hi all
have just joined this morning after reading up about the Samsung G 2  which I hope to be my first smart phone.

The issue I have with phones is for the last 16 years I have been travelling the world working. I have lived in London 3 times in the last 11 years. Did a stint  in Dubai, Prague, Singapore, Melbourne, the Hague, Copenhagen, South of Spain and others. And so I have to carry a pocket full of sims and have to buy my phones outright as I can never sign up for contracts. 

I work in data integration using DataStage now an IBM product. Before I started travelling I was IT Manager at the Auckland Regional Council back in 1994.

Showing may age now I got my first VDU in 1981 and I remember getting our first IBM PC with a 10 mb hard drive. Before that, the desktops we had were running an operating system called CPM and had no hard disk and one 8inch floppy and 56K of memory and we had to write code in overlays swapping both data and program out to disk as we went from subroutine to subroutine (we were writing flood forecasting systems for the Clutha dam build).  Before that it was all punch cards.
 
I am currently on Waiheke - too far from the exchange for Telecom wired Internet so use a local WiFi service - YNET. great service and managed to do two 30 day assignments last year from home dialling into the UK. 

So I am a bit old, but completely mobile, carry a dell xps PC and 2 TB of disk in my back pac and will travel anywhere any time for work which can be fun. Currently working on projects at Telecom and Tower insurance, this year - expect to be in UK next year as have a daughter and 2 grandchildren there.

Anyway look forward to reading y'all posts.

Peter