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!

I could not get motivated earlier to do my German homework. Did you know I've been studying German for the last few months? That shows you how much of an impact it has made on me. But tonight, I sat down and opened my books, and started typing some stuff on the PC. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot actually. I had forgotten how much fun it is to get back into learning again. I don't do that too much these days, and I should, because its one of the things that keeps me going. I just seem to play too much Eve lately, and that is taking all of my spare time. ::sigh:: Maybe I should quit playing Eve and start learning something new again. Nyah... fuck that ;-) There's a compromise to be found here, if I can reach it.

Going go Germany today. As usual, Anna is a nervous bundle of energy who wants to leave NOW (3 hours before we need to), and who wants to know how we're going to handle the luggage NOW ;-) She had to cancel her Open University course yesterday because there was a pre-course assignment she had to do which was going to interfere with her finals for her full-time course. She wasn't happy about that, poor girl :-( Still, she can do another one later on with no problem :-) Anyway, I'm off to get everything packed to go, will update this as I get a chance over the holidays :-)

Went on a course today to learn how to speak to the media. It was very interesting, and will be of a lot of benefit when we launch AOL 6. We did three interviews on video, and the difference from first to last is quite startling... in the first I came across as nervous and ill-informed, but in the last I think I did a lot better :-) I look shit on TV though... my nose is too big and my eyes cross too visibly. Sucks. Also today, Max and Scally's wedding present arrived... from Gaggia!!! Its a pretty fantastic espresso/cappuccino machine :-))) No longer will I have to sleep, there will ALWAYS be enough caffeine for me to stay awake just a little bit longer ;-) Nice one guys, thanks :-)

Been an intense week, did a course on Monday and Tuesday on time management, then fixed bugs for the rest of the week. The time management course was interesting and somewhat relevant to how I do stuff, and I'm hoping that I'll have the discipline to put it all into practice properly. Most of it can be applied to using MS Outlook, which means I can continue to use my PDA :-)