Something that seemed quite unlikely only a few months ago is now true: the primaries in North Carolina will be quite important.

The race for the Democratic nominee is still not concluded, and after Pennsylvania the largest remaining state will be the Tarheel State. Mr. Obama has agreed to a debate in North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has not committed to one yet.

For all North Carolian readers: today is the first day you can apply for an absentee ballot, and you have until April 11 to register, change your party affiliation or your address. More details on WakeGOV.com.

This week it's been busy at work as we have a release coming up. I'm learning some new technical stuff, mainly around Ruby, and I did some Javascript work. To my surprise that wasn't too bad and I even enjoyed it -- Javascript used to be my least favorite language but tools like prototype and script.aculo.us make it a lot nicer than what it used to be a few years ago.

Today's been an easy day. I've been organizing some paperwork and I'm preparing to file taxes.

This Sunday we switched to daylight saving time, so as I'm writing this it's 7.10 am and still dark outside.

In the evening it's staying light longer which is nice, especially for running. In the Netherlands the clock hasn't changed yet so the time difference is 5 hours instead of the usual 6, for a few weeks.

Three weeks ago Drupal 6 was officially released. There are lots of improvements in the new version such as better anonymous commenting, but my main reason for upgrading is to make sure I'll always have the best security fixes in place.

Stuff that I used to have a plug-in for, such as 'Pretty signatures' and the very useful 'Update status module' are now part of the standard distribution.

However, some major modules that I use do not have a 6.0 version yet. Most critically, CiviCRM, CCK and the Views module are still in development. These are modules I use extensively, so I'll defer upgrading until versions of those modules for Drupal 6.0 become available.