I’ve been a little quiet on my blog lately. That is due to my grand plan for 2009 which was born as my New Year’s resolution. The original plan went like this:

In average, I need to visit a new country I have never visited before, every month of 2009.

That means 12 trips to a new destination for the entire year. I soon realized this was too ambitious, expensive and time consuming. I needed to adjust the plan to something more realistic and this is what I came up with:

In average, I need to visit a new country that I may have visited before, every month of 2009.

So, still 12 different destinations but it is now ok for me to visit countries I’ve seen before. So far it is going quite well. Here is my itinerary for 2009 as it looks right now.

• January: Germany
• February: England and Moldova*
• March: USA
• April: Spain, Gibraltar* and Portugal*
• May: Scotland*
• June: Holland*
• July: Greece* and Albania*
• September: Turkey*
• December: Egypt*

* = have never visited before

These trips have been a mix of business and pleasure. Whenever I go on business trips, I always try to find time to explore the place I visit. Lately I’ve fallen for the idea of visiting the countries along the old silky way including Azerbaijan, Kirgizstan, Georgia, Armenia and a few more. I hope to find the time to spend some time there in the fall. Also, I’ve never been in Asia or Oceania so that’s also very high on my wish list.

Often times when travelling, I don't have access to a PC so I don't read or write many blog posts. Instead I tweet from my mobile phone just to keep a little up to date with the news in tech world.

I’ve been a bit inactive for the last few months. Here’s an update.

New laptop

My old laptop was 2½ years old so I thought it was about time to upgrade to a newer machine. I’ve been happy with Dell, so I got a new XPS M1530 laptop. Here is what I customized it with:

• 4GB memory
• 64GB solid state HDD
• HDMI out
• Blue-ray drive
• Wireless N (really fast)

It results in this Windows Experience Index.

BlogEngine.NET

It’s been awhile since the team and I have given any information about the next version of BlogEngine.NET. Truth be told, we haven’t had much time to work on it since the last release back in August. Many bugs have been fixed and more will be during the next weeks. The roadmap has been conservatively updated. We might change it to add more things to it.

Since I got my new laptop I’ve updated BlogEngine.NET to run in both IIS 6 + 7 out-of-the-box. The solution has also been updated to Visual Studio 2008. One of the major things that I will focus on in BlogEngine.NEXT is refactoring and cleaning of the code. We are also working with the Windows Live Writer team to implement support for the newest version that is currently in beta.

Another thing I really want to add is life streaming. The ability to have Facebook updates, Twitter tweets etc. to be listed alongside blog posts in a chronological order. This will bridge the gap between blogging and microblogging in a nice way I think. I’ll soon have something to show here on this blog.

SemanticEngine.NET

Since I published the bits on CodePlex a few months ago, I haven’t had time to do a follow up. I still haven’t time. That’s why I asked for people to help out, but so far no one have volunteered. I’ll probably do some polishing and make an official release around Christmas. Still, if you have the time to help out please drop me a note.

Blogging

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had the time to blog – or the energy. Time is only one part of blogging. The other part is having something interesting to write about. Normally I get ideas from code that I experiment with or play with at home or at work. Lately, I’ve been so swamped at work that I haven’t had the time to play around with code as I normally do. That is changing now since we have hired some new developers to balance the work load. 

I’ve just upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 (about bloody time!) so I’ll have a lot of experimenting to do and will of course blog about some of that.