daveydave

The live, in-the-field reporting rather tailed off there didn't it. I guess a mixture of mobile phones not being the best medium for writing even short copy on, and the question of who is really that bothered about hearing what I'm up to in real-time, brought that little experiment to an end. However, it did leave things a little open-ended. So, my overall thoughts of the German capital? A very cool city; it has a bit of everything as all capital cities should. It obviously has a wealth of history, particularly recent history and a fine mix of architecture, obviously a lot of it is modern, but the quality of the design of the new buildings is pretty high on average. What I really love though, is how they've managed to mix new with the remains of the old and, indeed, how they have reinvigorated some of the older buildings: the Reichstag in particular. Norman Foster has done great work with this famous old building and the views from the top are quite spectacular. One things ...

I've been trying for hours to post something but no joy. So, Germany defeated by the Spanish. Many many unhappy Germans filed passed this evening after the final whistle took away any chance of a German comeback. Subdued is not the word. But at least it gave us the chance to enter the party zone. There was a hard-core still dancing at the stage closest to the gate, but that party came to an end just before midnight. Back at the hotel now; shame Germany didn't win, it would have been fun, but what was great to see was calm resignation and that those Spanish fans who were visible were left alone and not given any grief. Back to normal tourist duties tomorrow.

Well, the Brandenburg Gate area is crammed with half a million football fans, so we couldn't get in. Standing in a bar round the corner with 10 minutes to go. Not looking good for Deutchland.

Today involved more walking, as these trips tend to. The morning was a visit to the zoo. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of locking animals in cages but I can see there is a scientific side to such establishments. However, it was good to see the elephants, gorillas and the polar bears. Feeding time for the panda was pretty cool too because it meant the lazy oaf actually moved. After lunch (guess what!) and a mooch about, I headed west to the old royal palace, Shloß Charlottenburg. Extensively damaged during the war, it has been restored and was an interesting visit. The build up to the Euro final tonight continues apace. The train back to the hotel was full of locals suitably covered in black, red and gold. Tonight's destination is the Brandenburg Gate area, which is already very busy. More later, hopefully.

Greetings from Berlin. Day 2 already and my feet are sore. Yesterday was mainly travel and the obligatory trip to the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag. Currywurst and a couple of biers too, of course. Today has been mainly walking the city from the modern Potsdamer Platz area, the Holocaust Memorial down to Checkpoint Charlie. I won't go on too much as typing on a mobile phone is never easy, but the Holocaust Memorial was quite amazing and truly moving, especially as you read the last letter of a 12 year old girl to her father. Leaving there to the sound of the B52s was a jarring experience as I found myself in the middle of a huge, loud and colourful gay parade. This is certainly an interesting city.

I'm off to Berlin tomorrow for a few days holiday. This conveniently coincides with Germany playing in the Euro 2008 final on Sunday. I'll try and blog over the next few days and let you know what's happening.

Use Google much? Click on those little ads when they show up something interesting? Wouldn't it be nice if instead of the money paid for that ad going to Google Inc., it went to a charity. That's exactly what's on offer with Everyclick : 50% of advertising revenue goes to charity, and if you sign up you can even tell them which charities you want to benefit from your clicks. So next time you reach for a search engine, think about using Everyclick instead of just defaulting to Google.

Yes folks, the IPL is upon us. The official Twenty20 cricket league in India kicks off on Friday with Bangalore Royal Challengers vs. Kolkata Knight Riders . Of course the tricky thing is who to support. Kolkata were an obvious first choice because one of their owners is Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan and let's face it, everyone loved Knight Rider , in spite of David Hasselhoff's hair. They have some great players, including captain Sourav Ganguly. The bookies favourites are Chennai Super Kings , so they would have been a fair choice too. But no, I've gone for the underdogs: Rajasthan Royals because they're the outside bet, Shane Warne is captain and Dmitri Mascarenhas, the only Englishman in the league, is playing for them. All matches are available (in the UK) on Setanta which means you're not tied into an annual contract. The only problem being the time difference, so the games are on during the day - perfect weekend viewing, however. Pick your team!

