Last Blog of the year

Things have been going very well recently, and Ive been having the best Christmas time in ages. My DSL laptop is running pretty smooth now, and Im carrying it about in its nice new slimline laptop bag that I got for Christmas. Only weights a little over 4 lbs all in, not bad for a freebie thinkpad thats 5 or 6 years old.

Ive been continuing to hack away at my 'traingui' perl/FLTK IDE prog during my morning and evening commute and its going pretty good. Hit a couple of fltk bugs where Fl_Text_Editor would hang on resize, but I hacked around them in the end (upgrading FLTK didnt seem to help). I reckon I might have an initial alpha in a couple of weeks once the holiday season is over.

Other good news as well... finally told friends and family that my wife is pregnant... May 25th is the due date (were on week 18 now). We threw a Christmas party and told all our friends... everyone was very happy. Guess Im going to be a dad, thats a kind of sobering thought. Where did all the time go? :-)

Finally passed my driving test as well. Ive had a UK license since 1988, but I never got around to getting one in the US. The test was really easy but they do ask some stupid questions and the NJ drivers manual has some basic errors in it (i.e. night time stopping distances are less than the day time ones). Didnt have to do the road test, so I got my license on the spot. Now all I have to do is learn how to drive an automatic on the wrong side of the road :-)

Oh! and lots of pressies for Chrimbo as well... wife got me a Tom Tom Go Linux based GPS car navigation system, as well as Half-life 2, Doom 3, a giant Mag-Lite torch and a hardcover copy of The Watchmen. Man that Tom Tom thing really rocks. It routes in a second or two and you can input complex addresses really easily on the touch screen. The UI is exceptional and you can load up the full USA roadmap on a 1Gb SD card. Woohoo! I wonder if anyones hacked it yet? :-)

Well, almost time to go home now (currently at work). Happy New Year to anyone who reads this! Hope everything is going as well for you as it is for me! :-)))

PG.