I have just returned from a 7 day sailing trip with Ben, Phil and Ants, all Bangalow lads. Ben owns a 36 foot Simpson Catamaran, “Shea”, and decided to take it in the annual Dent to Dunk Island boat race.

Well - my old mate Keith has finally got himself hitched! I have known Keith for 22 years and he has just married for the first time.

Kristen and I travelled up to Port Douglas for the last week of April to celebrate this monumental occasion with Keith and Sara.

Ray and Joan (Kristens folks) looked after the boys while we took some well deserved timeout to visit the far North of Queensland. Unfortunatly Kristen injured her knee just before we left leaving me to explore the World Heritage Daintree National Park and the Great Barrier Reef whilst  she explored the local shops!

We have just spent 10 days over Christmas and New year visiting my brother Nigel and his family in their new home at Lancoona near Hillston in NSW. The kids had a great time playing with their cousins, swimming, fishing, motorbike riding and just having a great time in the country.

The temperature reached 48 degrees C so we drank lots of beer, made plenty of cocktails and basically we just relaxed and enjoyed ourselves.

I am really working on the gallery section at the moment and everything is a bit messy. SO bear with me!! I have started putting up 2000 and 2001 photos first but I havn't done the text descriptions, cropped the thumbnails where required or altered the templete so it looks a bit slicker.

Over the next week things should shape up more. Also I have another website to do for a client so thats really going to put the pressure on for a while....

Last week I changed the website CMS from Mambo to Joomla in line with the general feelings of the open source community over theMambo / Joomla split and subsequent change of direction. The change was fairly event free. I used the method of just dumping the Joomla files over the Mambo files (NOTE --> BACKUP everything first!) then doing the database upgrade. I am also

Originaly 20thousandcows but changed in late 2006 to billycart. This is because I am starting to host a lot of product landing pages and accepting secure payments - we thought we needed something a bit more mainstream!

I've just done my first ecommerce website for an online mail marketing company. I have completed the core work for the site and it is actually running in test mode at the moment for the client whilst he gets his content sorted out.

There has been a huge amount of work researching ecommerce especially as my brief contained requirements for special offers outside the envelope of the majority of standard setups. I must have looked at at least 100 cart programs, demo'd 60 and personally set up at least 8 on my own server for closer scrutiny.

I still have not thought of a trading name yet - so any suggestions most welcome!