Holiday Recap

So... time for a few snaps that showcase my festive season thus far, and before the crazy New Year's Eve parties!



This is... me meeting my Australian namesake. Yes, it's a picture of the muppets... and Simon & Simon. Look closer and you'll see I meant the real muppets - great food and conversation at Picadilly's TGI Friday's. We think we maybe related, but distantly, courtesy of some shared family ties to Yorkshire.



The lovely Bronwen - it's the Office Christmas lunch - we had a great lunch and then finished it off in a nearby drinker... and great fun it was too. Bronwen got plenty drunk, and had a plane to Australia to catch the next day. Had she packed? What do you think...?!



Next up was the "proper" departmental Christmas do. And it was fantastic. It was held at a swanky club in London called Tantra, owned by the Feneo group. It was very plush. We were lucky to have a tab behind the bar for most of the night on beer and wine. If you strayed you got stung - £8 for a shot of vodka!



Kirsty. I love you. You're hilarious.



Drinks at lunchtime? Christmas at work is a pleasant experience...!



Then it was back to the folks to enjoy Christmas. It was white on Tuesday, which was great! Dad went into hospital again, which is sad, and hard on the poor bugger. Hospitals suck anytime of year. Here's to his speedy recovery!



This horse toy makes me laugh every single time I look at it. I have no idea why, probably something to do with his googly eyes. Can I say 'googly' these days? Is it copyright?



Sometimes I like to try and be a bit "arty" with the ol' digicam. It's your decision whether I pass or fail...



Party Haze after one too many glasses of Glühwein! For those of you that have never tried it, it's a type of mulled wine from Germany. Nothing that makes me feel more Christamssy (and merry) than a good dose of mulled wine!



Then it's back to the Girlfriend's for another Christams dinner, this time in honour of Alexandria & myself. Alex is the Girlfriend's brother's girlfriend. It was a lovely evening.



A few of the above... (yes, yes I was being arty again)



And time for bed...



Just a final note... Girlfriend got me a wonderful gift this year... a proper print of my favourite painting, Red, Yellow, Blue (above), by Wassily Kandinsky. Awesome.

Hope eveyone had a wonderful festive season, and look out for an update after the mad New Year's - I'm Djing, so if you're coming down, then come say hey and I'll throw a tune on for you!

So... did you like your presents?

I love eBay.

Not minutes after the relatives have pissed off... the crap they gave you is up on eBay.

Check this lovely gift set out...

and this charming offering.

I guess you find out how much people really know you, because when someone buys you that one thing you never realised you always wanted... well you just think they're awesome. I hope someone thought of you this year!

And if the thought was nice, but the present sucked... eBay is your friend!!!

Happy Christmas

This is the most terrifying Christmas picture, ever.

Get drunk and have a wicked day peoples!!!

And if you don't celebrate Christmas, get drunk anyway - the day ends in a 'y' after all...

World Aids Day

Saw this post on Some Of My Mental Disorders, and wow, what an impact. Shockingly effective.

Hey pussy give me back my mouth lizard

So, really, this blogging lark, what's it all about. I love it, but at the same time I cannot find enough time to post all my thoughts online. It's true that the stories and the rants get the most interest, and maybe that's what I should post, interesting debates and such like. But wow, how much *time* does it take to get it all out! I need a brain dump. That's what I need.

Man it's cold. Was thinking today that a way of remotely controlling my heating and electricity via the internt or proximity of a key device or something might save shit loads of energy and ensure that I had tea or coffee waiting when I got home. Or a chilled pint if my stuff knew I'd had a shit/fantastic day.

Maybe it could order me pizza.

I'm heating up Monday's pizza right now. Deciding how to spend the next few hours. Might do a mix, that'd be cool. Yes I think I'll do that.

What else? Thanks for the comments on iPods, Pat. I so know what you're talking about. Poor Apple worshippers - you really don't know what you are doing. We need to watch out for evil companies. That said I am liking google more, making my homepage an online aggregator for RSS was fantastic, and adding headlines to Gmail was great. when are they going to implement that in IE? Come on MS, let's have IE 7. Firefox is toss, it really is - the memory leaks in it are hilarious. Run it tabbed and it'll fail to dump out the memeory when it's done. How silly, 140Mb of memory for 3 web pages? Feck off with that. My friends are now running it in non-tab mode. Save for mouse gestures and some of the neater plugins it's gonna lose out to IE. Hurrah! And I hate Firefox because it is used by *I love linux, everything else is shit* techies. They piss me off. Linux is hard to use, set up and maintain. That's why people get paid a lot of money to be sysadmins. Hell Windows is a bit toss sometimes but I can use it quicker than linux. And I hate Vi. Standards people - let's invent some and stick to them!

On to things I like. Numark CD players & Stanton decks, and my new Numark DXM09 mixer - BEAUTIFUL. LOVE THEM. Well designed, sensible, useful, good looking functional, useable technology.

Where's my Sony Ericsson phone? That's right, I'm stamping on it.

Right, time to eat the pizza. Someone please work out a better way for me to cook and lead my busy life more effectively!

Woohooo, I am a traffic cone///////////

It's Not About Bart Simpson's Dog

Why I Like Christmas

Startling

This photograph is a stunning, awesome shot of the Buncefield oil depot that went up at the weekend.



Pretty intense stuff.

Synchronicity

Too much time on their hands... But we love them for it.

Turn the sound up. Sit back and be amazed at what you can do if you have spare boxes of fairy lights and a lot of time on your hands.

This really is the Lights Fantastic!

Brilliant

I dislike hype. So do these guys.

55 hours they waited in line to get a brand new Xbox360. They took it outside, showed it to all the eager people desperate to buy one, and then smashed it to bits with a sledgehammer right in front of them.

SmashMyXBox.com

Go on Timmy, cry your bloody eyes out. No Xbox on Christmas for you... HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Not Rubbish

This is fantastic. Anyone want to get one shipped over?

Oooooh

Shiny!

I hate iPod. Everyone who knows me knows that. I hate the litigious Apple, and their style over performance, style over customer service, style over reliability, style over *everything* attitude. I hate so many things about iPod, iTunes, QuickTime, etc. But I won't go on and on, that's been done already. In fact, I do like these guys and what they do, so go support them.

AAARGH... The battery life. The screen. The SHIT SHIT interface - it's slow, it crashes, it's full of bugs. The fact that the USB doesn;t charge but draws power from the player itself - the fact that they come with no accessories, and the accessories put together cost more than the unit - and they used to be free!

Thing is though, what is going to beat the iPod? Maybe it's said shiny thing. Maybe it's the new iRiver U10. Maybe nothing. But I hope someone does soon because I seeth with my dislike for iPods. And what's worse is the people who love them, because they are blinded by the prettiness and don't realise what they are buying into... DRM is dangerous... Apple are evil and their services will tie you into them forever.

Just consider that anything you buy through iTunes you don't own. If you buy another device you can't use Apple stuff on it. If your computer crashes or iTunes decides that you're not licenced beacuse their software is shit and crashes you lose your music. You're just renting it. From Apple, who don't care about you, at all. They don't care if your device breaks. They don't care about anything but profits. I could go on...

Anyway, rant over.

Oh, and for those that don't know... I own an iPod. That's why I am justified in hating it.