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...

So very tired.  I've just about gotten the documentation I was supposed to have finished for work finshed at last.  Now I have a couple of weeks of backlog cleared, and I can get on with the development work I was handling a couple of months ago.  Except... my radioterapy starts on Tuesday, and I don't know wif I'm going to be in.  I hate not knowing stuff.

Crazy work at the moment. I just finished up a major project, which got so bad that I had to be in the office until 5am one morning last week. Still, its all done and dusted now, and I can get back to building my uber-website. Anna got her first essay back from uni yesterday... she got graded an A. Surprise surprise ;-)

Damn, three months without posting. I do have a good excuse though... I changed the technology behind the Long Pink Cake, and then didn't get a chance to update the bits that have to do with the XML behind this page. But that work is mostly done now, so back to regular(ish posting for me. So, lots of stuff happening in the past few months. Anna has started Uni a couple of weeks ago, and she's loving it. I think she's not yet used to the amount of work that she has to do though, but she'll get there. I startd a course in German last week, and it lasts for a year, so there should be some improvement there. I'm still playing Eve, and this is one of the reasons why I haven't finished the web site. In fact, I play it every chance I get at the moment. I understand where Hugh is coming from when he says how good Evercrack is... Eve is the same. I simply MUST play. I also changed jobs, and moved to Marketing. This was a brilliant move on my part. I love my new job, and am back to getting a kick out of the work :-) Anyway, I have to hit the sack, more tomorrow... I promise.

Its been a long time with no entries, so here's a summary of the last couple of months I guess. Work first... I've got a new job. I've been getting tired of localisation lately, to the point where I just didn't want to continue with it anymore. I was always fighting with someone to get the UK perspective across, it seems like it has been one big battle recently. So, a position in Marketing came up, and I went for it. I'm now the Client Release Manager, or the guy responsible for getting stuff on CDs and sending them to whomever. Its way more relaxed there, and I have the time to do the things I want, instead of fighting to get the day-to-day things done. I've had this idea on the back burner for a while now, to build a system for tracking CDs through the process, from beginning to end. It will compile the software, test it, burn the CDs, and track each step automatically. It will be fun, and rewarding, and I can't wait to start. I've had to spend the week getting setup though. I picked up my new laptop the other day, and it ROCKS. The monitor runs to 1400x1050, which is just obscene. The banner at the top of this page is about 750px wide, and it stretches half way across this screen.

Anna is thinking about doing a course in Archaeology. She has applied for it, but hasn't heard back yet. She also has a job lined up in the Passage later this year. One of the people working there is going on maternity leave, and not comming back, so Anna asked if she could have the job. Apparently they fell over themselves to say yes ;-) What else... we were in Paris last month, which was really cool. The weather was hot, and we had a hotel in Monmartre. Oh, we're going to Istanbul in October! Anna's parents bought us a holiday for my birthday, which they threatened not to tell me about until we got to the airport. I made them give it to me in Paris though, I couldn't wait that long ;-)

Lets see, whats been happening... um... I've been playing Eve-Online quite a bit lately, and its turning out to be better and better as it goes on. For those of you who don't know, Eve is a massively multiplayer online game in the same genre as Elite. In fact, its almost exactly like Elite, but bigger, and better. It also has real people flying around in it - typically around four thousand of them at the same time. That makes for a fucking awesome game.

Oh, I also got a new job last week. I'm going to move from Technology to Marketing, and do some funky things on the ground floor. More about that later on, I have a lot of things to get through first.

CSI rocked tonight, Grissom got involved with someone finally. Of course, it had to be Lady Heather, just about one of the coolest characters on the show who isn't a part of the team.

Work is completely mad at the moment. Everything for the last fourteen months has led up to the events of the last week - the release and launch of AOL 8.0. I had thought that I would be able to sit back for a while, take stock of where we are and where we're going, but it looks like we're going straight back into the fray with the next version. ::sigh::

There isn't that much else happening really. Too much of my life has been caught up in work lately, so we haven't done much. I have to fix that though, I don't think I really get to spend as much time with Anna as I would like, or she deserves. Weekends won't involve work for a while though, and late nights are going to be rare from now on, which feels real good :-) We're going to Paris in a few weeks, for my birthday. I've never been there before, other than on business, so I think its going to be fun. Anna has been, a few times I think, so she might be a fairly good guide. If nothing else, her French is probably better than mine ;-)

At last... holidays :-) It is the Saturday before Christmas, and I have two whole weeks of no work. I had a meeting with my manager yesterday which clarified something I had been mulling over recently... I don't like the way we've been handling the work we did over the last year. There is a new player in the game, and they don't always make life easier for us (as they should be). There's too much badly managed information going around, and too many organisational personnel running around like headless chickens. Its a pain in the ass. Bring back the old days where we had developers talking to each other, getting things done, doing them quickly, and sharing the knowledge they gained as and when they discovered it. Blah. Fuck it, no more talking about work until 2003 :-) Today is Saturday. Its the Saturday before Christmas. Its a day of rest, a day of haircuts, a day of good cappuccino, a day of putting together the last of the Christmas presents. It is fairly cold outside, so I think we're going to have to stay in most of the time, warm and snugged and comfortable. Have to watch the Fellowship of the Ring before tomorrow :-)

This week was one of the busiest I've had in a couple of years. It seemed like there was ten tons of shit just dropped on my desk, and it all had to be done by Friday, and I didn't have the tools to do it, and I had to prepare for going away for two weeks on top of it all. I'm going to Dulles on Monday for a week, for a meeting about the product we're about to launch. Then next weekend, we're going to Rome for 9 days to get a well earned break. I can't wait for that :-)

Last month we were putting the finishing touched to a product milestone we were working on, and for a period of about a week, we would build the code for that product, and then find another bug. We eventually put all of that behind us, and had moved on to the next milestones. Friday, we hit the last one - the final version that we were going to release to the public. This morning they found a bug. Its happening again....