Updates and downdates in busy rural Canberra

Boy, I've been so busy lately, which is why it's been a bit quiet here lately. Even my stream of emails have stopped, so if you're expecting something, it still may be on the way. Sorry all.

First, work is a lot of work. I'm doing bucketloads of Wiki and SOA / web services related work that hopefully will help out our infrastructure to the point where we can start talking about innovation again. Watch this space for lots of thinking, writing and swearing about these topics.

Secondly, as some might know, my wife is a three-years trained primary school teacher from New South Wales, but Canberra - bless its specialness! - requires teachers to be four-years trained, even when they already been a teacher for 7 years! So she's back in University, and this term there was a multimedia package that needed to be created as one of the tasks, so I've been helping out with this one ...

... plus all my other extra work stuff; one for the university of Australia, one for a conference in Norway on Patents and Software, the OZCHI conference website, a possible IA retreat in Sydney later this year, and a few other smaller bits and pieces.

Which means my days are; get up, get us all ready (me, wife, kids, dog) and out the door to our respective places (Alex [35 tomorrow] in the library, Julie [32] at the university, Grace [6] to the school, Lilje [3] into daycare, and Oscar the Cocker Spaniel [3 human years; 21 dog years; 45 pigeon years] to the backyard), work all day, come home, get dinner ready (Julie is mostly taking part of that these days; I only do the occasional one, lik eon mondays and the weekends) and eat it, get kids in the bath, clean up the house, kids in bed, dog dinner ...

... and then sit down again at the computer, working on all the other stuff until terribly late, crawl into bed ... rinse, repeat ... Were there any good movies on TV the last four weeks? Who knows?

Anyways, we're seeing the end of this madness, starting this weekend (which also is my birthday, so I guess that makes sense), so life will hopefully slowly return to normal. You'll be hearing from me.

PS. I had a birthday lunch at work today, and it was great; Even Paul and Rachel popped in for some laksa. Thanks to all for a good lunch! It was really appreciated.