Back in NYC. Damn - it's miserably hot one moment, chilly the next and threatening to rain constantly.

I have to buy a wireless internet card for my toshiba laptop. God knows what that will cost but needs must.

I discovered a side street of houses right out of the early 19th or perhaps 18th century. Called Sylvan Terrace, between St Nicholas Ave and Jumal Terrace around 160th Street. Wonder of wonders, one is being renovated and will be up for rent in June. I spoke to the owner's friend and if it's not insanely expensive I can rent it.
Unreal- I want it so much. I'll get photos.

Home again, home again, Blah! In about 30 minutes the cab will arrive to take me to Heathrow to start the journey back to New York City. I really hate this part of the trip. This is going to have to stop sometimes very soon and I'll get to pretty much just stay put except for interesting holidays in exotic places. (Which is a hell of a lot easier to do from the UK than the US!)
I've loaded my luggage down with so many books and goodies that I'll have to actually let them check it into cargo.

Just added a commenting system at Andrew's suggestion. We'll see if it works.

Just back in London from 6 days in oxford at the ACCU (CC++) Annual Spring Conference. First thing I do is check my email and find 5189 unread emails waiting for me. I sensibly did a search for all emails from my son Andrew and replied to them. Then I started slogging thru the rest of the mountain. Now, I tried to be clever about this and use the web based mail interface to dump the worst of the spam directly from the server. Somehow, in the process, I managed to simply delete it ALL! Yes, that's right, all 5186 emails vanished into the proverbial bit bucket. Dammit!

At least I did have a great time in Oxford and at the conference. Learned a lot, got a book on Python, made a lot of great business contacts, took an amusing few photos at the speakers' dinner including on potential Exhibit A photo.

I need to call Andrew tonight and make sure he has some cash. I wish I'd given him Alan's cell phone number so he could have phoned us while I was away. On the nice side of the scale, I did pick up some good books and nifty stuff for him.

I made some interesting contacts at the conference. Tomorrow Alan and I are going into central London to have lunch with a very nice chap from Microsoft. If he has time, we'll also show him some interesting bits of the city.

Alan did a presentation on How to Design Computer (MMPG) Games on the last day of the conference and it was quite a hit - filled the entire room, not a seat to spare. The supposed 45 min presenatin ran an hour and a half and then only broke up because Alan said we really ought to call a halt. I ran the visuals; a live projection and demonstration of Age of Adventure.