So what do I spend all my free tech time on? Well, it was this blog for a while, though most of my coding is elsewhere at the moment.

One of those projects is called "Thrius". That is the codename. I haven't decided what the final name will be yet, but I will let you know as soon as I can. I am not going to say much more at this point about what the product is other than what is on the Lexel Software website. From the website:

The most difficult thing in learning biblical Greek is learning how words in the language change their form to indicate their function, the inflectional system. For verbs especially, the possible forms of any particular verb is staggering, making recognizing these forms very difficult. Most students struggle significantly with this.

Thrius is the codename for a project that started in late 2006. We believe it will be of incredible benefit for students of biblical Greek. It encapsulates in an interactive program a personal tutor for noticing and recognizing the myriad signs that show up in Greek words as they inflect.

 It is a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) application, and my experiences in that technology thus far has been very positive. More on this project when more can be said. Currently we are in the alpha stage. My day job and general fatigue has slowed me down for the last few weeks, but I'm back on it.

Also, the design of the Lexel website is new. I must say, the old one was uber plain and boring. I have no one to blame but myself, unfortunately. The new one looks a little better, but if anyone has comments, I'd love to hear them.

There are geckos in my house. Not one of them has offered me cheap car insurance. Now I'm upset.

As promised several weeks ago, I now have a short review up on Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation book.

Two other books I've spent some time in but won't review are Return of the King by Tolkein and For One More Day by Mitch Albom. The former was fantastic. I think I like Two Towers better, but the whole trilogy was great. As for the latter, it took me about four chapters to get bored. Oh well. They're not all interesting.

Recently Expression Blend went into RC mode (Blend, if you don't already know, is MS's next WPF designer). Since I've been out of touch for the last few weeks, I am not sure how long it has been out.

The new Blend is now installed on my machine. First impression? It is considerably more responsive. Now last weekend I added an extra gig of ram to my machine (from 1 to 2 gigs), so that may have something to do with it, but I don't think so. I often used it when I had extra RAM left over, so I don't think the increase in RAM did it. But I could be wrong. But if I'm not, they have at least made some improvements in the performance. Bravo.

Sometimes you just get really busy. A task I'm on has taken up quite a bit of my time and has beaten down my spirits for the last few weeks. It's really mostly the latter. In every project I've seen there is good code, mediocre code, bad code, and really horrible code. I've spent the last few weeks in some of that really horrible code. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder what drugs they were on when they wrote it. It's the kind of code that makes you want to change careers. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder if Scott Guthrie would have heart attack if he ever saw it.

But it is mostly over now. My spirit is recovering, and I can get back to reading, blogging and side projects.

On that note, I updated my reading list. So I have gotten some reading done...