Stuff

Spent the last week in Washington (Tyne and Wear) running CRM Installation & Configuration and the Applications courses back-to-back. It went fairly well in the end, even though I was far from happy with my delivery. Once again it was one of those weeks when I just didn't feel I hit my stride properly, so I personally had a very uncomfortable five days :-( Still, the evaluation forms came out well in the end so I must have been OK I suppose.

I'm hoping to get some time to look at C# this week as I'm not training until Thursday, and it's only a one-dayer then. On Friday I found out that there is a new CRM course all about extending it with .Net (although I haven't seen it yet it sounds as though it is probably an expanded version of the SDK hands-on lab) and seeing as I know precisely nothing about .Net I really should start learning it. And then on Sunday I'm off to London for a week. Nice.

Steve Brennan and Bill Walker from work are in Canada at the moment, attending the Microsoft partner conference, and they're in various meetings including one with the MBS training development team, hoping to finalise my role in the CRM v2 course development work. Exciting times! I'm looking forward to being involved in that, if it all comes off.

I finished reading the Dan Rhodes book, "The Little White Car" while I was away, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Upon my return I found I'd received a load of parcels! One contained the new Glen Duncan book, "The Death of an Ordinary Man" (which has already been put into the pile I'm taking to Lindos), one held the new Christopher Fowler book, "Breathe" (which I'd bought directly from the publisher, and which arrived signed by the man himself!), and inside the last was the huge new Prince book, "The Vault", which is basically an encyclopedia of the man and his music. I've spent big chunks of the weekend dipping into it already :-) At the moment I'm enjoying "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides.

On the subject of writing, I had some good news from Neil Marr at Bewrite earlier this week. The new short story collection which had been given the tentative title "The Dark Side of Love" is now officially called "The Creature in the Rose". Personally I don't like it that much as it makes me think of greenfly! Anyway, the good news is that "Martin's Wish" is definitely going to be in there, and as it is practically a novella it will be right in the middle of the book and will serve as the centrepiece of the whole thing! The book should be out in August, all being well.

That's all for now.