I noticed my blog rate has dropped off significantly in the last couple of weeks (whilst my tweet rate increases!). It has been a combination of a few things - nearly all good :-)

• I have had a few days off for Chrimbo shopping and visiting family in the "cold north". We were lucky enough to also manage to get up to Yorkshire at the weekend and see plenty of snow in the Esk Valley.
• We did our last of our current batch of MSDN events over in Bradford hosted by Black Marble who IMHO did a fantastic job with the venue and format. Well done. (Oh - and I like the Xmas skin they have applied to their website!)
• I did my first user group session at NxtGenUG in Southampton and had the pleasure of doing my second ever delivery on SQL Server 2008. A fantastic user group who meet in a cheery setting (the entrance of a Church - but that does it an injustice) and throw in pizza for good measure. Highly recommended. As for SQLServer 2008 - I think spatial got by far the most interest (links from the session)
• I have been busy reviewing a number of articles we had commissioned on everything from WPF to EF to Language Futures (more on that later - as the best of the four is close to being published)
• I have been putting together an "offering" with a couple of our partners to help companies in the UK who have invested in Visual Basic 6.0 transition to (and benefit from)  Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework. We should have this ready for mid January 2009. Watch this space!
• I was fortunate enough to meet up with many of our user group leads the day before the awesome DDD7  - a four track one day developer conference created entirely by the UK developer community for the UK developer community. This was an amazing way to spend a Saturday in November - I loved it!
• We have as a team been working through the details of our main events for the first part of 2009. More on that later.
• I have been getting my head round a bunch of "breadth" things which didn't really affect me in my old "depth" role working with ISV early adopters in the UK. Everything from feedburner to friendfeed to slideshare. I am close to being "fully plugged in" :-)
• Yesterday I decided to rebuild my notebook and after some peer pressure (and twitter pressure) I went with 64bit Vista for the first time ever - and (touchwood) so far everything has been perfect. I feel a fool for waiting this long!

And finally - the view on Saturday after a 5 hour drive.