As Frank-N-Furter sang in The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Of course, Frank never did get to go home, but let's not let a minor detail like that get in the way of a good line.

So where exactly is home? A reasonable question, given the fact that I have lived for extended periods in four different countries: England, New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

I had just bought a new flat in Sydney shortly before I moved to New York, and rather than sell it I decided to keep it and rent it out. This means that all the time I've been renting an apartment in New York I have also been a landlord in Sydney. And I've been somewhat resentful of the amount of rent I've been paying here, compared to the rent I've been charging on the much bigger and more comfortable flat that I owned.

So when I say I'm going home, I mean I'm going back to Sydney. I still have strong ties to Auckland, but the fact that I own my flat in Sydney, combined with the greater likelihood of finding a good job there, gives Sydney the edge.

For more explanation of the decision see here.

My flat in Sydney (to the left of the image).

If you do a search on Google for "Peter Wall", you'll find that it's not a particularly uncommon name. There's an academic from Sweden (yes, Sweden), a guitar teacher from France (yes, France), and a General in the British Army, to mention just a few of the Peter Walls you'll find.

And then there's a blog named simply Notes by a student at San Joaquin College of Law in California (he used to call his blog Res Ipsa Loquitur — I haven't looked into the reason for the change). This Peter Wall uses his blog largely as a political soapbox, expressing views which overlap with my own in many respects, and diverge significantly from my views in others.

Then there's the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada — a gift from a Vancouver businessman named, unsurprisingly, Peter Wall. This Peter Wall is also the owner of the tallest building in Vancouver (I'd always heard Vancouver was a lovely city but now I have another reason for visiting). Because universities generate a lot of web references, the Peter Wall Institute tends to dominate the search results for Peter Wall.

There's also a former Liverpool football player, the Dean of the Diocese of Niagara, Ontario, a former Junior Mr. World (one of my favorites) and many, many more. And there's me.

So if you've found this page through such a search and you're wondering which Peter Wall I am, let me summarize: I was born in Cumbria in the north of England in 1951, moved to Manchester when I left school, and emigrated to New Zealand in my early twenties. I lived in Auckland for many years before moving to Melbourne, Australia, and then to Sydney. Over seven years ago I moved to the U.S., and I currently live in New York, although as noted above that is about to change. If these facts fit the person you're looking for, chances are you've found me.

I knew I shouldn't have mentioned it. For some months this page was coming up as the first result in a Google search for "Peter Wall" (in North America, at least). It subsequently slipped to about ninth or tenth place, although right now it's back up to second.

But Google isn't the only game in town. If you search on Yahoo! for "Peter Wall", right now I come out in the first position after the sponsored links. Clearly Yahoo! is the superior search engine.

I'm still not sure how my high placements happen — the search engine companies are very secretive about their page ranking algorithms, and I have no way of knowing what it is about this page that causes it to rank so highly. Or what causes it to be demoted later. Let's see if Yahoo! will turn out to be as fickle as Google.

A few of my friends have websites. I'm mentioning them here for mutual support, and in the hope that it will raise all our search rankings.

Selwyn van Zeller has a website for his Maths In A Suitcase and Science In A Suitcase businesses.

Gary Stewart has a website featuring his art work.

Heidi Schuster has a website with photos and news (and that annoying dancing baby).

Chris Roberts also has a website.

And Heidi and Chris have a shared website.

Lily Chang has a photo website, but I think she updates it even less frequently than I do mine.

Kathie Callaghan has a website for her recruiting business here in New York.

Rob Byrnes has a blog.

Will Schenk has a blog.

And Laam has an online retail store called Jesper-LA.

If I've left anyone out please don't hesitate to draw my attention to the fact.

No changes to the appearance of the website this time round.

In December 2006 I moved the full-size images to my own home machine, leaving the rest of the content (HTML pages, thumbnail images and ancillary files) on the web hosting facility. This means that there is now no limit on the amount of space I can use for photos, but it also means that the full-size photos may occasionally be unavailable because my machine is down for some reason. There is now an indicator on the photo pages to show whether the image server is available — if the indicator is red try again later.

For information about this website, see here.

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