We have a minor dilemma with our upcoming trip to Jakarta and it’s got nothing to do with the bombings at the Marriot and Ritz Carlton last week and the subsequent (and highly predictable) travel warning issued by the Australian government.

The airline we’re traveling with is suspending their Tuesday flights in mid August meaning that, while our flight to Jakarta remains unchanged, the return flight will either have to be two days earlier or two days later. They say this is due to economic downturn, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the terrorist attack has something to do with it.

The problem with this is purely the decision! The heart is saying it would be nice to extend the holiday by a couple of days but the head has really good and practical reasons as to why we should come home two days earlier.

We’re leaning towards head rather than heart, simply for the number of reasons to come back earlier – Being that Thomas and Cameron will miss a whole week of school if we return on Thursday (arriving back in Perth early Friday morning), that we’ll be really tired when Emily and James come for the weekend and of course I’ll have work to catch up on.

As far as work goes, I’ll be taking my notebook computer and organising a skype out number as well as getting a local cell number, so I’ll be completely contactable.

When it comes to holiday snaps I’ll probably be limited on the posting of photos due to the fact that my version of Photoshop is too graphically intensive to run on my notebook and my old old version of PS doesn’t run on Vista. I’m sure Lia will be posting some on Facebook though!

Update: We’ve booked the return flight for the Sunday, so we’ll be coming back two days earlier.

The release date for the latest flavour of Windows has been announced along with a nice little ad from Microsoft inviting me to upgrade. Thanks, that would be nice!

Of course, when I followed the link I knew deep down that this would be another of those “available to US residents only” kind of deals and so I was not surprised when, despite not saying anything on any of the pages leading into the shopping cart, there were no international options available.

As our state shares the same abrieviation as the Microsoft home state, I was tempted to select WA and see how far I got with it but in the end I figured it would just be a futile jesture.

I had a similar problem with Adobe when I upgraded my web developer package from MX2004 to version 8. I’d bought the package from Macromedia who had no problems letting me access the US store and downloading at that price. After they’d gotten bought out by Adobe that all changed and Adobe refused to let me access the store- I’d even cried foul on that citing the free trade agreement between the USA and Australia as a justifiable reason but in the end, due to time pressures, I was forced to pay the Australian price. Six months later I received an email from an Adobe office in Dublin saying that they concidered this matter closed. They hadn’t even corrosponded with me!

I am definately planning on upgrading – I am still running XP on three computers with Vista on my notebook. We’re already running Windows 7 Release Candidate on a testing machine and I’m liking it more than Vista.