Made it, and in style too.  BA upgraded me even though I didn't ask them for it.  I looked at the queues in Heathrow to checkin, and said "Fuck-it, I'm going to check in at the automatic machines".  So I did, and discovered when I had gotten to the gate that I had been bumped to business class, which was cool.  One of the flight attendants on the plane turns out to have been from Passage, where I grew up, and has since moved to Crosshaven, which is just five miles down the road from where I lived.  The flight took us over Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, and I picked up some great photos of those.  I'll stick them on the web when I get home. Right now, I'm in our office in Los Angeles, getting some mail done while my contact is on a conference call.  It's been a productive morning so far.  After I get out of here, I'm going to San Luis Obispo, where I will meet Anna in the morning.  Can't wait :-)))

There's always a shit side to travelling, and this is it:  Its 05:30, and I've been up for half and hour already.  The cab is coming to pick me up at 6 and take me to the airport.  Ouch.

You know what?  I'm beginning to think running this blog on a managed server with .Net is actually a bad thing.  Now, I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong, but sometimes it takes an age to show pages.  It might be that the caching isn't behaving as I thought it should, or it might be that the server needs to reload the compiled code or something, but its beginning to piss me off.  Its bad enough that I have to admit I miss the old ASP / VB Script days when everything simply loaded.  Unfortunately, I've changd this blog so damn much that that isn't an option anymore, without going back to scratch and doing it all over again.  There are bits on this page that get re-used over and over again, like the buttons on the left and the top and bottom bits.  They're the same on each page, so I broke them out into components.  The only thing that changes is the "content" that you're looking at now.  I though at the time that this was a great idea, and it certainly helped me understand asp.net more, but now I'm not so sure.  Maybe I'll take a look at it again when I get back from holidays.

I'm off to California on Wednesday, for a meeting with some of our technical folks, and then two weeks of holidays.  I'm hooking up with Anna at her mission on Friday morning, though I have to take a seven hour bus ride to get there, one day after a twelve hour flight from London.  Ouch.  Anyway, I'm just about all packed, though I have to get some clothes dried and ironed yet, and I'm crap at ironing.  Two shirts took me nearly half an hour earlier, so I gave up and got some lunch.  I'll probably not post from California, but should have some good photos when I get back to post.  Oh, I still have to fix the damn photo album module...

Photos of Dublin are published.  Something strange is going on though, they're not appearing in order.  ::Sigh::  I'll deal with it later.

So, Anna's gone to California for six weeks.  She has been gone for three weeks today, and in two and a half weeks I'll be going over to see her :-) I have to do some business in Los Angeles, but then we're going to take two weeks and tour the state.  The plan so far is to go from Los Angeles slowly up the coast and finish in San Francisco.  We're also going to meet Danny in Reno, though at this point in time I don't know how we're getting there.  You see, I was supposed to get a driving licence so we could drive through CA, but the waiting list for that is going to take me to October, which messes things up a little.  Oh well, I'm sure there'll be a bus we can take, and I haven't finished hassling the DVLA yet, so there's still a hope that it will work out.
I was in Dublin last weekend, and it was all good.  I got to see my parents, and went to Andrew's birthday party. I'm going to post some photos on the site soon, but there are some technical problems with the photo system at the moment, so its going to have to wait for a few days while I sort those out.