To the beautiful city of Oslo to attend the first SC 34 meeting of the year, and in particular to progress DSDL. SC34 suddenly has a lot of new P member countries ('participating member' countries) sending representatives, and I am interested to note the majority of their representatives are, as individuals, also Microsoft employees. However, thoughts of Office Open XML (OOXML) are far from my mind, and far from the agenda for this meeting, a point strongly made by our secretary who emphasised that OOXML was outside the bounds of what we were going to be discussing.

For the breakout sessions, in the (unusually busy) WG1 meeting it was a pleasure to have new member Mohamed Zergaoui in attendance, whose thoughtful and expert comments were extremely helpful in identifying and sorting out some of the gnarlier issues in DTLL, as it enters the home straight and its, somewhat delayed, FCD stage.

Unfortunately pressures of work (the same pressures which have held up my editing of DTLL) means I return to the UK tomorrow - happy, however in the knowledge that the DSDL technical work is progressing and gaining more traction. The interest from implementors and commentators in NVDL, for example, has been such that a number of esoteric (and some less esoteric) problems with the standard have come to light, necessitating production of a technical corrigendum.