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I'm off work at the moment. Nothing bad, just having a week at home instead of going camping. Mrs Mawoo's at work, so I've been spending my time coding and learning. Fun, fulfilling, but a bit tiring.

Been working on a new ASP.NET project - Team Mascot Online. The background is very simple. In my team at work we have a team mascot each week. Each member submits a nomination for team mascot, and then we have a vote. We then spend the next week with our team mascot as our desktop wallpaper, and in times of trouble and strife, ask ourselves the question 'What would x do?'. Just a bit of a laugh. Past mascots include Mr T, MacGuyver and Corey Haim (the younger brother out of the Lost Boys. The Corey who wasn't in the Goonies.)

So I though I'd put together an online version, where users can write their nomination cases (oh yes, they have to be justified!) and vote for this week's mascot. I'll write a bit more about it when it's more complete, but that's what I've been doing with my time this week. I've still got a bit to do, but hey, I'm not back at work until Tuesday, and Mrs Mawoo's away this weekend. I've still got 4 whole days to finish it (It's mostly aesthetic things to do now, anyway).

The rest of the time (even I can't concentrate on one things for a whole day!) I've been doing some learning. I just upgraded to Broadband over the past couple of weeks, so I've been caning hell out of it with loads of multimedia stuff. A lot of what I've been watching/listening to hasn't been the brand new stuff, but go back a month or two and there's tons of archive material out there...

DotNetRocks is hosted by a coupla guys, Rory Blyth, and Carl Franklin. It's a coupla hours long, goes out weekly and is packed to the gunnels with cool .NET news, information and interviews. Not just .NET, either. They've had people on recently talking about Mono, SQL Server, and a little while ao, just a geek fest talking about water cooled PC's and other nerd toys. Fantastic. The shows are available as MP3s, each one coming in at about 75-80 MB (Now do you see why I didn't get into it while I was using Dial-Up?)

Jo Hummell has made a series of 15 webcasts looking at VB.NET development. I've seen 3 of them (they're about 1 1/2 hours a peice) and they're really cool. It's kinda wierd sometimes. He'll quote something as a design rule, or something like that, and I'll thin 'hey, that's really clever'. It'll be something that I know how to do, just something I've never thought of doing (The one example that springs to mind is overriding the ToString method for any classes you write). There's loads of other cool stuff in there as well. There must be - there's 15 of them!

This webcast by Ken Getz was really cool too. It's a series of tips and tricks that have been pretty much lifted from the WindowsForms.net website. It covers some great stuff in windows forms programming. Things like alternative applications of databinding (I bever really thought of using databinding for anything other than, well, data...), windows forms transparency and accessing protected methods and properties via inherited classes are all in there. It's all fascinating stuff.

That's pretty much all I've been doing this week, apart from spreading the joy/laziness of MSN Messenger via the web. A couple of my mates work behind spiky corporate firewalls, so can't use mesenger at work. Not no more!!

I'll write again when I've got something more to write about...