Erm, apart from the fact the HP's Procurve networking kit is already enterprise class and shed loads better than anything 3Com has made in many years.

On the contrary - I to am British but have travelled a fair bit, mainly around mainland Europe and every time I have done so, I've learned a lot from other cultures. I've also found that the best journeys are made cash-poor and time-rich (which if you're working you may not be) - pack the family into the car and spend a lot of time going not very far and it'll be good - particularly if you can stay in local accommodation (i.e. not the local Best Western, but gîtes, gasthofs, agritourismo, etc.). To display my own prejudices, I don't understand why so many of my compatriots spend vast amounts of money traveling to the other side of the world when we have so much to see on our door-step - from Iceland in the north, down through Scandinavia, the low countries, the former eastern bloc, France, Spain, Italy and on to the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, north Africa...

If being made into the un-dead means becoming more like GNU/Linux, I'd rather just keep me and my demonic servers six feet under please.

Funny thing is that running cable is a part of my work which I really enjoy - OK, it's mucky and doesn't take a huge amount of brain power but it's the one place where my normally messy and chaotic self can get really anal about neatness and getting everything just-so. Weird, but there you go... :)