It's true, I've turned into a cantankerous old git and it must stop. I think the problem is that I try to follow politics and current affairs too much and, in general: 1. how the British Government operates annoys the hell out of me (bloody spin, useless, target-led management, policies geared towards sound bites and column inches rather than actually fixing things, the you disagree with me therefore you're wrong attitude of ministers, etc.), and 2. the way the press reports the news does the same (dangerous sensationalism, the fake patriotism of the gutter press, 24hour news with pointless and endless speculation, sticking the boot in when people are having trouble instead of showing support). 3. stuff like Tibet and the mess in Zimbabwe I could continue, but we'll all end up in another of my endless rants and that is not the purpose of this post. It all stops now. This blog is for interesting and witty posts on a range of subjects and there is to be no more whinin...

Here's a question: just how far up his own arse has Thabo Mbeki shoved his head? According to the South African president, there is no post-election crisis in Zimbabwe. This guy is a moron if he thinks the current situation in Zimbabwe is not a crisis. Of course, I shouldn't really be surprised, the members of the African Union have been a collective joke with regards to Mugabe's rule over the past few years. He may have been a hero in southern Africa 30 years ago, but now he's just a thug who has managed to bring what should be a successful country to its knees while making sure he and his cronies do very well out of it. If you're interested in what's going on in that country at present, then point your browser at the This is Zimbabwe blog. Yes, it is depressing to read what the people who live under Mugabe have to deal with, but their incredible resilience is so uplifting. It also shows stark contrast with the political apathy of a large chunk of the UK's...

OK, so this isn't my perfect plan to fix the bad bits of life in the UK - and if you believe all you read in the tabloids (which I hope you don't) there are a lot of them. No, I've just read this story on the BBC news website. It's about a group of people who turned their estate from a place where people were to afraid to go out at night, into a proper community where people like to live. I love stories like this, it shows that there are great people out there and that you don't have to live with graffiti, drugs and violence. It also shows that if you talk to the relevant authorities, it is possible to get things done. That's what we pay them for after all. Absolutely spot on.

Yeah I know, more cricket ramblings... So I've just listened to this interesting discussion on Twenty20 cricket and its possible impact on the future of the game. Twenty20 (or T20) was introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) back in 2003. Some nations (Australia in particular) scoffed, regarding it as some sort of playtime version of the game. They're taking it more seriously now. This form of the game has been hugely successful domestically , playing to sell-out crowds across England and Wales - unheard of for the counties . The inaugural World Twenty20 went down a storm in South Africa last year, and now the Indians have taken the lead. Firstly, the rebel Indian Cricket League (ICL) was set up promising big bucks to those who would brave international bans (ICL was not sanctioned by the International Cricket Council (ICC), cricket's governing body). Then the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the Indian equivalent of the ECB, set up its o...

...and other such sites. I know a lot of people (usually company execs) get a bit miffed at the YouTube thing - their precious content being screened for free - but in some cases if it wasn't for such websites, half of us would have no access at all. Here's the latest example which has really peed me off - any one noticed it's getting much easier to annoy me these days! :) If you've seen this blog before you'll probably have realised I'm a cricket fan. In the UK that means not getting to see much cricket on the telly because Sky has bagged all the rights - I have seen approximately 35 seconds of England cricket over the winter. So, I thought I'd sign up to ECBtv and pay for access to highlights. Nope, not allowed. I live in the UK, therefore I'm obviously not entitled to even pay to watch my own national team play. Make sense? No, not to me either. Surely I can't be the only person who thinks this way. I mean, organisations that seemingly go out of ...

New French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just spent 2 days on a State visit to the UK. He's a bit of a card isn't he, looking as nervous and uncomfortable as I would in such a glare of media and royalty, while his infinitely elegant wife looked on, calm as you like. But get him in front of a microphone and Monsieur Le Président comes into his own. Watching clips of his addresses to Parliament, at the banquet at Windsor Castle and at the Mansion House was like watching the nicest person you've ever met tell your mum all your best features. Beyond the flattery though, one thing does look reasonably hopeful, and that is he seems keen to improve relations with his neighbours over the channel and this can only be a good thing. He may seduce us with words of his deepest respect for the UK and its new-fangled ways, but there are a number of things we can learn from France: modern nuclear power for one, and bloody good trains for another. It was also nice to see the President call...

