I'm pleased to say that we finally have some really good progress on the house extension.

Paul (our builder) hurt his back just after the slab was poured, so he's only just been able to return to work. As you can see, we have had a bit of rain lately so it a bit on the muddy side now.

It's all looking really good though, and it is great to finally be able to walk around and get a sense of the space and size of all the rooms.

The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType.

I've blogged previously about how I enabled ClearType because it should improve productivity. I've left it on at home with the LCD monitors, but I reverted back to the standard fonts on the CRT monitors at work as it was just too fuzzy to work with.

Unless you're using ClearType on a suitable monitor, I wouldn't bother with these fonts. They don't look that great on my CRTs. I'll give them a try at home though.

Diarist - A nice PocketPC application for writing blog posts.

The built-in unzip in Windows XP is nice to have, but for some reason it runs extremely slowly if the zip has more than a few files in it. I'm trying out "TUGZip" as it also integrates with Windows Explorer and looks like it is a bit snappier in the performance stakes. It's also freeware.

The ISTS Unit here at UniSA have begun using MOM to monitor our Windows Servers. I'm interested in whether creating management packs for our ASP.NET applications would help with monitoring and getting early warning of potential problems.

Here is some light reading to get up to speed:

• Call MOM: Instrument and Monitor Your ASP.NET Apps Using WMI and MOM 2005 - MSDN Magazine, September 2005
• Monitor Your .NET Applications with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
• MOM 2005 Management Pack Development Guide