Living in Grand Cayman

I was in Miami sunday to monday in a conference.  Great place, great conference and great … food 🙂 

Back in Cayman, it has been raining a lot recently. Julie told me it rained a few times while I was gone, and now its saturday and it had been raining for two hours or so.  When it rains here, it really comes down hard.  Low lying areas get large pools of water and sometime its tough to pass with the car. Speaking of car, we still dont have the CRV ; best estimated it will be here in the second half of June.   My patience is wearing thin 🙁  Outside our house large pools of water form in some areas, but nothing to worry about.  During hurricane Ivan in 2004, the house we rented had some flooding, but came out of it en reasonably good shape.  It was a category 5 hurricane afterall!

Here are some pictures I took a few minutes ago while it was raining.  You can see that my driveway has a few centimeters of water in quite a few places.

I was asked to write a series of articles for a local paper.  The first one came out today.  I made page 4 out of 32.  Not bad at all once again. I guess the local media like IT security stuff 🙂  I am very pleased how this came out.  Also, on the same day, a second newpaper ran the press release we made last week.  Great timining!  I love the title “Mr. Schumann …” in bold an everything!

 Here is what the looked like in the paper! 🙂

Click on the link for the PDF version of my article “are you exposed to hackers”

 hack.pdf

This week I had my mug shot in the local newspaper, “The Cayman Observer”.  Organizations can send in press releases to tell the business community about promotions & hirings.  This is not something I was used to in Montreal, but am told by a buddy of mine that in english Canada is done quite a bit.  In the first week of may, in another newspaper “The Journal”, I will have published the first of five montly security articles I am writing as a guest columist of the paper.  I will post it here when I comes out.

 Saturday was the annual KPMG beach day.  It was a great day to have a beach party. There was plenty of drinks, burgers, ribs, BBQ chicken, etc. Turnout was surprisingly low (free food & beer … go figure???), but it was great anyhow.  One of the other managers brought his sea kayaks.  Julie & I took one out for a 30 minute paddle along 7-Mile beach ; we really enjoyed it.  Thank goodness we had put on a lot of sunscreen though! We are now considering getting one for ourselves.

Here is a scan of the press release.  It made page 5 out of 32.  Not bad eh?  People actually read these things because on of my clients even sent me an email after reading it.

Here are some pics of the office beach day.

This week-end is a long week-end as in most of the world. My friend Michel (a former co-worker) is here for 9 days and is staying at our place. He is doing an advanced diving certification most of his time here.  However, this week-end, his schedule was not as busy so we headed out to some local tourist activities.  Friday we went by boat to Stingray City (no we were not stung ; there is absolutely no danger) and saturday we went to the Turtle farm which is now also a bird sanctuary & a shark aquarium.

 Here are the pictures of these two days.  Two absolutely gorgeous days (needed lots of sunscreen lotion)

On our way to stingray city

Here we are at stingray city.  You can see the stingrays going to see the people & to get fed calamari.

Here Michel & I hold a Stingray.

Now to the Turtle farm. In this picture, I took a medium sized turtle in the petting area. We are allowed to pick them up & play with them.

Here Julie feed a Cayman Parrots.  There birds are very pretty and were not very shy. 

Also in the bird place, there were two strange looking birds ; a pair of “white Ibis”. They walk right up to you and start checking you out with their very long beaks ; toes, shorts, sandals, etc. Of course, it tickles terribly.  Julie compared their “bites” to chinese chopsticks. These birds dont hurt you and are not agressive at all. All three of us very much enjoyed our encounter with these friendly birds.

 Now to the shark tank.  There are 6 reef sharks & 1 nurse shark.  By my estimates they are about 3 – 3.5ft long.  You can go snorkeling in the pool next to theirs and see them thru a window while snorkeling ; very cool. Here is a picture of one of the larger reef sharks.

Once we left the turtle farm, we walked over to the ocean (the other side of the street) and looked at the waves crashing onto the the ironshore ; the sea was rough and the waves were quite impressive.

(For those that have not been on the Blog recently, I made 2 posts this week.  See the other one right below)

got back from Turks & Caicos wednesday.  I spent 3 nights there.  Most of the time I was there, it rained. Feel sorry for those there on vacation and who paid 2800$ a week to be at the Club Med which was 500m from the hotel I was in.

Here is a picture of the hotel where i was.  It was actually a condo that they rent out when the owners are not there.  Very nice and roomy.

The hotel was on Grace Bay.  Probabably the nicest and most known beach on Providenciales, which is the name of the Island in Turks & Caicos where I was.

One of the most amazing places is not a beach. Its called “Chalk Sound” ; its a sort of bay with small islands and amazing turkoise waters.

Finally, with all the rain on the island, I witnessed the problem with not having any rain sewers (none of the islands have any)  Basically, when it rains too much, huge puddles form all over the place.  People with small cars (like i have with my rental car) have problems getting around.

Now back to Cayman.  On saturday morning, there was the annual “Humane Society Dog show”. I decided to go with Aipa and check it out. It was great fun. Below is a picture of some dogs being judged for one of the competitions.

I entered Aipa into two categories ; Best “First time entry” (dog who never were in the show before) and Best rescued (since we got Aipa from the SPCA we were elegible) Guess what???  For the “Best new entry” category ; there were about 50-60 dogs, Aipa got 3rd prize. 🙂

Finally, one evening Julie & I went with Aipa for a walk in another area of the island.  There was a horse in a field. We got a picture of the horse with Aipa.  Very cute 🙂