It's been a bit of a busy week, one way and another... Work has started to pick up again after the xmas lull, and I have spent about 7 hours finishing the Program for the panto.

Did I ever mention that my daughter, Amy, in a drama group : Phoenix Productions? No, well she is... Amanda has got the post of 'Front of House manager' and is responsible for Program & refreshment sales, and I got volunteered with designing the program. My own fault, I was very critical of the standard of the last one, and when asked "could you do better" was daft enough to say YES!

Finally finished it yesterday morning, burnt two copies to CD (Publisher 2003 & PDF format) and handed them over to the producer. The show starts in just over 1 week, so it was a bit borderline. However when things like the running order are still being changed with only two weeks to go, what can you do?

I bought a copy of Publisher 2003 specifically for the job, and I have to say - It's excellent. The last time I tried this program was version 3, many years ago, and it was awful. So there you are, some MS software DOES get better in newer versions, and it not ALL feature bloat.

I have already started on the program for the summer show, which is not till June. I fully expect that it won't get finished untill the last moment again, but I can get the 'Look and Feel' approved, and the basics in place now - or at least as soon as the Panto is finished in a couple of weeks.

I have been impressed with the Laptop performance too, 2.5 hours continuous battery use still 40% left. I finished the battery off by playing MP3's for another hour, so 3 1/2 hours on a full charge would seem to be realistic... Not too shabby!

On Friday, I went to a lunchtime Bodypump class, different instructor to my morning classes : My God do I ache today... I don't think I have EVER worked so hard (physically) in my life....

No news on the Nokia 6600 front, or at least no good news: I had a text message from Orange on Thursday to say that they still have no stocks. At least they are keeping me informed... always have liked Orange customer service.

Today, I have been playing with the configuration on my Archos MP3 player. Running Rockbox firmware you can save multiple configuration files to allow you to easily change everything about the player for different uses. For Example: I now have a Walkman and an In_Car setup. The In_Car config, sets a lower volume level, flat equalisation, flips the screen up-side down, loads a larger font and a simplified 'While Playing Screen'.

In the process, I managed to overwrite my Walkman WPS configuration, so having spent about an hour recreating it, I have 'Cut & Pasted' both WPS files to my Website. At least I can't loose them again!

I downloaded a copy of "BBC BASIC for Windows" last week, boy what a trip down memory lane. That coupled with the work I have been doing on websites recently (Home & Work) has re-ignited my desire to do some programming. I have now ordered a copy of VB.Net 2003 from Amazon - £87, not too bad, and that should be here sometime this week. I want to make my own Playlist generator as my first project, and maybe a version 2 of my Rockbox configuration prog, it's been 12 months since I last worked on that....!