That was a well needed break

As of last Wednesday, I had gone 31 days with only one day off in the preceding month. I was burned out. Fortunately, this coincided with my friends coming to visit my wife and I from Ohio, so this gave me an excellent opportunity to deman^H^H^H^H^Hrequest time off, and they gave it to me.

For the past 5 days or so, I've been off and running around the NY/NJ area, doing all sorts of touristy things with our friends, and just exploring NYC like I haven't had the chance to before. We spent an entire day at the American Museum of Natural History, and I finally got to go to the Hayden Planetarium to see Cosmic Collisions. It was absolutely worth it, and I'm so glad I picked up a membership on my first visit.

I finally got to go visit Liberty Island and see the statue. It was great, very impressive. After July 4th, they're going to be opening up the crown, but until then, you can only go to the top of the pedestal. It was still a great view.

Ate lots of great food, had a good time with my friends, and today I'm back at work. We're switching over to a new backup site this week. Hopefully things will go smoother than they have the week prior to my vacation, but we'll see, and I'll write about it.

So did I miss anything good?

Boy are my arms tired!

Well, I'm back in the States, and working on getting back into the groove. I want to take a second and reiterate my thanks to the many guest bloggers who helped me out and contributed some really great information while I was gone. I really enjoyed learning from each one of the entries, and I can tell from your comments that they were well received. So thank you again, Ian, Bob, Nick, Ryan, Jeff, Phil, and Michael. You guys helped me out a lot, and I really appreciate it.

After Amy and I got back to Columbus, things got even crazier. Due to an (un?)fortunate alignment in the cosmos, we were scheduled to have the moving company come pack up all of our belongings the morning after we got home at 11:30pm from the trip. So I slept about three hours that night, while Amy pulled an all-nighter to get things ready. I don't know how she did it. We got it done, though, and spent Saturday night with our friends Mike and Heather, since we didn't have a bed at that point.

Sunday morning we got up and packed the things we needed into the car and left for New Jersey, and we're there now. Our furniture should be here this morning sometime.

I started in the corporate office yesterday, and it seems like it's going to be a lot of fun. My "todo" list is sitting around a dozen, and that's just because I left it at work. I've come up with several other tasks since then. Since there's no shortage of things for me to do, I'd better get started.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to return to normal blog posts tomorrow. By the way, I'll be uploading photos of the trip to my flickr page, if you're interested.

Thanks!

From whence I came

Today, sadly, I'll be returning to Barcelona to catch my flight home, and the real world.

Because my life isn't ever boring, I'm moving to Union County, New Jersey this weekend. The movers are coming to take our stuff away tomorrow, and Sunday we'll be driving to NJ to move into our new apartment.

Monday I'll be starting in the corporate headquarters. I've visited several times for a week or so, but this will still be a sizable change from what I'm used to. The wardrobe requirements in particular will be difficult to adjust to. I won't be able to wear sandals and jean shorts in the summer. The horror!

Anyway, I'll cover all of that in the future. Thanks to the time warp of scheduling these entries early, it's now 1am Saturday, January 24th, and in a few short hours, I'll be on a plane bound for the Mediterranean. Have a good weekend!

Mediterranean Island: Malta

Today I'm hitting the small island nation of Malta. To be honest, I don't know much about Malta, other than what the wiki article says. I'm passingly familiar with the Knights Hospitaller, but other than that, I guess I'll be learning when I'm there.

From everything I've read about visiting, it's one of the few places that is actually small enough to take in on a single day. It should be interesting, and if not, at the least it'll be a relaxing day in a beautiful part of the world.

Dear Diary: Jackpot

Today, I set foot in Egypt. To say that it's been a dream of mine since I was a child would technically be accurate, but it wouldn't really convey the full meaning. When I was in elementary school, I was fortunate enough to attend a pilot school called TREK one day a week. This program was set up very similar to college. You picked your own classes, set your schedule, and learned about what interested you. I'm not even sure how many times I took Ancient Egyptology.

Part of the reason we took this cruise in particular was that we stay docked in Alexandria for two entire days. This gives us time to make the trip to Cairo. The amount of history in the slender Nile Valley is amazing. Since time began, people have made their homes here, civilization flourished here in this oasis in the desert.

We're going on a private tour where we will visit the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, several historic mosques, and of course, Giza plateau, home of the pyramids and the sphinx. Words cannot express how excited I am.

I'm almost home. Pictures will be forthcoming. Punch will be served. Or something like that.

Secular and Religous History in Turkey

Today I pull into Ephesus in Turkey. We actually dock in Izmir, but the majority of the history is in the place that was once known as Ephesus.

