Well, it's official, I'm going back to Sydney next month, this time without a stopover in Hong Kong on the way back. We're deploying our new app to the friendly folks in the Sydney office, and I whined my way onto the invitation list, and I'm proud of it. Should be a good trip, didn't do the London one last year and that was a big pain (I might as well have gone because they kept calling me all weekend from there when stuff didn't work right), but I'm cautiously optimistic that this one will go much more smoothly.



As luck would have it, there's not much of interest going on at the opera house this time, but it's kind of hard to tell what else might be in town, so I'll have to wait and see. I was there in August of 2002 all by myself for the deployment of our own application, but only for five days, but I made it to both theaters of the opera house, and though neither of the programs in and of itself was that interesting (Carmen in one, Maazel conducts Strauss in the other), it was still fun to do. It's getting close to winter there after all, so they should be at the height of the concert season. This time I'd like to get out of the immediate downtown area at least once and actually see the night sky.



It seems there are really only two reasons to go to the southern hemisphere, to see the night sky and to see the toilet flush the other way. Thanks to modern technology, toilets don't really swirl like they used to (at least in commercial office buildings and hotels), so that leaves the southern sky, and from downtown Sydney you can't see any stars at all. Last time I got a fair amount of sightseeing in, went to the observatory, did a run over the harbor bridge and another along the Circular Quay, had lunch at Darling Harbor, even went to the movies one night, and watched a fair amount of rugby and australian football in the hotel room. I also was on a quest for Wiggles merchandise, which was still extremely rare in the US, but now is everywhere and of course the kids have outgrown it and don't care any more.



This go around there's about 10 other people from work that will be there, but I don't anticipate hanging out with them a lot after hours. Since this is more of a sanctioned trip I don't have to be so frugal either, last time I was buying phone cards and sandwiches at convenience stores to save money for the bank. It was kind of pathetic, but since I was by myself it didn't matter that much. This time the gloves are off, baby. Let's see how I do keeping this thing up to date from 14 time zones away.