Seems that the universe is conspiring against me getting access to the wonderful interwebnet. A couple of days ago our NTL set-top box crapped out and died, so we've been living with no broadband and no TV for a while. This post being evidence of the NTL engineer coming round and giving us a brand new box [grin]

I've not done anything hugely useful this week - I'm still trying to bring some order to the chaos caused by temporarily moving back to my parent's house. The forum FAQ is slowly creeping towards completion - its now at that stage where I'm tidying up the loose ends and formatting it, cross-referencing etc... nothing hugely exciting. I'm on holiday next week, so I'll have to crack on with it early August now - hope you guys dont mind waiting [smile]

I'll also see about uploading my notes from Exceptional C++; Ravuya's logic seems good to me - plagiarism maybe, copyright infringing no. The way I've been writing it is more as a "memory jog" for myself - you'd need the actual book to understand the notes completely.

About a month or so back I listed a few toys I picked up from the MS company store. Heres a picture of the light-up USB-2 hub mousemat thingy-majig:



I know that showing off isn't exactly a great personal quality, but I think I've officially got too much Microsoft software now.

MVP's get a complementary MSDN subscription which is very nice of them. I got one in July '05 and then that got cancelled and replaced by an upgraded one in Dec '05 (VSTS offer) and now I seem to have picked up another one courtesy of being renewed in July '06:


Five folders full of DVD's


The contents of the latest delivery for my new July '06 subscription


The above image but spread out on my floor. The other four folders in the first image contain about the same number of DVD's if not more.

I know I'm lucky to have access to so much stuff and that I really shouldn't ever complain, but I think I really do have enough of them for now [lol]

I'm going to have to schedule some time to actually go through each and every one of those DVD's and work out which ones are duplicates (most MSDN shipments contain DVD's that are just updates of older ones) or in obscure languages that I dont have any use for (I have every version of Windows in every single language from what I can tell)...

Anyway, anyone want some DVD-shaped beer mats or coasters? [grin]