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Somewhere in Bavaria lies the city of Augsburg. Somewhere in Augsburg lies a Fujitsu-Siemens factory. Somewhere near that factory lies a conference centre. And in that centre, on Wednesday…

.. you could find this charming room, and me inside it. One conference keynote plus one interview plus one photo plus one comment from Greenpeace (and after factoring in about ten cups of coffee) you have one news story, and so before flying back out on Thursday I had time to check out the city. And here it is:

It's all rather pretty, actually, with cobbled streets, trams everywhere and fountains. Fountains that, for some inexplicable reason, are all covered by pointy wooden hats, as if to protect them from the rain (because, as we all know, fountains and water don't mix). And then there's the Fuggerei:

The Fuggeri was founded in 1516 by the Fugger family who, being both breathtakingly rich and Catholic, wanted to keep in God's good books and were able to blow vast sums on doing so. They did this by building a whole city district, comprising of really rather nice homes, and renting them out for a tiny fee - plus three prayers a day - to poor, Catholic residents of the city. It's still running today, funded by tourism (4 euros to enter), the Fugger family and, to some very small extent, the rent (just 98 euro cents per resident per year).

So, once you've seen the social housing and the Fujitsu factory, what else is there in Augsburg in November? Not much. The worst thing would be this fellow, staring out of a hunting shop window:

And the best thing? That'd be the cake:

If you like cake, you will like Augsburg. We found dozens of cake shops, including the one above, whose cake counter must have been almost 100m long. Hedgehog shaped cakes, cherry cakes, fruit cakes, cream cakes.. it's all a bit bewildering. So, we ate cake. And drank coffee. And bought more cake. And all very nice it was too. And then to the airport, through a slightly demented security check that took exception to my camera, and home.

So, Augsburg. Worth flying there? Not really. Worth a couple of hours if you happen to be nearby? Sure. Is that a glowing recommendation? I suppose not.

Hunter takes off - in HD from Tom Royal on Vimeo.

Hunter does his bit for science, helping me test the EX-F1's 60fps mode. This was shot as 60 6mp JPEGs in a one second burst and then smooshed onto the interweb, hence the dubious image quality (technical smooshing details: JPEG images resized to 960×1,280px in Photoshop, stitched into an AVI with JPEGVideo, converted to H.264 in Quicktime Pro then uploaded).

(NB - he did actually land safely about a second later. And he caught the snake, too.)

.. and all I got were these lousy photos. And a news story about antivirus software, which was really the point of the exercise, but never let the truth get in the way of a bad pun.

Anyhow, I went for a walk, got lost, took photos, somehow found my bearings again and made it back to the hotel for the press conference, which was something of a relief.

On an only vaguely related note, I've tweaked the Wordpress template to make it play nicely with Flickr pictures (which are 500px wide by default). Looks OK to me, but please let me know if I done broked it.

Furthering their attempts to take over the world, and branching out from previous appearances in magazines published by Dennis, Hunter and Ralph will soon be invading a WH Smiths near you in the CA Ultimate Guide to Easy Website Building. Check them out - and enjoy a special guest appearance by Boris the Myspace Panda - on pages 13 and 14.

Oh, and there's advice on website building, too. Well worth £6, if I say so myself.

Back to work tomorrow.