Back from 5 days in beautiful Rome – it is difficult to put into words how beautiful the city is, even after a couple of days back in the UK I’m struggling to write a blog post – so I thought I’d right a list of my most abiding memories:

1. Take comfortable shoes, ones that you can walk A LONG WAY in – I took some Spring Court shoes, very comfortable – but after two days of walking, they (and my feet) were wrecked. I ended up buying a pair of comfy Nikes for the last few days.
2. Take lots of storage cards for your camera (or a laptop/hard drive to download each day) – you will take a lot of photos. Here are a selection of ours.
3. Eat away from the main tourist areas – we were given some great suggestions of places to eat, and they were ALL away from the main tourist squares and ttrations. This saves money, but most of all increases your chances of finding fantastic food.
4. Find ‘Sant Eustachio il Caffe’, and order cappuccino there – you will not be disappointed. It is here on the map.
5. Allow good time for the Forum – there is a lot of it, and lots to see. To me, much more enjoyable than the Colosseum.
6. Visit Trastavere and the Porta Portese market on Sunday morning – there are some great finds to be had in between the usual market fodder. I bought some beautiful old postcards which I’ll show here soon.
7. Find a bar – and sit outside, people watching in the evening. Rome is so busy, you’ll need to relax and there will be plenty of people to watch.
8. Eat late – a few times we spent longer doing number 7 than we anticipated, and ended up eating at 9.30 / 10.00 pm – it was worth it, the restaurants are busy, buzzing and full of interesting people.
9. Plan your days and get extra value. Tickets for Palatine Hill, Forum and Colosseum are ‘all in one’ – 14 euros per person, but they must be used in 48 hours. Don’t buy them at the Colosseum, buy at Palatine Hill for less queues (we did). The Vatican Museum + Sistine Chapel is free on certain days – check this out in advance (we didn’t – but the fee was worth it).
10. Take your time – Rome is a busy capital city, but so beautiful & romantic that it deserves you slowing down to enjoy the sights, sounds, smells and tastes.

A selection of my photographs…

This is me & Mrs Rutherford , ten years ago today – we’re off to Rome for a few days break.

Will update twitter (and automagically, Facebook) while we travel – but the PC will be off while we’re relaxing and seeing the beautiful sights, sounds and tastes of Rome.

Like most people I was doubly impressed with Usain Bolt this week – smashing both the 100m and 200m records whilst winning Olympic Gold.

Now you have a chance to race him yourself – in true old school track and field style – I hit 9.61 and 9.82 in two attempts… I think my keyboard maybe mashed!

With an email – and this blog post – Twitter ended the outbound delivery of SMS updates, inbound updates are still OK, but people are a bit peeved at the change.

I’m not a huge SMS receiver of messages, but I do update via SMS and I can’t help thinking that it might have been a smarter decision to cut the free service, but at the same point enable a paid model that would allow SMS-junkies to continue getting their regular fix of 140 character goodness. It would have been EVEN SMARTER to at least ask peoples opinions before the big switch off.

On top of the fail-whale and system instabilities over recent months, this cannot be seen as a positive move.

I can be found on Twitter here.

Live Search is doing some amazing things with its home page in the US – adding changing background to the search homepage is really generating some bizz around the net. This is todays superb image:

Showing Weber-Gale and the ubiquitous Phelps after the 4 x 100m freestyle relay Gold Medal victory. Check it out for your self at the US Live Search site – or on the Chinese Live Search site (where they have their own imagery).

I can’t wait until they roll this out in the UK and beyond, this kind of work could make Live Search a destination URL.