I'm going on a trip the first week of June along this route:

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Should be pretty fun. It's in a "railmotor" which is a self-propelled railcar, kind of like a bus on rails . More details here (PDF)..

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving I thought I would get a turkey sandwich for lunch today.  (Though, I realize that a turjkey sandwich is really in the spririt of the days after thanksgiving, not necessarily the big Turkey Day itself!)  However, after going to about five different delis, I've determined there is no such thing as turkey in Australia ( Read more... )

On Wednesday I got back to Australia from El Salvador (I also visited Boston, New York, and North Carolina, while in North America...pretty crazy trip!). Here are the pictures if you're interested:

http://www.portzer.com/gallery/es2007
( Read more... )

I'll be flying to North America in a few days for a pretty crazy schedule. Here's what it looks like so far:

Friday, July 6: leave Sydney, arrive JFK airport, New York.
July 6-9: go to Poughkeepsie, NY, to visit my grandfather
Monday, July 9 - take train from NY to Boston
July 10-13 - presenting at and attending the BbWorld conference
July 13- ( Read more... )

Random web site of the day: Aviation Safety Reporting System..

I was looking through the database and found this pretty funny one. The pilot's description of the lady (about 3/4 of the way through) is excellent.

( Read more... )

On Friday night, I had the chance to go to my first sporting event in Australia, in this case "footy" - which is the all purpose Aussie word for football. My colleague Daniel, the only true Sydney native in our office, is a rabid fan of the Manly Sea Eagles, one of the National Rugby League (NRL) teams here, so he got tickets for everyone in the ( Read more... )

This weekend I decided to take a trip to Canberra, Australian Capital Territory - the capital of Australia. Canberra, like Washington DC, is a purpose-built capital city to avoid conflicts between existing cities when choosing a capital. But since Australia wasn't federated until the early 20th century, the capital wasn't started until 1920 and ( Read more... )

Since I got my bicycle in March, when my belongings finally arrived in Sydney from their 4-month container trip, I've been exploring the area on two wheels. You can obviously cover much more ground by bicycle than by walking! One of my favorite locations so far is the Cooks River Cycleway, which connects to Botany Bay, originally discovered by ( Read more... )

So, in case you thought Viriginia was the only place that has wackos, look at this story from Perth, Western Australia:

Girls 'just felt right' murdering friend

I'm not sure when I joined this site but I'm guessing it's gone the way of orkut - the latest fad for a while but now pretty much eclipsed? At any rate, a few weeks ago they started sending me emails ONCE A DAY telling me "What I've missed" on their site since my account had been inactive. What tools. Fortunately they offered an online ( Read more... )