This is the story of "What I did on my Summer Vacation" May 23 thru July 15, 1997.

Actually its the story of what I did during my Sabbatical. Every Apple employee gets to take a 6 week paid leave of absence every 5 years. This is a great program that is offically called "Restart" and it was put in place by Steve Jobs back in the early days of the company. (if anyone knows the story of how the program originated, send me mail) This is the story of what I did with my six weeks.

*** While I was putting this togeather, Apple discontinued the Sabbatical Program. I am so glad I got to do this... and I am sorry for all future employees who will not get to have this experiance. ***

Right after the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in May, 1997, Apple decided to send me on a trip to London and Berlin to speak at Internet world. On June 1st in Berlin I started my Sabbatical and for 4 weeks I traveled around Europe and then spend two more weeks in the USA and Mexico

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Berlin - The trade show center in western Berlin where I spoke at Internet World. 1.002

On Friday, May 26, I was wondering around downtown East Berlin just goofing off on my last day of "work" before my sabbatical officially began on the coming monday. I had been to the Deutche History Museum and felt like just exploring. East Berlin is still a bit wild and really has a different feel from West berlin which is a lot more like AnyCity USA.

At random, I saw a sign offering Internet access at a little cafe. I decided it would be fun to stop in and send mail to some of my friends from such an exotic location. I could only think of a few people's addresses off the top of my head so those are the ones I sent the mail to. As time went by, I would add anyone who sent me mail to the mailing list. Eventually it got to about 100 people and I stopped adding people. I know that various of my friends would forward these to a wider audiance so I am not sure how many people read them in thier origional form. Very few people actually got all of them.

Well, I did and it was. In fact it was so much fun that I did it again at a cafe in Prague, Czech. Then again in another cafe in Prague. Then again in budapest. All in all there are 17 messages from 13 cities in Europe and Mexico. The first few are short but the later ones are kind of long. I would generally spend about an hour each time I did one of these. I had a great time doing this and a number of the people I sent them to seemed to enjoy hearing about what I was doing. Because of that encouragement I have decided to turn this journal into a web site and share it with a wider audiance.

I used PC''s running windows 3.1, windows 95 in most locations. A two of the places were using X-windows under Unix and both of those were BSD. Only one place was using Macs exclusivly but a couple of places had a few macs. As some of the messages say, I had to deal with a lot of very slow connections. I learned a lot about the challenges of sending mail on different machines and the free email service from www.Hotmail.com really helped a lot. When I first started I would spend an hour or so just trying to check my mail, but by the end I would just get a form in Netscape and pound away. Thank you Hotmail.

These messages contain a lot of spelling and gramatical errors. A number of people have encouraged me to publish them without changing anything. I have fixed some things that needed fixing for readablity but left most of them untouched. The errors add to the overall feel of the piece. Some of the problems are caused by my almost total inablity to spell and my total dependance on the Cassidy and Greens Spell Catcher program to make my business correspondence readable. Unfortunatly, I did not have access to a spelling checker in any of the cafe's that I visited, and while hotmail has a spelling checker of sorts built in, most of the connections that I was using were so slow that using it would have been really painful. I found writing in a stream of conciousness style without worrying about stupid stuff like spelling to be a very liberating experiance.

Berlin - Waiting to speak at Internet World with me, Avi Tevanian, Charles Wiltgen, Dominik Westner and Frank Biederich. 1.003

These pages were completely layed out using Golive Cyberstudio, by far the finest web site development tool in the world. Finally someon has paid attention to what a webmaster need's in order to get full featured, state of the art pages out in a hurry. As Apples Internet Evangelist and the designer of many of Apples web pages I have played with most of the HTML tools out there. The coolest thing about the program is that it let me create pages that I have no idea how to create with raw html. And not once did I have to fall back to BBEdit and thats a first for any HTML tool.

Berlin - Check out Andreas Poliza, CEO of Golive peeking out from behind Charles. 1.003.andreas

Berlin - Charles wows the crowd at Internet World Berlin with his Quicktime tricks. 1.004

Berlin - Dominik Westner talking with Frank Biederich. Frank is the main author of the Golive CyberStudio program. 1.003.dom

Berlin - Avi getting interviewed by German TV. 1.005

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about my trip. I would love to hear any comments about what you think of this web site. Especially if you have any suggestions for how to improve it. Please, no comments about my lack of literatacy and spelling accumen, photographic talent or poor lifestyle choises.

Please recognize that this is copy written work and please send me email if you would like to quote me or use my stuff in other ways. I am pretty easy to work with if you want to use any of this for a non-profit type thing... just send me a short mail asking for permission. If you want to publish it for real, just ask and I am sure we can work something out.

Copywrite 1997 by Carl de Cordova (Carldec@Apple.com)