Well, so much for my good intentions to start blogging again pre Christmas. Life has been crazy busy as usual and this always seems to be one of the first things to drop off the list. I am hopefully on my way to being more productive now thanks to my new strategy for Getting Things Done. I’m only really part way towards fully implementing this program but I do feel that it’s already helping me keep more on top of things.

We had a great trip around Paris, Rome, and the Amalfi Coast with my folks for Christmas. I am hoping to get the photos up on www.jamesfitzsimons.com soon.

I’ve been concentrating hard on my secret website project of late. I’ll let you know more about the purpose of the site in the future when it’s ready to launch, but for now lets just say it’s great to get back into web development. I’ve been really enjoying playing with some of the new features of ASP.NET 2.0 (using Mono of course) and have also been discovering the magic of nHibernate. I hope to make more posts about the specifics of that in the future.

One of my recent discoveries while searching for information on some aspect of web development has been http://tropicalseo.com. This guy has some really interesting points to make about Search Engine Optimisation, but also about aspects of web site management in general. Oh, and it probably helps that I “share the dream”!

I think I’ve just about hit the wall. I am feeling really run down at the moment and the last couple of days I’ve been sick with a nasty head cold – which is odd when you consider it’s about 30 degrees outside. I think this is my bodies way of telling me I need some time out. This weekend Anthea and I are planning a very quiet weekend in London. I’ll probably just sit down with my book and take it easy. I might do some hacking – I’ll see how I feel. I should really get my monodevelop patch finished and submitted soon.

Over the last couple of days I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu dapper on my laptop and configured xgl. Man it is really cool! I’m loving the eye candy and am thinking about how some of that cairo/opengl goodness could be used in some other apps like f-spot for example. Maybe one of these days I’ll have a chance to play with it.

Well I managed to get some hacking done over the weekend. Spent the most of the time working on my website project. I have almost finished the user management stuff now. Took me a while to get my head around getting Mono, MySql and NHibernate all playing nice togeather but I am there now. I will probably do a post on that sometime soon as there are a couple of gotchas that would have been nice to know before I started so I figure I might be able to save someone else some time. I really need to get hacking on f-spot and monodevelop though. I wanted to get the features I’m working on for those two projects submitted before I go to Lugradio live and I am fast running out of time.

We managed to find a new housemate over the weekend which is great. It’s one less thing to worry about and she seems like a really cool person.

Off to see Jet Li in Fearless tonight so I’m hoping that will be good. Anything’s got to be better than the worst movie ever which I saw last week.

This will be the first weekend in ages that Anthea and I haven’t been going away. I am really looking forward to chilling out, watching a bit of the football and maybe doing some hacking on the various projects I find myself working on these days. I also have nearly 1,000 photos from our recent trips to sort and label so that will certainly keep me busy. Perhaps it won’t be such a quite weekend after all!

We are in the midst of interviewing prospective new housemates at the moment. Unfortunately (for us) Kirsty has been offered an amazing job back in South Africa and so will be leaving us at the end of July. Hopefully the next person we get will be as cool and friendly as all the previous inhabitants of that room!

So it’s been a long time since I blogged my last entry here. If I ever did have any readers I guess they are all long gone… Life has just been sooo busy over the last few months that I haven’t had time to even think about blogging let alone actually put aside 5 mins to write an entry. In fact I’ve done almost no hacking over that time either. Summer arrived in London with a vengence and Anthea and I have been taking full advantage with the busiest social schedule I can recall us having since we were students. We have also been doing loads of travelling with trips to Morocco, Isle of Wight, Amsterdam, Brussels, and this weekend Leeds. In fact I am actually writing this entry on the train on the way back to London. GNER have wifi on their trains now and I took full advantage of a free trial on the way up. It was very cool to be able to hack on f-spot and download a bunch of ubuntu updates for my laptop while sitting on the train to Leeds!

Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll be able to find a few hours to do some hacking. I have a bunch of things on my todo list. I still want to get my compare view for f-spot finished. I have changed track on that one a little bit so hopefully with have some screen shots and a patch ready soon. I also want to rewrite my class browser patch for Monodevelop and get that submitted. I think it will be really useful and as I use Monodevelop a bunch myself these days it would be cool to be able to say that I contributed something useful to that project. I also have a website which I am building. That has a bit of a timeline but it’s still a bit top secret so no more details on that just yet. Finally just for kicks I downloaded the latest version of dashboard from CVS on Saturday and built that on the train on the way up to Leeds. I really like what they are trying to do there so I might try and get involved in that project at some stage too.

Not too much planned this week other than a gig on Saturday night and some friends for dinner Wednesday so we’ll see, might even catch up on some sleep!