It's a fair question. Last time I managed to blog anything, I was in America. Since I got back, for some reason I've not managed to put finger to keyboard and post. Easily rectified, as this post testifies. But doesn't really explain the absence. What have I been doing?
Well, as it happens, what with attending weddings, meeting up with old university friends and the like, I've found myself frequently being asked the question 'what've you been up to lately?', so I've obviously had the opportunity to practice the response at some length. Tragically, when I think about it, it turns out that the most honest answer is 'watching a lot of imported American drama series on the Sky plus box', which is hardly the stuff of which great anecdotes are born.
In fact, what I've largely been doing is:
- Preparing the lean-to at the side of the house so builders can come and fix the roof
- Having builders in to fix the roof of the lean-to at the side of the house
- Cleaning up after the builders fixed the roof of the lean-to at the side of the house
- Buying a new car
- Attending Gareth and Lucy's fabulous wedding in Cardiff
- Watching Lost season 1
- Watching House season 1
- Waiting for this guy (who probably won't, in spite of the insistence of certain wedding guests, end up being called 'Bosephus Jethro James Hart'. Probably.)
Which, it turns out, takes up a whole lot of weekends and evenings.
I've also had the reinstall-everything-from-scratch fun that can only come from my laptop hard drive failing. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the day after I got the replacement hard drive, Microsoft finally shipped .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, and I had a clean machine which had never been infected with any betas, community technology previews, or technology demonstrators, and was therefore the perfect environment into which to install the final delease versions of Microsoft's latest dev tools. This is the sort of thing that makes a geek happy.
Still, the relentless descent towards fatherhood is beginning to daunt. With that in mind, I was very grateful to discover Greg Allen. Okay, maybe a little bit over-obsessed by the stroller-choices of celebrities, but he's got a good writing style and seems pretty level headed for a New Yorker. One for the RSS aggregator.