Two week hiatus

Tomorrow first thing I'll be on a plane bound for the Cook Islands, for my first real, complete disconnect with the world holiday in many many years. I'll actually be arriving the day before. The Cook Islands are just the other side of the date line. Talk about disconnecting.

Since 1994 or so, there would be few periods of more than 24 hours where I had not connected to the net. The longest period can't be more than a couple of days.

But this time I am determined. A pile of books, including several by Neil Stephenson, a quiet south pacific island, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, swimming, hopefully good weather, and the company of Sara, should keep me out of trouble for a couple of weeks.

And in the middle of it all, next Tuesday, Sara and I are getting married.

So you won't be hearing from me for a couple of weeks.

But when I get back I'll be raring to go.
The Style Master 4 beta programme has been under way for about a month, so we'll be looking to wrap that up during December.
I have a number of articles I just have to finish up and publish, about everything from the sociology of software piracy, to some ideas about how to make intellectual property laws work a bit better than they do at present.
I'm also working on a project I hope to unveil early next year that Maxine called yesterday "all the benefits of XML on the web today, well, actually yesterday".

And hopefully early in the new year some exciting news about Web Essentials in 05, bigger, better and more mobile.

A few stats before I sign off.

My first post was September 29 last year.

Since then I've posted 114 articles, and there have been 274 comments. Not the most widely commented on blog, but a fair old start.
We've had well over 50,000 visits (though with RSS taking off these days I am sure like me with most blogs I read, a lot of people never visit they simply read the post in their feedreader).
By way of comparison, this is a small fraction of the number of visits to westciv.

In the year or so since I started "dog or higher" I've

bought an apartment with Sara
along with Russ, Peter and Maxine taken Web essentials from idea to successful conference (I hadn't even met Peter and Russ this time last year)
released Style Master 3.5
published several articles at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age online
spoken at conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane
got fourth in the Australian Surf Lifesaving champion patrol competition. Fourth in Australia a'int bad for someone my age ;-)

Anyway, that will do. It's been a busy, good and tiring year personally. not so sure how good the year has been more generally, but...

So, many thanks to all of you who have read some of my rantings.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks. Hope you all come back then too, and til then, take care, and as my mate Bennie says "stay lucky".