This will mark the first visit to one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. The once-beautiful Temple of Artemis has been taken apart piecemeal until it now consists of a single column in a field.



Much more happily, the Library of Celsus has had its facade, along with a portion of its interior. I'm really looking forward to this portion of the trip.

Interestingly, Ephesus is also the home of what is said to be the last earthly home of the Virgin Mary. Amy's family is pretty much exclusively Catholic, so we'll be visiting that and getting some holy water.

Thanks again for reading, and I hope you've had enjoyed this week full of guest bloggers. Next week we'll have more submissions from guest bloggers as well, and I'll continue to update you as to my where-abouts. Take care, and have a good weekend!

Καλώς ήρθατε και πάλι!

The subject says "Welcome Back" in Greek (at least, google translate tells me it does).

Today, I'm in Athens, Greece. Last time you heard from me, I was in Rome, which was settled in 750BC, and I talked about how long ago that was. That might be a long time, but it's peanuts compared to Athens.

According to Wikipedia (and we all know wikipedia wouldn't lie to us), Athens has been continuously occupied for 4,500 years. Four and a half _thousand_ years. Think about how long ago Jesus is said to have walked the earth. A long time, right? Double that. Then add 500 more years for good measure. That's a long time. The Roman republic that everyone talks about? Guess where they got the idea? Right. All those fancy Roman pillars and construction methods? They might have shined them up a bit, but guess where they started? Yep, right here in Greece.

So what do you do in a city that's been around long enough that when it was founded there was a different polar star? Eat! Greek food is amazing! I can't wait to get it from the source. And since we'll be eating so much, it's a good idea to walk! Well, it's probably too big to walk the entire time, so we're also taking the bus. There's a route called the 400 line that takes you all over the ancient city for a low daily price. I expect that I'll be getting to know the bus pretty well.

I'm going to have to do a post when I get back and link to all the pictures I'm taking, aren't I?

Hello from Rome!

OK, as I'm typing this, I'm not actually in Rome; I'm still at home in my arm chair, but by the time you read this, I'll be in Rome, wandering around the seven hills, trodding on ground which has seen millennia of humanity pass by.

To an American like myself, especially one who hasn't traveled widely, the idea of an area having that much history is unusual. The oldest pub I've ever been in is the Stone Street Tavern in New York City. It's from the mid-17th century, roughly 2,300 years newer than Rome. That's pretty amazing.

I've gotten advice on what to do from everyone that I've talked to about this, from the president of my company to Michael Janke (thanks Mike!), and while everyone has different suggestions, everyone also says that I need to see the Pantheon, so I'll be heading there. I'd like to walk from the Colosseum to the Pantheon, stopping by some local shops on the way.

The best site I've seen for cramming a lot of information in a little bit of space is italyguides.it. Their google maps mashup is great.

That's it for now! Next time you hear from me, it'll be Athens, Greece!

Can you believe, I got over the wall!

Hello, and welcome to a very unusual fortnight on this blog.

Typically, I talk about server and network administration, I harp on documentation, diagramming, user support, and a wide variety of other admin-y topics. Not for the next two weeks, however.

You see, for the next two weeks, I'm on vacation.

My wife and I are in the middle (near the end, actually) of relocating from central Ohio to New Jersey, and we desperately needed a vacation. It got to the point where I didn't care at all, and would have gladly spent 2 weeks vegging in front of the TV rather than go to work or respond to emergencies. Luckily, I got creative and starting trying to come up with places to go or things to do during the two weeks. After tossing around and discarding several ideas, a European vacation sort of got stuck in my mind.

After weighing the financial options, we decided on a Mediterranean cruise. It had all of the features we wanted in a vacation: travel to several interesting places, no (or extremely expensive) cellphone reception, and lack of proximity to work or a computer.

Since we hadn't had a vacation at all since our honeymoon in 2007, we went for a 12 day trip all around the Mediterranean. Our ports of call are Rome, Athens, Ephesus, Alexandria (which we're really just using as a gateway to Cairo), and Malta before returning to Barcelona.

If you're into cruising and are curious, we're going to be on the Norwegian Jade.


Now, since I have absolutely no intention of using a computer more complex than the one in my camera, I'm not going to be writing blog entries for the next two weeks. Rather than leave the blog barren, I have enlisted the aid of some excellent bloggers, as well as some readers who have shown interest in contributing material. This will serve the dual purpose of providing interesting material and informative content, and a link back to their blog, so if you aren't familiar with their work, you can check it out and see what they're all about. If you already read lots of blogs, maybe you'll find your favorite author doing a guest piece here.

So for now, enjoy the guest bloggers, and have a good two weeks on the internet without me.

Sincerely,

--Matt Simmons