Quick Update

Life has been busy and I've been learning a lot about my new camera and the image post-processing choices available to me. I still have a long way to go with the learning and it's great fun to be back doing what I used to do about 5 years ago.

We have been to Barcelona since getting back from San Francisco and we're about to jump on another plane tomorrow to go to Umbria in Italy for 10 days.

Here are some images to tide you over until my next post!

Click on them to enlarge

Golden Gate Bridge just before sunset

Nordstrom has funky curved escalators

San Francisco panorama from Twin Peaks

Barcelona cityscape

Up scary heights on Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia

Inside the Santa Eulalia Cathedral in Barcelona

I hope to be able to blog from Italy and, Pandabonium, I haven't forgotten the Guten Photo Tag!

Brown Paper Packages

We took a quick trip to San Francisco last week, mixing some business with mostly pleasure. We went shopping, and on one occasion, we came home with these 2 innocuous paper bags.


What's inside? Looks intriguing!


Let's unpack the bags. Looks better!


Let's unpack the boxes. Now this is awesome!


Introducing my new baby: the brand new Canon 5D MkII with 24-105 f4 L zoom, 70-200 f4 L zoom, 580EX II Speedlite, BG-E6 vertical grip and double battery holder, and the RS80-N3 remote trigger.


I also got a Manfrotto tripod and a Lowepro backpack in which to schlepp it all.

My Christmases and birthdays came at once!

San Francisco turned on some stellar weather for us to trial the camera. J quickly became adept at carrying my tripod and driving me to all the photogenic spots. She's got the makings of a good assistant!

I'm blessed to have a partner who buys me quality gifts, and I will be saying "thank you" for a long time to come!

First images from the 5D Mk II will be posted soon.

San Francisco - the week that was

This past week has been spent in San Francisco - sunny, windy and cold. When we haven't been working, we've been walking, and we've managed to see 2 movies.

Da Vinci Code was really good - the clues came at a furious pace, but what can be expected from an adaptation of a novel with so much to tell?

X-men 3 was fun! A bit of escapism never hurt anyone, and that's what this movie was all about. If you get to see it, you HAVE to stay until the end of the credits in order to see the last additional scene! That will be a challenge for the Dubai audiences - staying through the credits!

Haven't taken many photos as we've been here so many times. Here are a few from the hotel window - what great views from hotels we've had on this trip.

This first one is for MamaDuck!

Appropriately......

...there was this poster on a building beside our San Francisco Hotel.

J has already left earlier this morning to continue her way back to Dubai through Boston, Washington, New York, UK, Berlin, Utrecht and Paris, while M flies in the opposite direction through NZ and Singapore.

So yes, M will be in NZ by morning - albeit having missed a whole Tuesday while crossing the International Dateline!

See you on the other side!

Back in San Francisco

We’ve been back in San Francisco this week to visit the US office, and to hold meetings, including a very successful User Group Meeting.

There hasn’t been much time to play or to take photos, and it’s cold – although not as cold as we expected.

Yesterday we spent the day in Denver, Colorado to meet with a partner. Denver looks to be an interesting city and M would like to spend more time there. We felt like aliens on another planet – flying from SF to Denver to arrive at 9:30 at night; sleeping; spending most of the next day ensconced in a board room talking; back out to the airport that afternoon; fly back to San Francisco. All that in less than 24 hours!

Ironic observation: when eating, most Americans cut up their food, then abandon their knives and transfer their forks to their right hands to eat. They have more in common with Muslims than they think! We wonder how this American way of eating came to be.

We leave SF tonight – M back to Dubai and J to our head office in Berlin for a few days. The images are from various trips here over the past 15 months. There are 2 that have been taken on this trip - the early morning views of the streets from the hotel window.

UPDATE: Upon reading my above ponderings on the American eating etiquette, one of our blog fans in the USA emailed me with a link to an article that explains a theory. (How big a fan is he? He has our blog listed in his RSS feeder so that he's instantly notified of any updates!) Unfortunately, the link he provided isn't available to unregistered readers of the Chicago Tribune, although I could access it in the US but not in the UAE. So I went hunting (googling, actually) for a new link. I found 2 links to share - one factual - Cut and Switch, and the other is a humourous quiz - Don't Gross out the World.

