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Thursday, 25^th March, 2004

Due to the timezone dif­fer­ence, presently only 1 hour, or more likely the lack of decent sleep: about 4 hours a night for three nights has taken its toll. For­cing myself to con­cen­trate in meet­ings and act­ively add value. Men­tal fuzziness.

Sleep­ing in strange beds in many hotels you learn how to get a good night sleep. Its an occu­pa­tional skill. Rule One: keep the room cooler than 17 degrees C. Rule Two: use a flat pil­low. The prob­lem with many hotels is they pride them­selves on big puffy pil­lows. Instant neck prob­lems here.

I have a bad habit of fall­ing asleep about when the cabin crew start the safety demon­stra­tion and wakeup when level flight is reached. Its uncanny.

Read­ing the my new pur­chase in the Lonely Planet range: Japan. I have a the­ory that I enjoy travel to coun­tries that I wrote school pro­jects on (if that makes any sense) Love Actu­ally on the screen in eco­nomy. Ahh, Lon­don. See you next week.

Sick of forms. To leave Aus­tralia, arrive in New Zea­l­and, leave New Zea­l­and (after pay­ing NZ to get out of Auck­land Inter­na­tional Aiport, thank you very much) and finally arrive back into Aus­tralia takes 4 forms. Name, address, email, SARs, Pass­port num­ber. There has to be a bet­ter way! In the time between the Singa­pore trip and the Auck­land trip, the Aus­tralian arrival form has changed!

5 minutes from Immig­ra­tion to Aus­tralia. The joys of pack­ing light!

Wed­nes­day, 24^th March, 2004

The Auck­land Sheraton prop­erty has been sold to someone else, accord­ing to the gos­sip. I hope they have deep pock­ets as the place is a little tired. The hotel rooms are still stuck in 1983, maybe 1984. No high speed inter­net access. At least BBC-World is on TV.

Meet Luke in NZ. He is a new dad, only 4 days in. He has another 21 years of fun. Men that have had chil­dren, and been involved in all the birth­ing action, remem­ber more about the pro­cess of child birth and other obscure obstitric details than one would expect through the years. Is this universal?

I also real­ise that I am car­ry­ing 896Mb of Com­pact­Flash memory to Europe. This is a massive amount of stor­age (about 900 digital cam­era shots) before I load them into the laptop. How the world of memory has moved on.

Tues­day, 23^rd March, 2004

6.50pm flight to Auck­land, NZ. Hello Qantas Club Inter­na­tional Sydney, my second home. Almost second office as I run into Barry and dis­cuss business.

Neil Perry my arse. The food on the 2hour 20 minute flight tastes vaguely famil­iar. Yes, I am reminded of 3 years of board­ing house food. The lamb was prob­ably from the mid 1980s as it was tough. Thanks to the iPod, apart from the dubi­ous food, its a quick and pain­less flight. Arrive 11pm, hotel lobby bar until late.