The last four weeks

We've been pretty busy over the last four weeks

• 5 days in Paris for the long weekend at the start of June
  
• a rainy weekend in Frankfurt for my cousin's birthday
• a sunny extended weekend in London for Julia and Denis' birthdays
• a week of having Paul as our guest also including a special appearance by his girlfriend Deb

It's been hectic, it's been fun and we'll update y'all on all of them in more detail later.

In other unrelated news I need a root canal and the Germans are stupid when it comes to ADSL. They're the only country (excluding Bosnia-Herzegovina which conisidentally had it's phone system installed by the German telco.) in the world which does not use the Annex A/M specifications over a normal phone line - instead they use the Annex B (ADSL over ISDN) specification everywhere. This means if you buy a cool ADSL modem/router combo cheaply in Australia, get your friend Paul to lug it all the way around the world - it wont work. The moral of the story is A) don't do what I did and B) standards exist for a reason, Germans should not exclude themselves from this anymore than Microsoft should. *sigh*