What a week! I haven't managed to post at all for about nine days so I thought I would post a bit of an update - this is a bLOG after all. Right now I'm sitting at the big blue square table in the Virgin Blue "blue room". Thats a lot of blue. You can tell that I am here with Bella because I have "The Wiggles: Toot Toot!" in my DVD drive playing in media player when she decides to come over and pay me some attention.

I took Friday as a holiday last week (11th of June), so on Thursday night I flew down from Canberra to Melbourne in time for my sister-in-law's presentation ball. It was a good night, although very late - maybe I am not as nocturnal as I once was.

Growing up in Queensland I was never exposed to anything like a presentation ball, so it was all a bit new to me. While we were down there (wife, daughter and I) we managed to get out and see the next installment of the Harry Potter movies. I definitely enjoyed the evening - especially since we splashed out and went to gold-class.

On Sunday it was time to fly out to Perth. The boss was good enough to spring for Nic and Bella to fly over with me since I've been travelling quite a bit lately. It's the longest flight we have ever been on with Bella but we survived it OK. The hotel was really nice (Quest West). I was over in Perth to co-deliver Readify's Industrial Strength .NET course with Martin Granell - although the course didn't start until Tuesday.

Unfortunately, on Monday Bella decided to be "upset" which derailed our tourist plans that we had made for our first ever trip to Western Australia. On Monday afternoon I got a call from who I thought was Charles Sterling (MSFT) but turned out to be Nick Randolph (.NET Community of Practice/AutumnCare) using Chuck's phone.

Nick (where is ya blog mate?) invited me along to the twilight developer's session that Microsoft had set up to follow on from the Security Summit that they have been having around Australia. It was a great chance to catch up with Chuck and meeting Andrew Coates (MSFT) and Nick for the first time!

Andrew did a presentation on XP SP2 from a developers perspective. The content was a little bit different from what Nick Wienholt presented at the SDNUG meeting recently. I may be off mark - but I think the key point that Andrew wanted to get across is that we as developers should get XP SP2 on a box and test our apps with it - but I might be missing something.

After the session we all went out to dinner at a Korean BBQ resteraunt. It was great fun, not only was the delivery interesting (BBQ hot plates in the middle of the table) but the company was great - we were joined by Sandy (IE/Outlook Express MVP) and Malcolm (SBS MVP). I needed to leave a little bit earlier than everyone else to get back to the apartment to ensure I was ready for start of the course. Fortunately, Martin had checked in by then and we got together to review the material and break up the workload.

Thats pretty much how it went for the rest of the week, although Nic did get hit by food poisoning on Tuesday - I won't lay down any accusations here, but lets just say I have my suspicions. Martin and I also went hunting for a wireless cafe to satisfy our broadband needs. Conincidentally we found it at the same place we and all our students ate lunch every day - unfortunately they weren't open in the evenings which was the case for all the other hot spots in Perth.

All in all its been an interesting nine days. The students in the class were fantastic but I am looking forward to getting home to my own bed.