What is it with restaurant names around here that have to have a sort of funny meening? - It's just been pointed out to me that we have both a Beau Thai (pronounced "Bow Tie", in case you haven't worked it out) and also the Shirley Temple. Thankfully the new "fish!" restaurant that has just opened in Solihull's new Touchwood Centre didn't choose to name itself "ghoti!"

I know it's been linked to from the Blogger home page, but I want to do it again, because the idea is so neat: wapblogger allows you to post to blogs via a WAP handset. It's yet another example of an excellent use of the XML-RPC Blogger API. Note: I said the idea was neat, but actually using it from a phone keypad doesn't really bear thinking about - too painfully slow.

As far as non-work related life goes yesterday was my manager's birthday (okay, so it's slightly work related). He is still 51 weeks younger than me, but for this week at least we are now both the same age. A good time was had by all who attended his birthday meal at The Beau Thai in Solihull. It's been a while since I last had Thai food, but I still like it. Each course was delicious.

Gosh it's been quiet around here recently - blogwise anyway. Of course the reason for this is that real life has been keeping me too busy. So what's been happening? Well, after coming back from one week off holiday it seems to take another week before everything settles down to normal. I am now back on track as far as work is concerned, and it's been really good to bury myself inside a proper bit of development. I've actually found myself being creative again rather than just handling support queries all the time, and it's been good. A new enhancement is now pretty much ready, and I am pleased to say that it's a better solution than was originally required. Oversimplifying the problem for clarity: The requirement was to produce a translator for a later version of a particular file format. It was assumed that an existing translator be used as the baseline and a new source tree be created from that for the new version. The end result of that would have been two source trees requiring separate maintenance in the future. My solution was to enhance the existing source tree to handle the newer file format as well - end result a single source tree, and therefore easier support down the line. Not really a big deal, but it's always nice to deliver more than is expected.