Where did the year go to?  It only seems like a couple of entries ago that we were in Germany for the holidays.  Well, we're going back there again this year, but this time my parents are coming over from Ireland.  You see, we've always spent Christmas with one side, but always only one side.  We thought it might be nice to have everyone together for once :-)  So we're all getting into Munich on the twenty first within ten minutes of each other.  How's that for great organisation? I have no idea what the plans are like for Christmas though, we'll just have to wait and see.  I do know that we're hooking up with the usual crowd though. Seibel and Michi will be back from Canada, and Sylvia and Al will be over there too.
I started smoking again, but gave up yesterday.  Today, I'm a little tense.  It is a very bizarre sensation.  I feel like I'm very cold and my body is sluggish.  I lack the control that I exert over myself.  I don't really like this feeling I have to say, though at least it will go away soon.

Yayyy... I uploaded the images from Munich and California finally :-)

There doesn't seem to be an easy to use blogging system out there in VB.Net yet.  There are some that can be used, but they're cumbersome, or don't do exactly what I need them to do.  That's why I stopped using Scott Watermasysk's .Text application, which almost did it for me.  However, I couldn't find an easy way to put my skin on it, and I didn't want to learn C# at that point in time.  So I fucked around with this application until I got to the stage where it is at now.  I'm going to place Code snippits on a new page for you to use, and ultimately the entire source code for this application.

OK, so I've been working on my site for a while now, and I seem to have finished almost all of the things I wanted to do :-) Adding and Editing blog entries are now working and optimised, the display engine should be optimised, and I've just finished the code for an RSS feed.  You can get that on http://davewhite.net/xml/davewhite.xml  All that is left is to publish the comments for my photos of Germany and California, and I can finally rest :-)

Must sleep. I've just made a small update that should sort out the fonts though, so this is a test :-)

Lots going on at the moment. Anna has just left to go on a field trip for a week. She's going to Salisbury Cathedral to survey the place, but she has a nasty case of the flu which is going to make the week most uncomfortable for her :-( I really feel for her, as I had the same thing last week when I was in Prague. I was there for the DVD Forum's annual European meeting, and that was really informative. There are some funky things happening with high capacity DVDs fairly soon :-) Also, I re-coded all the HTML on this site to conform to XHTML 1.1, which I have been meaning to do for some time now. Fonts are still a little screwey, but we'll get there. Finally, I've redone the image galleries in a way that makes them easier to handle, and a little faster to load. So, I'll be putting lots of images up there within the next few days.

Well, it looks like Bush did get elected. Yay. I was in Prague when it happened, at a conference for three days. The only english TV I could get over there was CNN, which wasn't as much fun as watching Jon Snow on C4 give his own brand of the state of things. Prague was a mess - I had a fucker of a case of the flu which spoiled any chance of me seeing more than the inside of the hotel. And now Anna is getting this too, and she has to go away tomorrow for a week to do some surveying with her Uni. Ouch :-(