Enjoy - and thanks Mike for emailing the link!

The Past Week

To recap what has happened for us over the past week.

After leaving Tokyo, we flew into San Francisco for a few days, to visit our company office and to have conversations with some of our clients, as we learn more about their industries in order to provide them with solutions.

While we were in SF, we had a free weekend – and 2 Saturdays! Flying over the International Dateline from Tokyo meant that we had Saturday all over again, as we left Tokyo at 5pm and arrived at 8am the same day. Very nice - we made the most of it and went shopping. Not many people can say that they shopped in Tokyo and SF on the same day! On Sunday, we rented a convertible and drove down to Monterey. It was a bit cold to have the top down, but we did manage to do the 17 mile drive through Pebble Beach while exposed to the elements. In Monterey, we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Both of us had been there before, (J in 1995 and M in 2000), but we both love visiting it. There are lots of great displays, and there are 3 very big tanks that have to be seen to be believed – the shark tank, the under the wharf tank, and the kelp bed tank. The bluewater Tuna are HUGE – I haven’t seen Tuna this big! They also have a lot of Hammerheads, 7 gill sharks, a Sunfish, Bonito, Eagle Rays – and something that neither of us had seen before – a Sturgeon fish. This is where Caviar comes from! We were very envious of the 2 divers who entered the under the wharf tank to feed the 7 gill sharks and California Eagle Rays. The rays were like puppies – getting underneath the feet of the divers and tripping them up in their bids for attention and food!

The jellyfish, penguins and giant octopus tanks are also cool to view, and the California Sea Otters are very cute. While having lunch, we were fortunate to see some of these creatures in the wild in the ocean. They dive for shellfish and crustaceans and then lie on their backs to eat at the surface. They balance a rock on their chests and bash their food against the rock to open it – one of the few animals other than man that has learnt to use tools.

After SF, we flew to Austin, Texas for an AMIA conference – the Association for Moving Images Archivists. It was an interesting time and our first participation in this event. AMIA’s next conference is in Anchorage, Alaska in Oct 2006 – that’s going to be an interesting place to go, and I hope that we get to go there!

Austin is more like a large town and we liked it. We saw a little bit of the town as J has a longtime friend living there, so we went out for dinner twice with John and saw his gorgeous apartment that looks out over the hills to the Southwest. Real estate is cheap there and so are the general costs of living. The Austin Hilton where we stayed for the conference is US$120 per night which is cheap in comparison to most US city hotels, and it’s a very good hotel. The Crowne Plaza next door is US$80 per night.

We’re now at Frankfurt Airport waiting to embark on the last leg of this journey – the flight to Dubai. By the time we get home, we’ll have been travelling for 26 hours from Austin, Texas via Washington and Frankfurt. Dulles Airport in Washington is shocking - avoid it if you can. This time in Frankfurt is the worst part – 6 hours between flights. Luckily with J’s flying privileges, we’re in the Hons Circle lounge which is what the Lufthansa’s First Class lounges are called in Germany. We made the effort to walk out of the terminal to the main Hons Circle Lounge which is a lot bigger than the others. We clear security and immigration in the lounge before being chauffeured directly to the plane by a Mercedes limo or Porsche Cayenne – damn! We get to walk out by the plane before ascending the stairs that lead directly to the airgate. We like doing this - not many people get to walk beside their plane and get a closeup look at it from the outside.

We’ll be glad to get home to Dubai and back to some relatively warmer weather in comparison to what we’ve had in Japan and the US.

All this travelling sounds rather glamorous, but living out of a suitcase and in aircraft; being stuck in windowless seminar rooms; continuously talking business; looking for new partners and clients; eating unhealthy hotel convenience food and not seeing much of our environment does wear thin. That’s why we make the most of our free time – to blow out the cobwebs and do what we want to do. Sometimes we don’t have weekends when we travel from one place to the next in order to be there for the new working week.

However, it’s what we do – for now!