I have just completed the first visit of piece of consultancy I am doing for a Rittman Mead customer, and like a lot of similar engagements I can’t go into who, what or even where. I arrived home late Friday evening to find my younger daughter (whose 15th Birthday I had missed by a day) had arranged a pirate themed sleep-over, and hence the prospect of little sleep for me. Yesterday, was the catch-up day, laundry, mail, bills and Christmas shopping (I am not a last minute person, but the prospect of dragging stuff around the world did not appeal , so it had to wait until I got home). Eleanor, the birthday girl, also had job for me to do, connect her new laptop to our home wireless network; our home network is a secure one and she did not know the encryption keys or even the (hidden) network name. As for her laptop, let’s say her “major maker” dual-core PC with 2 GB of RAM cost less than the 2 GB of additional RAM I bought for my MacBook Pro 
The new PC was top-present until the local ski slope gave her a (used) snowboard as a reward for helping clear part of the hireshop stock room.
Over the next few days I will be working of some new course materials for Mark and Jon, working on a couple of blog postings on data quality in staging data to a data warehouse and doing some research for a new conference presentation (which has just been accepted for Collaborate 08 in Denver, CO next April – this will be the first time that I present in the USA) and packing again for my month away with a customer…
Season greetings to all – and maybe we will meet up next year.
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