I have come to the conclusion that eBay is fickle. I just sold a couple of items on there… One item I got about three times what I expected, and the other I got about half. Actually the second item was a solar cell. This was a 10W version, and I sold a 5W version for about 30% more a few weeks back. Still, it is good to get these out of the house. I have all sorts of old bits and pieces from old consulting jobs – things that I will never need and that have been written off totallty.

I have been reading up on the X-Box and found a fairly good FAQ on many of the things that people need to know about getting the most out of their X-Box. I am looking forward to getting mine, and I might even get a game to play on it… After all, I have heard a rumour that you can actually play games on them… I will have to see if that is actually true.

Overnight I got back the code that I needed in order to save a structure to file on the HDD in VB.NET. The load and save routines are below. The one thing I needed to do was convert my existing ‘Collections’ into ‘ArrayLists’. Fairly simple.

fs = File.OpenRead(fil)
Dim bf As New BinaryFormatter
a = CType(bf.Deserialize(fs), AStructure)

fs = File.Open(fil, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write)
Dim bf As New BinaryFormatter
bf.Serialize(fs, a)