I’ve been off-air for a little while. Not because I didn’t have anything interesting to say, but because I’ve been rather busy.

First up we had a couple of site launches. MyTalk is a very exciting new Australian Talk Radio portal consolidating all the Southern Cross stations. It was a very frantic build but good to see it up and running. It’s actually two sites in one – the core station site and a CommunityServer driven community/feedback site. As usual the design by Cat Savard was a real pleasure to work with (especially as we both had some pretty strong personal deadlines to work to).

AMDMeansBusiness is finished (but not yet fully live) is a new consolidated portal for AMDs Australian and New Zealand business clients. That was a huge amount of fun to work on (another great project with Zzarg Advertising)

Both sites where built using ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. Where would I be without them!

That wasn’t actually what kept us busiest though. No sooner had we finished coding, testing and uploading that it was a mad pack-down of the house (splitting stuff into five big piles – needed on voyage, air freight, sea freight, give to friends and turn into landfill), a mad round of goodbyes and then off at the crack of dawn to catch flights from Brisbane to Seattle (by way of LA)

It’s time to draw a line under a very interesting chapter in my life (though I won’t be losing touch with some very good friends, and I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on some interesting projects as they evolve without my beady eye on them – for the best some people might say!)

When I’ve finished gathering my breath I’ll post a little more about what we’ll be doing here in Redmond WA but for the moment I’m just enjoying the fact that it’s snowing here, broadband and cellphone data is really cheap (compared to Aus) and good PCs are not a drama to find and buy. We celebrated our first thanksgiving with some good friends both old and new which was a real treat. I’m still not sure I like driving on this side of the road (and the sooner I can swap my mini-van for a Jeep Liberty the happier I’ll be… got my first driving test in over 20 years to face first though!).

Only downside to the move so far has been that the dog got rather sick on the flight. Luckily he seems to be on the mend now. Aerowood Animal Hospital are awesome at 1am on a rainy night.

Someone once described Seattle as being like England but without the good beer. Right now I’d argue that point. The weather is the same but the people are much more welcoming, service isn’t a lost art and as for the beer…

Oh, and I found a new blogging tool. It's called BlogMailr and it's got a very goo heritage. Don’t know if it’s going to replace Windows Live Writer as my tool of choice but I’m going to give it a try