November is always a great time when hot Christmas items are released and 2006 promises to be a bumper year:
Anyone with $1149 bucks to blow will have a great week starting Nov 14th based on the following release date and price info from Amazon.
Nov 14th – $250 – Zune
Nov 17th – $599 – Playstation 3 (but they are warning they’ll miss the date)
Nov 19th – $250 – Nintendo Wii
Nov 19th – $50 – Zelda Twilight Princess

Finally achieved XHTML compliance, even if it is only Transitional.

I’ve completed the migration of my old site from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0 and this’ll be the first post in the new site.
As you can see I’ve taken this opportunity to clean some stuff up and give the site a new user interface. I’m fairly crap at the UI type of thing but reasonably happy with the result.
I used the only design principal I know which is "plenty of white-space" so I’m sure there’ll be some tweaks in the future.
New features:

I’ve re-written administration for the …

Finally had some downtime and have I’ve recently begun migrating this site to ASP.NET 2.0. Migration is really smooth considering but I’d like to redesign the site in the process.
I haven’t really touched the core code powering this thing in about 4 years so it’s fun to go back and unravel some of the hoops I’d created. It’s also pretty neat to see how the tech has advanced and how much extra productivity you get with the ASP 2.0 (even though it’s been out for ages).
For instance, I’m …

Oh dear, I look enormous, but it could’ve been worse I guess.

The book is done. Or at least all chapters have been submitted. The author review period is next.
Some stats:
* Currently about 357 pages (likely to grow during review).
* I began work on 6/2/06 and took 3 weeks off to go on vacation.
* I have written a chapter a week, sometimes 2 a week.
* The coding was all completed within this period too.
* 14 weeks total which doesn’t sound like a lot.
* Average chapter size is 20 pages.
* Largest is 31 pages.
* Smallest is 9.
* 20 total projects ranging from …

New pics of our Ireland family vacation up on the website. This was the first trip to Ireland for Sydney and Ethan. Here’s my favourite.

As Paul says though, this one has a certain "majesty" about it:

After a huge effort, I have 4 chapters and an appendix to go. The running total is around 296 pages and counting.
I am doing some rather heavy research at work these days in the Office 2007, MOSS area. Cardspace (Infocard) plays a role too.
This leaves little time for anything else so when I see folks working on projects like this I am envious:
Link

I spoke to my editor today. I am approximately 230 pages complete by their count. The bad news is I am a chapter behind.
I spent some time tonight re-organizing the outline for this book in order to add two new chapters. The result is that I reduced the page count by 25 pages but added two new chapters representing 40 pages total. The net is an additional 15 pages.
I have switched to human blinker mode. I am now a robot, living only to accomplish the mission. I have …

So I just completed chapter 11. This makes a total of 9 chapters completed and 210 pages. Not to mention the code. There are about 9 beefy applications provided so far, 6 or seven smaller example type apps and lots more to come.
I wish I had more time. There really is no time for all of this. Since returning from Ireland it’s really hard to get motivated. Still, the end is in sight, almost.