I started a new German language course today.  Its not run by the same group as before, but by the Volkshochschule (the state adult education group).  So far I'm pretty impressed.  The previous classes were very intense and very expensive.  This is the opposite.  However it actually seems to be a better structured course in that it follows through with a subject more that the Berlitz courses did.  For example, we did some work on modal verbs today. but instead of only dealing with them in first and third person in the present tense, we dealt with them from all perspectives and multiple tenses.  Its good, because I think it is more like actual conversation than the other method, which maybe was a little too rigid.  I'll know for sure after a few more lessons.

That's not really true as I have updated my blog many times during the last week.  You can't see the updates yet though simply because they're in the new blog engine.  There's a bunch of updates that are all going to happen at once. 

The first is that I'm going to roll out BlogEngine.Net.  This is a full featured and flexible platform that (while still being very young) seems to suit my requirements perfectly.  It supports all of the usual features you would expect in a modern blog and is built in C#.  There are a couple of things I would change though, which is one of the things that makes this package so useful.  Its published under a Shared Source license, so I can change the things I don't like.  The second thing is that James is going to re-design the UI on this blog for me.  If you're familiar with his work then you know what a big deal that is... I bow down before the designey brilliantitudeness of the Marett.  So when both of these two things are done then I'll roll out the new system.  Its likely to be a couple of more weeks yet though.

So, I went to enroll in another German course today, but they were all full with the exception for one which was too far away to be viable.  So, I'm going to enroll for one starting in April.  I'll do it early so that I can get the course in the location I want (ie: close to where we live).  I could have enrolled for one today, but it was three days a week and so far out from us that it would have taken an hour or more to travel there.  It seems to be very common here that people speak English.  That makes it not impossible for me to do stuff like buying things and interacting with people, as long as I can take the time to communicate with them.  I went to get a hair cut today after searching for the German course.  There were a bunch of salons that would have suited my needs, but they were all booked out for the next few hours.  So, I found one, and absolutely typically I discovered the one salon where the guys spoke German and Hungarian, but no English. Still, after getting around that with Anna's help, I ended up with a fairly decent haircut.  Unlike London, hair salons here are stupidly cheap for men.  The women's prices are lower than in London usually, but the men's prices are just stupid.  Figure €10 to €15 for a decent wash and cut.  Try matching that in London (though the barbers down the road from the office used to be seriously cheap too).

In other news, my sister just passed the last phase of her doctorate!  I think she has a couple of revisions to make to her thesis, but nothing too much, which is nice :-)

I have been doing some more work on the C#.Net version of this site of late, though not as much as I wanted as I've been bust with other stuff.  One thing I did discover was that there is now a fantastic new .Net blog engine around that I have downloaded and played with a little.  Its called BlogEngine.Net, and does everything that I want my blog to do already.  It is written in C#, and released under Open Source (actually I think its shared source, but I don't have the license in front of me.  Its so good that I may end up actually using it on this site instead of something else I might write myself.  Stay tuned for more!

LINQ is awesome!

   1: // Get the data from the database using LINQ

   2: var topTen =

   3:   (from bl in lpcsql.Blogs

   4:   where bl.PostType == 1

   5:   orderby bl.ID descending

   6:   select bl).Take(10);

   7: // Bind data to the repeater.

   8: objBlog.DataSource = topTen;

   9: objBlog.DataBind();

  10: // Check if its me, and if so activate the Edit and Delete controls

  11: if (User.IsInRole("Administrators"))

  12: {

  13:   for (int post=0; post < objBlog.Items.Count; post++)

  14:   {    Label lbl = (Label)objBlog.Items[post].FindControl("EditControl");

  15:     if (lbl.Visible == false)

  16:       lbl.Visible = true;

  17:     if (lbl.Enabled == false)

  18:       lbl.Enabled=true;

  19:   }

  20: }

  21: lpcsql.Connection.Close(); 

I just came across a great post from Paul Vick (the guy in charge of Visual Basic development at Microsoft) about the popularity of VB.  Linkage

I know. As bizarre as it may seem to anyone who hasn't seen me in the last few months, I just bought a hammer action drill.  It doesn't have USB or Wireless, and it isn't compatible with Windows.  Still, its a big drill and it will make nice holes in concrete walls....