It has been very quiet on the blog front recently, for several reasons. Firstly, we are moving to Seattle in October so I can start work at Microsoft. I'm not absolutely certain what I will be doing yet, but the general idea is that it will i. involve developer tools and ii. be fun. It is great to have it all finally decided so I can concentrate on finishing my Concern Maps project over the next couple of months.

More recently I spent four days in deepest Poland, in a placed called Torun attending my cousin's wedding. As far as I can tell Polish weddings are endurance tests to see just how much vodka, coffee, meat and dancing the human body can take (the answer is about 12 hours). I won't go into too much detail, but the take home points are:

1. The countryside, buildings and people were absolutely beautiful and I'd recommend a visit to Poland to anyone. Unless they didn't like vodka and/or meat.
2. There is an Wild West themed restaurant in the town square where it is possible to order a meal "with clapping" for an extra 5 zloty - the waiter told us this was a 'suprise'. It turned out to be the entire restaurant staff yelling and clapping as they served the food. We were all suprised.
3. Sample menu items at this restaurant: 'Tortured frenchman captured by Sioux' (some sort of drink), 'Jack London's mood with a glint of white fang in his eye' (meat?), 'Killed bison playing dice for his soul, so that his flesh remains in one piece' (not bison), 'Juicy manitou cult chopped with a tomahawk by Alan Pinkerton at high noon', 'Scumbags in Fort Knox uniforms'... I could go on, but you get the idea. Wacky.

We got back from Poland in time to show my family around London for a few days before the terrorist attack on Thursday. I was impressed at how Londoners remained calm in the face of such terrible events, particularly Ken Livingstone's speech.

On the uni front, I finally got my Whidbey beta 2 build finished at 1am last night. Tonight I'm playing around with the Class Diagram Power Toys with a view to using an API to create class diagrams (rather than just building the CD XML myself). This has presented some interesting challenges which I'll post on once I have them beaten.

Lastly, my latest Amazon shipment is the new Spolsky book and Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, both look good.