has anybody else noticed the new gerrod.com banner? How cute is that little guy?!

I think my squirrel obsession has gone too far though. My parents have just returned from a round the world trip and the first highlight they thought I’d be interested in hearing about was… a friendly squirrel they saw in Hyde Park!

Glad you made it home safely folks!

Here’s some miscellaneous updates:

• You’ve probably noticed this one already, but kristy’s stories now appear in a purply-pinky colour. (Scroll down if you hadn’t noticed yet). This is to help you, the reader, more easily distinguish who wrote the story that you’re currently enjoying. Notice how this story is in black? This is a gerrod story.
• Continuing on the theme of colour – you can now post comments in your favourite colour – provided your favourite colour is listed in the drop-down box below the comment field. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how it’s done.
• Little Zach has learned how to jump with both feet, and can now say “ball”, “car”, “Zach”, “two”, and his favourite, “more”.
• The site header has changed, and in theory will continue to change on a regular basis. The idea is to use it as a different way to show off some of our recent photos. This one is of one of the most photographed bridges in the south east corner of Central Park. (If the header doesn’t look any different to you, try pressing Ctrl+F5.)

Now it’s late, so I’m going to bed. Zzzzzzz….

I’ve spent many hours today providing some updates to my site, including a new Comments feature for each article. Please note that the comments are generally unmoderated, so if you’re posting, try to keep in with the “G” rated theme of the site .

Blog is now running off a database, using OLE through ADO.NET. Notice any difference? I think things load a little bit faster.

The abstraction of ADO in .NET is pretty bad, if you ask me. To be fair, ADO.NET is well thought out, and it’s all very logical and easy to use. However, there’s no easy way to say, “I know I was using ODBC, but now I want to use OLE” – because there’s no factory methods to farm out objects (eg. Connection, Command, Transaction, etc) of the right type. So, I wrote a framework to do this. If anyone wants to use it, let me know – especially if you work for Microsoft and you want to offer me a job.

(Don’t get it? Never mind! It’s a post for geeks like me =])

You’ve probably worked it out by now, but just in case you haven’t – the gerrod.com blog is online. I will try to update as often as possible so please check for updates (if you’re interested, of course!). As I’ve only just finished getting the site up, I will update the news for the last few months in dribs and drabs. For those of you techo-types out there, you can also subscribe via an RSS feed.

As always, please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for improvement, content, or whatever!