I touched down yesterday in Toronto, Canada, where I'm going to spend Christmas with my family in their home about two hours north of the city. The suburbs of Toronto are covered now with a beautiful, classically Canadian dusting of snow. Thanks to all of you for your part in an incredible year. I'm too sappy right now to go into detail (must be the effects of maple syrup), but it's been a pleasure to meet and work with such talented, diverse and interesting people. I wish you all a very enjoyable

"Do you think we can get it working again?" I asked Scott, as he opened up the Marsellus Wallace briefcase to reveal the bits of a disassembled brain-computer interface. Here we were on a Saturday morning, in Gary's stunning office space overlooking Saint Stephen's Green in the heart of Dublin, with the sun streaming through bay windows onto a desk just waiting to be covered with electronics gear. A week ago, I'd visited the University College Dublin to meet with former colleague Ed Lalor, who, in

I'm down to Waterford tonight to talk about SQL Server 2005 at the local INDA usergroup . If you're down in the southeast, come on out and I look forward to seeing you at Dooley's Hotel. Just a bit of personal interest to round out my blog for today. Gamasutra (a site devoted to the art and science of making games) has an interesting write-up on the Games for Health conference . The piece works as a thoughtful survey paper on a number of ways people are using interactive techniques to contribute

As Paschal reports, Monday night’s INDA discussion topic was the use of the CLR in SQL Server 2005 . Nick Grattan gave a characteristically thoughtful talk that walked us through the steps involved in hosting .Net assemblies on SQL Server. Nick’s also already blogged the answer to my burning question, which was: what are the proposed best practices for when I should use this new feature ? How does CLR Assembly hosting fit in to the big picture alongside TSQL? It turns out it's a case of with rather