Well it's again been a while since I've been here, but this time I have some photos to share with you from my birthday, which was a few months ago (August 1) Worth seeing as there are some cuties in there (well, me and some others).

It's been a quiet few weeks on the social front, partly because I didn't drink for a month and also gave up eating red meat. This was to assuage the gout which

And then my sister said, wot are you up to?, so I told her something like this:

1) Working (I ghost wrote some technology columns posted elsewhere)
2) Writing the excellent The Health Care Blog, although speaking of family I've tried to get my father the Gynaecologist to weigh in on the odd issue and got nothing out of him as he's busy building this housing estate.
3) Twisting my right (already

Well it's been a while since I posted, although my other blogs Are You Outraged and The Health Care Blog are very busy.

I've been doing a fair amount of Rock-climbing indoors at Mission Cliffs and also with my friend Patrick Wheeler at his local Planet Granite in Belmont. Patrick is doing really well (much better than me), pity that he had to wait until he was 40 to discover something he was

So, life is becoming routine boredom parties, paragliding, much more rock-climbing, a bit more gout (nasty!) and even some work. I am though off to volunteer on a policitical campaign or two (see Are you outraged? for all that) and I did get sent this incredible photo by my strange friends from Germany, Uli and Maikka. I think the hair is faked, but I'm not sure. Any of you missing Vietnam like

This blog has got a lot less interesting due to the death of my digital camera (and this is a hint bearing in mind later news in the blog). There is though much more on my Are You Outraged? blog if you're interested in politics at all.

I am now set up at the new house which is at 950 Harrison, #106, SF, CA. It's a huge 3 level loft and I have almost all my art and photos up and as we speak the

Just a short entry to those of you still following at home.
I'm back in the US for a while now
I'm paragliding regularly at the Dumps
I have a new loft-type apartment with the lovely Stephanie Wong of Stylemaven fame, and we are sharing an office when the DSL works (soon I hope!) in the SOMA area of San Francisco
There'll be a big party at said house on August 1
My new professional web site is

So in the very fine tradition of better very, very late than never, I'm going to dash off the last month of my travelogue, another piece that was originally written in May and then was eaten by my Handspring Visor--funnily enough Handspring was bought by Palm last month, so soon I'll be complaining about another tech company that doesn't exist anymore?­.

Anyway this contains the story of what I

So I have now got all of the last photos from New Zealand up on the web. I'll write a little more about them later but here are photos from
Drive down the South Island and Views from the top in Queenstown
Milford Sound, the most beautiful fijord in the South Island (90 photos!)
Doubtful Sound -- Amazing Kayak trip on another beautiful Fijord
Kepler Track - I did a three day hike in this alpine

These are the abbreviated notes from Taiwan which were written and lost cause of my stupid Visor, or possibly because of my cheapness in refusing to buy a non-reconditioned one! I wrote this on the plane back from New Zealand, so now I'm a month or so behind in the narrative. Now I'm back in San Francisco I'll catch up on the rest of the blog over the next week or so, and then start complaining

OKOKOKOKOKOKOK
I am very very sorry and very mad (in the American sense of being pissed off). I fixed my Handspring Visor in Australia to the point where it actually seemed to work when the batteries were changed and everything. I then wrote copiously in it so that I'd have lots to put on the blog when I got back to the Internet store in the only town in New Zealand that let's me connect it to a

OK, here's the piece I wrote last week about my end of NZ trip and the week in thailand, now with photos! The trip to Taiwan will be up shortly but this is a fun one so read this too!

So I drove from Wanaka to Queenstown with the intention of finishing my paragliding PG1 course there. (Here's a map of the south island to help) The first day because of some wierd incident on the hill the day

Quick one. I'm a little peed off with my new Handspring Visor which has developed a bad habit of crashing and losing its short term memory when I change the batteries (which it seems to need new ones of every 20 minutes) and I've lost a long piece I was going to post here as a result. However, I've been in Nelson (where I was before) learning to paraglide; I've now done three high (High!)

Well it's been a wild week in New Zealand. I escaped Sydney after ten pin bowling with Chris Cuthbert, Sally and their kids Oliver and Christian, and their friends. Chris came to pick me up in his very flash new old Aston Martin, which was great although the heater was stuck on! Sally won the ten pin bowling of course. That night we had a great dinner; Stephen and Annabelle joined Chris, Sally

So after a late dinner after the ride on the beach, David dumped me off at the Launceston airport. I called Bettina in Melbourne and found that I had been traded to the Norbury team for my season in Melbourne. Joanne Norbury, who I hadn't seen for a while, came and got me at the airport. She'd just moved back from Sydney and was missing her true love Joe Gatto (or at least I think that's what she

So I've escaped from Tasmania and a very hectic few days in Melbourne....I'm now sitting in Sydney in Stephen Burley's barrister's chambers clogging up his office Internet connection by uploarding all my photos from Tassy (without bothering to reduce the size as the connection is so fast!).

So where was I when last I left you a few weeks back? Oh yeah. Singapore. City of rest and idleness, for

So I've made it to Tasmania and got to see Jo Ellison and her new-ish husband David. David has a beard and hair of a real mountain man and the language to go with it. Quite how as demure a person as Joanna ended up with him I dont know but they seem to fit very well together! They live on a 43 acre property in rural northern Tasmania surrounded by horses, cows and wallabies (or dinner, as I'll

I have had a couple of complaints about my silence lately. The easy cop-out would be to say that I went to Burma from Chaing Mai (top of this map) and the evil fascists who run that country don't allow Internet use there. In fact my Swedish friend Mia was waiting for me in the middle of Rangoon. I however was in bed in Chaing Mai with a terrible case of backache. It hasn't really gone away

Christmas in Laos.

OK this may sound like the title to a new Disney movie starring Goldie Hawn and some computer generated chipmunks, but it's much worse. It's the true hideous story of how in Vang Vieng, Laos, Lish Woodgate survived an assasination attempt three times by the diabolically-intentioned Ann Larson (OK two were by me) and then foolishly decided that due to her injuries she was

I'm one in a million! Blogger (which is the program that writes this journal) has 1 million users now....but you lot don't care about that! I have just escaped Laos and made it to Chang Mai in Thailand, and boy is that a re-emergence into civilization after where I've been lately! No photos yet, but I'll get some text and photos up while I'm here in the next few days. For those of you scoring

Sapa to Laungh Prabahn -- Well it seems so long ago that I left Vietnam that it's difficult to write too much about it. My trip to the beautiful hill country of Sapa was mostly a dud, as the weather closed in and there was 5 days of consecutive fog. Sapa is a hill town near the Chinese border in north-west Vietnam that used to be a center of ethnic minority culture, but is fast turning into a

Quick note--there have been some problems with the archiviving function on Blogger...so you may not be able to see entries before early December. Hopefully I've fixed it but please email me if you can't see earlier entries (and their links to photos) and want to.