Off to South Africa!

Emilie and I are leaving for a three week trip to South Africa today and, of course, my notebook's hard-drive picks this day to die! All I can say is thank goodness for backups, source control and VPN!.. the poor thing is already booked in at the repair shop in Cape Town for tomorrow so hopefully it will make a full recovery before my MMUG presentation next week!

Aside from my talk at the MMUG and the three-day workshop I'm planning to use the time to finalize the roadmap for our newly open-sourced Ariaware RIA Platform. The first update, it appears, will be a Flash Communication Server service module for ARP, which we will be releasing shortly with aYo Binitie. You can catch a preview of it at aYo's talks on best-practices pattern-based RIA development with Flash and Flash Communication Server on Tuesday at IBM Bedfont Lakes.

Of course, it's not going to be all work and no play and from what I understand, we've got some great sightseeing planned for us including trips to wine farms, a bit of horse-riding and walking with elephants. I wonder if the elephants have Wi-Fi?