After another twelve hour day in the office we all went out for a meal at Bambou. Beautiful food and excellent wine - thanks to Kate for choosing and John for paying. Don't have the pineapple boat pudding though, it's definately the only bad (pine)apple of a good bunch. Night before we ended up in the Joshua Tree which is a whole different ballgame - in fact it was showing one. The clientel was definately a certain New York type - girls with Monica Lewinsky style hair and the same sweater and boys with shirts tucked into chinos. Everyone had dark hair. Strangely our waitress was Irish.

Timezones. You only truely appreciate them when you pass through a number in quick succession.

Having spent a wonderful week on the west coast driving from Las Vegas to San Francisco I then spent a few days in New York and then popped over to Amsterdam for a weekend courtesy of Unilever. Bless. The west is beautiful - Death Valley, Yosemite & Fire State National Park are all so different it's amazing. Amsterdam blew me away as well. I just want to live everywhere at once!!! Actually, that sounds like New York...

Not long now and I head over to Vegas, baby! Meanwhile I wonder how car rental firms don't get constantly burnt to the ground for their attempts to convince you that it is possible to hire a car for $99 a week all in... oh, and did we mention the $500 of insurance, tax and excess mileage charge, sorry about that! Anyhoo - staying in the Luxor a big shiny pyramid on the strip. Can't wait to blow my recent UK tax refund...

On a more webby note chek dis awt... hunger

As of a few days ago (and many dollarinos to evil global .com providers) I own sushification.com and matthewhobbs.net. Huzah! Yep - that's what happens when you sit around on a very humid day in NYC for a few minutes.

At the moment they are both just pointing here until I think of anything more useful... ideas are building as we speak.

As promised - I'm now fitter, healther and kinder to my fellow human beings. A week into being 28 and already I have achieved spiritual fulfillment.

That might be true apart from the raging hangover from Peenak's party last night (got home around 5am) and excess weight that my few runs in the week have yet to shift. I've made a start though. Ran into work on Tuesday morning (took almost an hour) and Saturday's run across the bridge and back. Neither of which were 'runs' in the real sense - more fits and starts of energy between catch up walks. I would go for another now but the weather's actually made a turn for the better and I might just go and sit in the park and catch some rays and relax on this Labour day bank holiday.

That aside I've checked into DSL for my apartment and it all seems very reasonable so next stop a faster Internet connection. Then I need to get a scanner to get a few thousand photos onto the web. I was looking at getting a new camera but at $1800 odd I figured it would be more important to make the most out of my old one first. Hence going around running off huge amounts of film everywhere to many people's annoyance (especially Matt T).