It's June in Seattle and time for some summer time hiking. A short stroll up a mountain to Heather Lake brought us into plenty of snow under foot and a great view at the lake side.

Heather Lake Stitch5

This is a Windows Live Local collection for TechEd Australia.

 I am in San Jose staying with my friend Mark. Today Mark , his daughter Lora and I went to play mini golf. I managed to get 3 "hole in one"'s in a row!!

Unfortunately I also scored several 6's

I am in Los angeles for the week - there is some big software conference called PDC that I am attending

I am staying near Universal City
Check out this place on VirtualEarth:

 Wow! Seafair today was cool. I saw lots of things go really fast on the water and in the air. Thanks to Radar Works for laying on the special seating and food. I made some great new friends and had a superb day.

SeaFair
Check out this place on VirtualEarth:

I am sitting in another airport. I left Sydney a month ago and have been to Las Vegas for the Mobile and Embedded Developers Conference. I then headed north to Seattle, where I spent a few weeks in Redmond with the fine folks at Microsoft. This last week I have been in Orlando at TechEd 2005. A huge conference for IT Pros and developers, I believe there were over 12,000 attendees!
It was a blast
I am now in Washington DC waiting for an airplane to take me back to London.

Where to next?...

After a quick 2 week trip back to London I am back in the sunny Sydney. The weather is gorgeous. Blue skies and warm air. I went to the beach in the morning and the sea is warm and air is clean.

My soul has nearly caught up with me now. I think I passed it going the other way on my flight back!

For the next few weeks I am traveling around Australia talking about eXtreme .NET. I will be in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane.

Today is midsummers day in Australia. The second midsummers day I've had this year
Six months ago I was in Seattle on midsummers day enjoying the hospitality of two most excellent friends. I was just getting started on writing my book, which has just been published.
It's amazing to think back over just the last six months and see where I've been and what I've done.
In the last six months I've been to; the USA, England, Greece, Italy, France, back to England, back to the USA, Australia and Singapore.
I've consulted with several software teams, written a bunch of papers for journals and had my book published.
What will the next six months hold in store?
I wonder where I'll be then for my other summer solstice?

In some bizzare (and possibly twisted way) I enjoy long flights like the two I have just taken to from Sydney to Singapore and back. Firstly I get to catch up on movies I missed at the cinema. Singapore Airlines has on demand movies and on this trip I watched Aliens Vs. Predator, Collateral, Master and Commander, Sharks Tale, Catwoman and Manchurian Candidate.
Now if that wasn't enough I also managed to clear out my inbox. I had around 120 emails that needed answering and they have all been answered, filed or tasked for action. I feel so free!

I've been in Singapore for a couple of days now. I have given some presentations and last night I presented eXtreme .NET to the Singpaore .NET User Group. Their web site says 'for cool developers' and it seemd that way to me. It was a good group and lots of interesting discussion.
I managed to get a break in the middle of the day yesterday to have a bit of a wonder around Singapore. It's not the first time I've been here but I discovered a couple of nice places I didn't know about before.