This blog has been pretty quiet since I last made a release of Castle Visual Studio Integration, but I do have a pretty good excuse.

I completed my Bachelor of Information Technology at QUT in November, and after a short break to recover from all the lost sleep, I started work at Transmax. We build intelligent transport systems in Australia by providing a complete solution to traffic authorities, including signal, motorway and incident management. If you are interested in learning more or are looking for a new job in Brisbane, Australia, then head to our web site or send me an email.

In the week before starting work I ordered the parts to build my new computer because my old desktop just wasn’t cutting it anymore. My old computer was well past its use by date for a developer/power user and I had just been putting it off because I was always busy with university work and I didn’t want to set everything up again. My new computer is pretty standard compared to what most developers are using these days. It is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 with 4GB of RAM, running Windows Vista 64-bit. I’ll go into more detail about my new computer and my experiences of Windows Vista 64-bit in another post.

At home, as an early Christmas present we got a new Samsung 81cm HD LCD TV, so I have been watching more TV and movies. I was so used to our older, much smaller CRT TV that, I didn’t realise how much I was actually missing of what was going on in TV shows because the TV is so much clearer and brighter. We also upgraded our HTPC when we shuffled around our computers.

Slowly, over the last month and a bit my brother and I have been rearranging our network. My old desktop is now my Dad’s new desktop and with that came many other changes, some complete rebuilds, some just hardware component switches between machines. One of my brother’s machines became our new HTPC and from other changes I made a new machine for our NAS. I plan to write about what I am doing with our network and how I have set it up in a new post in the new year.

To finish things off I bought a new phone, a HTC TyTN II. My old phone, a Nokia 6610 has been playing up for a while, mainly some of the buttons would stop working. I hadn’t decided what phone I wanted until the loudspeaker/ringer in the phone stopped working a couple months ago, so I was forced to make a decision. I got my new Windows Mobile phone the day after Boxing Day from 3 and I am really liking Windows Mobile. I’ll follow up on my experience with this phone in the next few days.

Happy New Year