Re non-attendance at conferences: I know the feeling. I attended quite a few unrelated conferences this year but have had similar experience to yours over many years trying to attend a VFP conference. I almost made it to one of the latter Whilfests and was in Phoenix hours before one of the SWFoxes but could not alter arrangements to stay for it. Stuff keeps cropping up. e.g. this year I was presenting at another conference in Texas during SWFox. But one day I'll actually get to meet some of these disembodied online IT personas. So far I've met Tom Whiteley in San Fran a year or so ago and YAG most recently a couple of years ago during a conference in Seattle, but that's about it.

Anyway, "Happy New Year." I see you're now a SQL Server MVP: congrats. And since we haven't spoken for so long ;-) I'm sure you won't mind if I recall our previous discussions about the commoditization of IT: as we had both predicted, it's progressing apace and MS products *are* doing well. For example, people may like to check out http://www.xero.com to see where accounting is going. Xero is a NET/SQL Server offering worth thousands of dollars annually to small business/independent contractors from saved accounting time. It has a remarkably slick interface with lots of clever bits proving that NET has come of age. Equally, people might like to google "trixbox" or "trellis help desk" for open source LAMP versions of products that used to cost an arm and a leg. To paraphrase LOTR: the world has changed. So much that used to be difficult and worth a lot of $ has become mundane, while things that used to be impossible now are merely difficult and expensive. What fun.

Did you have a fireworks extravaganza this year, btw?