Here is a panorama from the rooftop of my apartment. In the pictures below is also the view of the pool and across the city. Great for relaxing after a tense round of wrangling with the contract people over why the contractors need to supply us with actual polygons not lines that looklike them.The sailing race was a casual affair, the boat was a fairly simple little 18 footer. It had a main sail and a jib. We thought of putting the spinaker up but the captain was...

As you can see from the photos I've been getting out a bit. You'll see some shots attached of the Avenues Mall, a 1.5km long stretch of mall that is like a town, basically. It's got lots of expensive outlets but also a section that's arranged like an old style Arab market. It's even dimly lit with stucco style walls, arched doorways and wooden fixtures everywhere. Of course there's an Ikea which reminded me of the one at Adelaide airport.....

Today I had my first proper day of work and ended up feeling quite exhausted. I guess it is a nearly 10 hour day but I think the main thing was the induction proper happened as it was all the details for the project and learning about how they do mapping here. I'm getting a car soon. It may be a Mitsubishi Challenger (called Nativa here) 4wd, thankfully as drivers here are indeed pretty aggressive. Just like Cambodia but twice as fast so their lack of skill ...

This is a final monitoring schedule item for Engineers Without Borders, where I cover a challenge that I had during the placement, whether I overcame the challenge and why/why not?The most significant challenge was developing the database. This was difficult because I did not have a lot of experience doing such a thing (for example the spatial databases topic in my Masters course at Unimelb involved an exam and 10 SQL query assignments of 10 items each, we never ...

These entries are about this moto trip route. It was inspired by these 16 routes, identified by BikeJin Magazine and vetted by inmates of Gaijin Riders.Moto trip report Day 1Tokyo – FujisawaThis was supposed to be Tokyo – Shimoda although it turned out I took until 4pm to get to the moto hire place as I spent so long having to organise stuff, including about 2 hours to get a damn phone (an hour of which was waiting to get approved). There was further ...