Hello faithful readers! The new Mrs. Merida and I are back from Portugal. The return flight yesterday was rediculously long - 7 hours flying time and about 14 hours total travelling time. Portugal was a blast, very friendly and picturesque.

We got to see lots of European fans in for the European Cup. No doubt they were surprised to see two Americans travelling over for their tournament. Some commented about how unpopular soccer is supposed to be in the States but I refrained from reminding them that we beat Portugal 3-2 at the last World Cup.

We also spent about a week on the Beaches in the Algarve region and I am now a more appropriately hispanic hue.

Now, its off to Boston for a friend's wedding. I will re-join the real world next week.

Sandy posted his vague memories of my hastily organized bachelor party. I remember drinking more than I planned, but isn't that always the case? Liberal consumption of libations is kind of expected when 3 of us from our Miami/Key West spring break trip are together. Thankfully its rare nowadays...

If you were there, feel free to post what you might remember but don't use this a creative writing assignment...

The framework and content management system we develop and use at work has been nominally Open Source for over a year and a half. Over the last month, we've made substantial performance and feature improvements to it and are preparing to make an official 1.0 release very soon. We've set up a blog, initially for our internal use, but its open to the public at syntaxblog.forumone.com