Today marked an interesting milestone in my life. In addition to it being the anniversary of my 32nd year of employment service, February 10th, 2007 also marks the day that I can retire from the company I work for with a full pension. In some respects I actually missed the day, as I was travelling from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur and of course you have to cross the date line so I left Friday morning, February 9th and arrived at the hotel at one in the morning February 11th here in Malaysia !
As several folks have pointed out to me, from here on in I’m effectively just working for a portion of my salary, as if I were to retire I’d actually be paid quite a good salary to sit at home and do nothing ! I’ll be the first to admit that it does feel a bit odd, as over the years I have worked with many folks who couldn’t wait for their first available retirement opportunity to arrive and who were desperate to leave, and here am I marking the event by just being on my way to another meeting ! Of course it would be an easy decision if I didn’t so thoroughly enjoy what I do, or if my health were poor. Naturally business priorities can change, but at the moment, at least the role I have is one that the company supports having. And I have told my manager, that I’ll be gone pretty quick if the content of the role became uninteresting or were changed significantly.
We’ll just have to see what happens – within the computer support and delivery area we are currently restructuring yet again, so as always, time will tell the story !
special – the Park Hyatt Philadelphia at the Bellevue is a lovely old (old of course is relative in the US – it was built in 1904) grand hotel with lots of marble, wood, stained glass windows, ornate features and trim plus creaky old elevators. It is very well preserved with reasonably priced TMobile wireless WiFi coverage in all the rooms, which are in very good shape and lovingly decorated – over all the place is a delight ! But there was just something about the place that nagged at the back of my mind, and finally yesterday someone sitting beside me let the cat out of the bag ! Its probably the most famous hotel in Philly – formerly called the Bellevue-Strafford and since renamed – where some 300 retired servicemen were infected, of whom 29 actually died in the first recorded instance of Legionnaires Disease back in 1976 !! I’ll be honest and admit that had I known the history, I might have been tempted to stay elsewhere, but you have to assume that after a problem like that it most probably has the cleanest and most sanitary heating and cooling system in the world and so must be perfectly safe.
Istanbul, and decided to take the plunge to see Troy! We arrived at Ataturk airport this past Monday, and stayed at the very nice Empire Hotel, which is a member of the Best Western hotel chain and right at the foot of the Topkapi Palace. The hotel is within easy walking distance of the major things to be seen in the old quarter, has very helpful staff, nice rooms and reasonable prices. Recommended.
e seen to be believed. Originally built in 537 AD under the direction of the Christian Roman Emperor Justinian, it has been pretty much in continuous service since then – till 1453 as a church, as a mosque till 1934 and since then as a museum. While the dome is slightly smaller than that of the Pantheon in Rome, it is still today listed as being the fourth largest cathedral in the world – pretty good for something almost 1,470 years old !. A must see. As well we also checked out the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern and then the Grand Bazaar followed by the Spice Bazaar.
about 4.5 hours by car over bad roads, and to top it off we had a really bad driver (really poor driving skills, no English, worse attitude), although the vehicle itself was quite comfortable. A few phones calls to the hotel to find someone who spoke the language got him somewhat sorted out, but it made for a long day and should not have been required.
one can easily visualise how it must have looked at the time of the Trojan War as described by Homer which is assumed to have been about 1193 BC or roughly 3200 years ago. Of course, as a location Troy was destroyed and then rebuilt many times over and the original settlement is thought to have been established about 3000 BC and occupied more or less continuously through till about 500 AD or so. As a result, there are many Troy’s to be excavated – currently thought to number 9 all together, but with many sub-categories. It should keep archaeologists busy for decades . For additional detail about Troy and the excavations ongoing at the site, please see 
with the Marriott agent in the US has been straight forward and so far without incident, this is not the case for my experience with the presumably well intentioned, but skill challenged folks I’ve had to deal with selling units for Marriott at their new facility in Spain. If it were not for the well trained and courteous customer support staff in the support centre that Marriott maintains in Cork, Ireland, I would have given up long ago and called in the lawyers as there has been one silly error after another. This ‘Laurel and Hardy’ level of competence was capped this week when, after waiting two and a half months for the deal to close, I finally received my ownership certificate from the Spanish sales office for a property I hadn’t bought, and which was of less value than what I’d paid ! I was less than pleased. Again, the good folks at Cork have had to step in to sort out this latest fiasco.