Amongst other things, I'm the webmaster for the Australian Carnivorous Plant Society.

I just received this email from seekdotnet, the company we have been using to host our website for the last few years:

Dear Mr/Mrs    [NewLine] Your Account is deleted due to non-activating more than 1 month. [NewLine] Thank You.

(Yes, that is an exact copy of the text, including the questionable grammar and the [NewLine] string).

And they aren't kidding - browsing to the website www.acps.org.au results in a 404 File not found error. Eeeek!

No warnings, no nothing. Just deleted like that after being in continuous good financial standing. If you want to keep your customers, you don't just delete all their info if there's suddenly a problem with payments. You might at least attempt to let them know there's a problem so they can fix it before it goes too far.

I've contacted the company, and I'm hoping commonsense will prevail. We'll see.

Paul videoed Sevenfold's recent performance and created a really nice DVD for all the band members.

Jane doesn't have a DVD player however, so I used these instructions to burn her an audio CD.

Additional comments 2nd Jan 2008

Things didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped. My DVD burner came bundled with ULEAD Burn.Now. I wanted to add CD-TEXT track info which Burn.Now supports. However after I burned the CD and tested it, I discovered that some of the tracks had been messed up. The track times were correct, but the content had been messed up. Jumping to track 4 played the content that was actually half-way through track 2. Very weird.

I read that WinAmp supports CD-TEXT, but after trying it out, discovered that it only supports reading CD-TEXT, not writing it.

As a last resort, I grabbed iTunes, and it did the job, though it could only add CD-TEXT for each individual track - I didn't see a way to add info about the album as a whole.

This morning I sat the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development exam, and am pleased to report I passed with a score of 824. Yippee :-)

There were a few questions that were a bit tricky. One in particular had me wondering if it had an error in it, the possible answers didn't seem to make sense to me.

Not to worry, I'm now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications.

Unlike some previous exams I've taken, I didn't study for this one at all. It just goes to show what Rob says, if you know you're stuff then you can pass these exams just relying on your experience.

Next stop is 70–547 and I'll have have my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD): Web Developer.

It was announced last week that the Flexible Learning Centre (the unit I work in at the University of South Australia) is being restructured. (The official memo says "a formal Managing Change process has been initiated").

Being the last University entity left at the old Underdale campus, it was expected that we would get moved to somewhere else eventually (which will probably be part of this process).

Our unit has been through these kinds of things a number of times before, but this is the first time that it has directly affected the team I've been involved with - Online Services.

Online Services is a relatively small team of developers, designers and A/V professionals and we've been responsible for creating the Uni's online teaching and learning platform - "UniSAnet". Whereas many other institutions just went out and bought an off the shelf LMS like Blackboard or WebCT (now the same company), we made the decision early on that we wanted to integrate with other existing systems (student information, courses, Active Directory etc) and the only practical way to do that was to build our own.

The great thing about our team (and I think we've achieved a bit of a reputation for this) is that we can create solutions relatively quickly, in an "agile" kind of way (lots of iterations). What might otherwise take months, we can often achieve in days or weeks.

Our team is regularly looking at new technologies and techniques. For example we're trying to incorporate things like MVP, NHibernate, TDD, CI to help improve both our productivity and the quality of the solutions we produce. Most of our team attend the monthly SQL User Group meetings in the city, and more recently our Tuesday lunchtimes have been spent watching dnrTV screencasts together. There's a genuine interest (encouraged by our managers) in professional development which I really appreciate.

The University also has an IT unit - ISTS, which looks after the systems and network infrastructure of the organisation, as well as manage things like staff and student portals, the corporate web server and various other "big systems". I've collaborated with the ISTS on a number of projects in the past and I think it's fair to characterise their development process as following the waterfall model. ISTS do look after critical systems, so quite reasonably they tend to be pretty conservative in their approach to implementing new things and making changes.

Don't get me wrong - I know lots of people in ISTS, and I'm even going to their Christmas party today (they always do a really good job so I'm looking forward to that!), so I'm not intending to be negative about them. It's just that we don't work on the same kinds of things and we don't work in the same kind of way. If we were to be made part of ISTS (which could be an interpretation of this item from an email sent out today- "UniSAnet and appropriate support functions relocating to ISTS") I don't think is likely that we could continue to provide the services in both the time and fashion that we do now.

So the timing isn't the best that this whole process is happening over the Christmas break. I'm trying not to be cynical, and that just maybe once this has all finished we will end up something better than what we have now, but only time will tell.

So for me:

• Best case - Online Services continues, most likely in the CBD, and we can continue to develop compelling resources and tools for enabling and enhancing great learning and teaching.
• Worst case - Time to tidy up my resume.
• Middle case - ?

I got a nice Christmas present this morning - my "thanks for testing Visual Studio 2008" cube arrived. It doesn't do much but it is pretty.