Back in Egypt, in Cairo at the moment. Probably here for a week or so, trying to get the RSE Website in order a long with a few other bits and pieces. Don’t know where I’m going to actually get to do this yet though, as the internet here and in the neighbouring spots doesn’t seem to quite be working right. Also means I’m going to have to use OS X for a lot of it, especially the testing, as I still can’t get a workable Flash Player for PPC Linux that would let me test the YouTube Integration and other cool things we’ve got planned. Shame really.

The flight back was good with no real holdups or issues. Arrival in Cairo though soon told me that for some reason my Egyptian SIM Card is unable to make calls or send SMS Messages, so I need to try and get that sorted out later on. Also, I’m pretty sure the taxi driver robbed me blind on the fare, not as bad as I’ve been done before, but bad. Still, it was late and I was tired so I can’t be 100% sure of my accuracy there.

The one massive downside to my travelling yesterday was my shock and horror while I was reading.
For the last few days I have been reading Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia by Joesph D. Pistone – yes, it’s the true story that the film starring Johnny Depp is based on.

It’s a fascinating read, filling in a whole number of gaps the film could simply never manage to incorporate. I got through it at a rapid pace and then, suddenly, in Milan I hit a snag.

Two sentences didn’t quite match up going from page to page. I sat, staring, trying to work out what I’d missed when it hit me. Page 97. The page I had just read was Page 272. It had jumped back in time.

But, I thought, no big deal, it can’t be more than a page or two, just a simple printing process slip up, right?

Wrong.

What I have instead is 47 pages of stuff that I’ve read before, and it doesn’t simply continue at Page 273 after this weird interruption, instead it actually manages to omit the following 47 pages (273-320) and continue again mid-sentence.

Now, I probably could have carried on reading from there and filled in the gaps on my own, but I didn’t want to do that. Luckily for me, I had made an impulse by at Heathrow of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins which I’ve heard a lot about and thought it was worth a try. At first glance it seems pretty interesting, although it is set to be more difficult to understand than Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time judging by the first couple of chapters. But that’s not always a bad thing. I still miss finding out more about the Donnie Brasco story though – I am going to email the publishers (Hodder) later and see if I have any chance of a replacement at some point in time. But given that I’m not going to be back until probably at least June, even with a positive result it could be a while until I manage to finish reading it. Still, I’d recommend it, just double check all the pages are there and in the right order before handing over the cash!