While I’m never in doubt of which city I’m living in currently, with both the harbour bridge and opera house visible from my home, I do occasionally forget that Sydney is in Australia.  In many ways Sydney could be anywhere - it’s another modern ‘’Western city, albeit an exceptionally beautiful one. 

But every now and again you come into contact with the local flora and fauna, and it seems so impossibly exotic, especially compared to London where the only interesting wildlife is usually the occasional dustbin raiding fox,

But in Sydney the native wildlife is all around you, and a reminder that you live in one of the most extraordinary continents in the world.   Loud screeching cockatiels (or cockies as they are inevitably referred to as here), the laughing Kookaburra’s in the tree outside my bathroom window, giant house spiders and cockroaches, possums scrabbling up trees or the sight of thousands of bats the size of cats flapping around at dusk, are all part of the Australian experience.

Most of these encounters are relatively benign (possibly excepting the freak outs I have with the cockroaches, ,I hate those fucking  things) though  there are plenty of snakes, red back and funnel web spiders to give the unlucky a nasty fright and/or a hospital visit.

But this week there have been two nasty shark attacks in Sydney, both involving the aggressive bull shark.  And yesterday in Manly there was an all out, “Jaws” style beach evacuation as a spotter plane spotted a big shark cruising a few hundred metres out from the beach.  One of the bull shark attacks was especially sobering, as it was right inside the harbour.  A navy diver off the the bow of one of the big Royal Navy warships near Garden Island was attacked, losing a hand and a leg.

According to one of my sailing buddies the Bull shark has the highest testosterone levels of any animals in the world.  Which all goes to make me thankful that my water sports tend to take place on, rather than in, the water.

Aussie’s apparently have debated for many years whether the cuddly Koala, which gets extra bonus marks for being one of Australia's few animals not capable of killing a heard of elephants with a single bite / sting, actually drink water.  This defies logic of course, but  seems no-one has actually seen one of the little critters drinking, until this fella was rescued by a fireman in once of the recent bushfires….it’s now become Australia’s most viewed clip on You Tube

I’ve had all of these on test for a while now, and they’re all great phones.  Of the pick I’d probably go for the Blackberry Bold.  I’ve never been much of a Crackberry phone before this phone came out.  But it’s a superb smartphone, great keyboard, 3G, good , a vastly improved UI over the previous Curve, and good application support. 

I’ve not fallen in love with the Storm, mainly because for email and SMS , the touch keyboard, while not bad, is not as fast to use as the Bold’s conventional qwerty keyboard, and only the big screen really gives it any kind of wow factor.  I’m sure that the second Storm will be a killer device, once they’ve got the remaining bugs sorted, and corrected it’s pitiful battery life. 

The iPhone still remains king of the touch devices, but it’s not perfect. 

The new HTC android powered ‘Magic” (terrible name) looks very assured for what is only Google’s second device – super responsive touch screen, very fast application processing including the ability to run two apps at once, plus what promises to be a great selection of new and interesting open source based Apps. 

The Nokia smart phone range, still based on S60 at the high end, is suddenly looking very tired, and needs a big step up to keep pace with the new kids on the block, both with this new crop, and the imminent arrival of new entrants including Android and the hotly anticipated Palm Pre. 

Forget that dumb ass, lame “I’m a PC” campaign, from Microsoft.  Microsoft don’t really do humour, well, not since I managed their advertising anyway. 

No, what is breathing life into the oft maligned Wintel industry is the new generation of ultra light, small PC’s running XP. 

I’m trialling the VF AU  version of the Dell Mini Inspiron 9 this weekend, and it’s unexpectedly brilliant.  I say unexpectedly because I’ve already got a newish full sized laptop running Vista, and didn’t immediately get why I’d need another PC.  But the notebook, the size of a paperback book, with 30 second boot time, on board 3g connectivity to our 3G HSDPA network, & with a new Intel atom processor, and you’ve got yourself one really useful bit of kit. 

Chuck it in a rucksack, and boot up on the train, the ferry, the couch, and you’ve got easy access to the web and enough on board ram and processing power to surf the net, download and update iTunes, watch You Tube etc.  The only thing that gets a bit of getting used to is the keyboard, which is a bit cramped after using a full sized one. 

Using XP again makes me remember how good this OS is - it’s twice as fast as Vista which is running on my other more high powered laptop.  Quite how MS managed to fuck up Vista so badly is a mystery, but fingers cross Windows 7, which I’m about to Beta, should correct past wrongs.

While the UK is under a blanket of snow, it's a very different story here in Aus, as weeks of 45 degree heat in Victoria, climaxes in the worst weekend of fires in the country's history.  Whole towns have been destroyed, and some terrible horror stories of whole families being trapped in homes and cars, and consumed by the fires. Sydney has not been too bad, with the winds keeping the temperatures down in the harbour region, but even so, on Friday there was a bush fire clearly visible from my office window in North Sydney, with helicopters releasing water bombs to douse the flames

Scary.  Actually, quite disturbing, publicity shot for the new single