Signs on the Sand

We spent this holidays season in Seattle area. For my wife and our little Cat it was first trip to the USA. And traveling between Middle East and North West USA with 20 month old girl is a challenge (Scott gives pretty good advices for kid-wise traveling).  She did very well though, mostly sleeping during those 33 hours in the sky.

Happily we missed the record storm that hit Western Washington so when we arrived things were normal and we got electricity and heat in the hotel and all our local friends got electricity in homes already.

The weather was Seattlish - rain rain rain and lots of gray color in the sky. There were couple of days though when we could see the sun.

Xmas evening we were at the Dimitre Novatchev's house. First time I met Dimitre in person. We talked about everything. He showed me some great stuff he's working on, including a new XPath related application he's developed and having trouble to release because he works for Microsoft now. That was really nice evening.

I also met my friend Sergey Dubinets who does XSLT in Microsoft. They are all about this new important XSLT debugger feature I will be posting about as soon as it goes public.

After all it was nice trip and we managed to get home without anybody catching even a cold.

Well, new year is here and I couldn't agree more with Kent Tegels - I'm glad 2006 is finally over. 2006 sucked on so many levels, but mostly on a personal one. 2007 must be a better year. This is my unexpressive but hopefully achievable new year resolution.

As a good sign the year started with Microsoft MVP award. This is fourth year in a row I'm getting MVP award (for XML of course) and this time I was really worried about getting reawarded - it was lousy year and I didn't accomplish much. Congratulations to all fellow MVPs getting their awards again this year.