It occurred to me this morning that I haven't made a simple "personal news" post here for a while, so here's all the goss.

This weekend was my mother-in-law Di's 60th birthday, and we went out to the local Chinese restaurant to celebrate. Chinese food is a little bit passe nowadays if you ask me, but the previous generation still seems to think it's the bee's knees, so we were happy to accommodate. Unfortunately the restaurant was just abysmal. Despite us having booked for 30 people, they only had one waitress working, so it was nearly an hour before we even had our orders taken. Then, after the three other tables in our party had all finished their main meals, we were asked if we wanted any dessert. This, mind you, was before we had been served our own main meals! It was obvious that they'd completely forgotten them, and the end-result was a rushed, tasteless array of meals that we shouldn't have had to pay for. What's worse is that our table included Di herself. Heck of a birthday party. And the fact that they still charged us full price really rubs me the wrong way. I'm kicking myself for paying. For Albury folks reading this, I'm talking about Ocean City restaurant in Lavington, so dine there at your own peril.

Sal and I caught Tropic Thunder yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. As many have written, Robert Downey Jr stole the show. His Australian accent is quite appalling, but it works well within the film's satirical context. Unfortunately I found his "southern black man" accent almost impossible to understand, although that may have been intentional.

Over the past few weeks I've been almost completely caught up in the fury that is Stack Overflow, the new forum/wiki project from Jeff Atwood. If you're a software developer then you're probably all over this already, and if you're not then you probably aren't interested, but I will say that the "reputation" and "badge" system (analogous to Xbox Live's "gamerscore" and "achievements") have made this site very addictive. It makes you want to answer questions, which means it's a very helpful ecosystem.

At work, we're in the middle of an office renovation which will bring all developers together into a shared workspace. It's a step back in that a couple of us lose our own private offices, but we gain our own "brainstorming" meeting room and a lot of wall space for whiteboards, so it should make for a collaborative, productive environment.

And lastly, we fly out to the US in two weeks' time for a 12 night holiday with both sets of parents. Sal and I decided at the beginning of the year that we'd take our parents to Vegas and show them where we were married. It was a way to take the parents away from it all for a while and share some quality time. Since making that decision, some others have decided to tag along, which has kind of defeated the purpose of the trip, but we'll try to make lemonade and have a good time.