Mostly good

It was a good week in Hinckley, and the course (on ADO.Net) was excellent - Dave Manning was as good as ever and we had each other in stitches. As well as now knowing a bit about ADO, it has also enthused me more about writing VB, which is what I've spent most of this weekend busying myself with, writing silly little applications, trying things out, seeing how far I get before I have to look things up and so on. It's been good, and I've discovered that I know more than I thought I knew.

Tomorrow I'm up at 4:45AM again (boo!) in order to drive back to Hinckley, but this time to dual-teach a 2559, which is "Introduction to Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .Net" or something along those lines. This will be my first dual-teach and, to be honest, I'm not wild about the idea of them, especially about how they would be viewed from a customer perspective. Still, it will all be good experience, as my boss tells me.

I had a nice e-mail from Microsoft a couple of weeks back saying that the work I did for them on the 8028a ("Microsoft CRM 1.2 Applications Professional - International English") has been accepted, and a revised edition of the course is being released. Hurrah! It was supposed to have come out a week or so ago but I checked this morning and there is no sign of it yet. Production delays, I reckon. Still, it is nice to think that the Peter Lee Remix of the course will soon be going global :-)

I've also had a bit of a lucky streak too - three lottery wins in the last three weeks (only £10 each time, but a win is a win) and best of all, on Friday I received an e-mail from the Sunday Times telling me that I was one of the top-prize winners in a survey they ran a few weeks back on the subject of music downloads. My prize? One of these. Very exciting.

Final bit of news: I had a fabulous idea for a story last week as I drove around Hinckley and Market Bosworth. As soon as I get the time (probably November 2008) I'm going to write it. Working title is probably "The Ten."

Finally, I'm not a religious person, but it was sad to see Pope John Paul II lose the fight yesterday. He became Pope when I was about six or seven years old, so to me he's been the Pope forever, and it won't be the same without him. May he rest in peace.