Heathrow Terminal 5 (or 'T5' if you're into that sort of thing) opened today in what was a very British display of disorganisation, cock-up and chaos. The £4.6bn (€5.9bn; $9.2bn) terminal had already seen hundreds of volunteers through the doors to test the systems and make sure everything was working as per spec. By close of play this evening however, only one of the 18 passenger lifts was working, over 30 flights had been cancelled and anyone wanting to fly tonight was going without their hold baggage. Beautiful. Heathrow operators BAA seem keen to open a third runways at this place too. I can't wait to see what sort of mess that'll turn out to be. I tell you what, why don't we stop trying to squeeze the entire population of the globe through that horrible shambles of an airport and have more direct flights to/from the regional airports. You know, have British Airways act as an actual national carrier, instead of a feeder airline for its Heathrow/Gatwick opera...

Remember that? Or at least, when you could state a point of view without being treat like you'd just shat on someone's front lawn.

For those of out there who have one of these phones (or are thinking of getting one) the GPS functionality appears to be a nice little bonus. However, if your phone is anything like mine, it probably had the worst possible settings by default, making signal acquisition and absolute nightmare - easily taking 10 minutes to get a position lock. Nice and easy to fix though: Go to the Positioning settings through the menu (Tools/Settings/General/Positioning), select Positioning server , and then Access point . If you're with 02-UK you'll have 3 options: O2 MMS, 02 Mobile Web and O2 WAP (I guess other networks offer a similar choice) and the current setting will probably be WAP. This is far too slow, so change to O2 Mobile Web which uses GPRS or 3G. Bingo - much quicker initialisation of your GPS and suddenly it's a useful gadget.

By all measures, this year has not been a good one for me and the environment. No, I'm not referring to my purchase of a 4x4, but the amount of time I've spent in aircraft. It all started with a flight back from County Clare, Ireland following a fantastic few days away for New Year. Next was Paris at the end of March. Two days later I was off to the States with work for just over a week, including several internal flight and almost 1000 miles in cars. Two days after getting back from the US I was off to Barcelona for 3 days, again with work, followed by a well earned travel breather, where any potential DVT could ease off a bit! September saw me in South Africa for a holiday and then less than 2 weeks later I was off to Korea for a conference. So having done the maths, this is what the figures look like: 29 flights taken during 2007 covering a total of 8 countries, 19 airports and (if we include car journeys) 9 US states. A total of just over 43000 miles in the air. That's ...

I meant to post about the new car when the '57' registrations came out in September (marking the car's 6 month anniversary) but obviously, I didn't quite make it. So having now owned the big brute for 9 months, what do I reckon. Without getting too gushy, I've got to say I love this car. It's roomy, comfortable, 100% reliable so far, has sufficient toys to keep me entertained during rush hour, is hugely relaxing on the motorway with its 6 gears and cruise control and is fairly economical too - a good thing at this time of ludicrously high fuel prices. There are only really two things that niggle: you really must keep the oily bits above 1800rpm when pulling away and the fact that it has a tendency to cancel your indicators at the most inopportune moments when negotiating roundabouts - a side-effect no doubt of there being no such things in Korea. But I think that's all pretty minor compared to the general niceness of the thing. I like it. Obviously I'm n...

Can anyone explain to me what Gordon Brown was playing at this week, turning up late to the signing of the EU Treaty? As usual, the Number 10 press office was quick to refute any talk of snubs etc, but honestly, are they seriously expecting us to accept that this was a simple diary mix up? That the staff in Downing Street really didn't know that this treaty was being signed? No, this can only be some half-cocked attempt to make a point to the rest of the European Union. The result however, regardless of your opinion of the treaty, is a Prime Minister that looks like a moron, and another embarrassing episode for the UK in international circles. Brown, you're an idiot. Reference: BBC News Number 10