Anyone out there in NZ, perhaps in Wellington? I''ve been doing procedural perl/PHP for so long that I''d appreciate some assistance with grokking Ruby :-) and the Rails framework. If you''re local to Wellington I''d be more than happy to pin you down over a liquid refreshment of some sort, as it were ... :-) I''ve just sort-of promised a friend to build a webapp that''ll suck in XML Word documents, transform the "interesting" bits into XHTML, and allow the users to add some extra markup ... so I need to understand REXML, file-system interaction and "select/create" drop-downs ... *cough* and the "prototype" AJAX library looks cool too :-) -jim