That was the year that was ...

Well, this year has been a good one for me. Good friends, good sport, good games, an excellent summer holiday in Amsterdam, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica on the telly, walks in the wood, a bit of snow, a birthday party to remember, and my family around me.

All round – ACEBEST!

Best wishes to everybody out there for the new year to come …

Happy new year from the Dogwood!

I went for a mooch around my town this morning and noticed that all of my conifers were now sporting some rather lovely fairy lights. I met Tortimer who showed me a big countdown thingy clock outside the post office and gave me a party popper to pop at the appropriate moment. Yay!

I sold my turnips for 156 bells – not as good as last week, but a reasonable profit never the less. A good orange harvest and a bit of fishing netted another thirty thousand bells – not bad for a mornings work. Just 130,000 left on this mortgage now …

Two hours 54 minutes to go!

 

New Year's Resolutions

From Found Magazine today comes a rather forlorn set of resolutions. I wonder what the last one says?

Link courtesy of Creepy Lesbo

Monster Mash

I think that this is advertising satellite TV. How many monsters can you spot?

Snow Day

Yay! A dusting of snow outside, and the world is transformed into a magical place, somewhere between Narnia and Moominland Midwinter. I haven’t had a skiing dream for a while, but I think I might tonight – it’s that mix of freedom and exhilaration. Bright blue skies, crisp air and dazzling snow. Yum.

I am well and truly into holiday mode now and feeling very relaxed. Nowhere to go, nothing in particular to do and no need to rush. Boxing day night was fun – we were invited to Kat, Rachel and Luisa’s house for food, fun and frolics with party pieces, silly presents and more food on top of the previous day’s excess. Yum again.

Yesterday was a mix of playing Animal Crossing (waves at Sue who came to visit and watch Casualty at the same time) and Gun – an ultra violent third person western adventure which is like Grand Theft Auto remade by Sam Peckinpah – Grand Theft Horse-o perhaps? Yum cubed.

Today will be more of the same …. ahhhh.

A Merry Little Christmas

An early start for me.

Not the children, who didn't stir until well after eight o'clock, but I was awake with that strange mix of excitement and anticipation that epitomises Christmas morning for me. I took Barney for his customary walk in the half light of dawn and then made a cup of tea and went back upstairs for a few minutes peace before the rest of the family woke up.

Christmas stockings first, knick knacks, gew gaws and gadgets with a chocolate orange tucked away at the bottom, and then downstairs for more presents. Everybody, I think, had just what they wanted - items from their wish lists to Santa and surprises too. Alicia had her box set of Doctor Who dvds, books and a sonic screwdriver, Jamie had the guitar that he had been hankering for and some new games and a Green Day cd, Jan had her new phone (pink, of course) and a mix of scarves, chocolates and a little gold box with some frankincense and myrrh. I had some new books, a new xbox game, a little crate of chocolate liqueurs, some marvel superhero pyjamas and a plush cthulhu. Oh, and I mustn't forget the fencing frog sculpture from my mum.

Some breakfast, and a chance to settle down to a morning of game playing, dvd watching and gadget experimenting with. Jan set to preparing the Christmas lunch and I contributed my usual bread sauce before being shooed out of the kitchen with instructions to go and play some more games.

We sat down to a magnificent spread. Turkey, pheasant, potatoes (mashed and roasted), parsnips, carrots, sprouts, bread sauce, gravy and cranberry sauce filled our plates. Bucks Fizz and Chateau Neuf du Pape to drink and crackers to pull. By crikey and by criminy we were stuffed, and far to full to even contemplate Christmas pudding.

The table was cleared, the worktops wiped and the dishwasher set to run and I retired for a post prandial snooze to allow my digestive system time to set to work. Another walk in the woods, an alka seltzer and nice cup of tea, and then it was time for Doctor Who - a fantastic hour of television with killer Santas, lethal Christmas trees, cruel aliens, a new Doctor and even a swash buckling bit of sword play to round things off. Oooh, and let's not forget the tantalising teasers for the next series - Sarah Jane Smith, K9 and the return of the Cybermen - yaybo!

Now, after setting up Jamie's megadrive joypad game, I'm sitting here with a glass of fine beer and a triple sec chocolate to savour and a moment to reflect on a wonderful day. Thank you to Jan, Alicia and Jamie for being my nearest and dearest. I hope that all of your many and varied days have been as satisfying. Cheers!

Yule Card

yulecard
Originally uploaded by neilh.

The war on christmas ...

From Niles’s Blog comes this link to an impassioned broadside against american fundamentalist christians, politicians and pundits who like to imagine that they are some sort of persecuted minority. Yeah, right …

Peace on earth ...

From Astronomy Picture of the Day

Fat, Lazy, Greedy and Proud of it!

Greed:	Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Deck those halls ...

xmas 007
Originally uploaded by neilh.

Photopia

Photopia is a remarkable piece of interactive fiction. Download version 2.01 for windows and give it a go ... I'll be interested to hear anybody's thoughts after you've played it.

In your face, Nook!

After a rotten day on the motorway yesterday, with a four hour holdup on the M1, things picked up today. I switched on my DS to find that Nook was finally offering a decent price on turnips - 414 bells each, and I had 70 to sell which came to, errm, quite a lot. Combined with three loads of oranges and apples at 500 bells each and a bit of fishing, I have scraped together enough to pay off my second mortgage with a single payment of 100,000! My new house is going to have an orange roof too.

Woo hoo!

You'd better watch out ...

... Santa Claus is armed

Animal Crossing Update

This game just gets better and better. I was beach combing yesterday morning when I found a message in a bottle washed up on the shore from deKay. I went to visit his town last night for a chat and to steal some more apples - the apples and oranges that I planted at the weekend are all growing but they haven't started producing fruit yet. We compared turnip prices - we'd both paid in the region of 100 bells to Sow Joan on Sunday, but the Stalk Market looks weak at the moment with that thieving pikey Tom Nook offering a measly 72 bells. Git. My red turnips are still growing, so I must remember to water them tomorrow before I go to work.

I was awake early this morning, so I went fishing to earn a bit of money, but then I ended up blowing 1400 bells on an ornamental sword for my house. I just couldn't resist and I think that I still owe 100,000 bells on my current mortgage. Aaargh. I just hope that I've put it in the right place to give me some good feng shui vibes to improve my luck.

All in all - BEST!!!one!!

Yule

Bitter Yule darkest night
Hardy souls gather by fire
The light will return

Herring flavoured yogurt

I haven't just been playing Animal Crossing this week and anyone who says I have is lying. Oh no.

Last night we went out to the Spotlight comedy club at the Chesterfield College arts centre for an evening of fun and frolics. The club was host by Anthony J Brown, who also runs the Caper Club night in Sheffield. I am starting to warm to his style, despite him reminding me of a cross between Jeff Green and Jarvis Cocker. I think he struggled a bit with an initially spread out and slightly subdued crowd - a complete contrast the rowdy mob at the Takapuna - but things warmed up soon enough. The first half saw two so-so standups - John Cooper and Sam Avery - who had one or two good gags and nice ideas between them, but neither of them really had the skill to banter effectively. John Cooper talked to me about my job for a while, which is, to be brutally honest, hardly comedy goldmine material.

A short break for fizzy, overpriced beer and a caption competition and the second half kicked off with a dire standup whose name I have thankfully forgotten. He didn't struggle for too long, and then the headlining Richard Herring took the stage. He really is in a league of his own, as far as standup goes. Even the material I had heard before had me laughing as he improvised new twists to it. The highlight of the show was the yoghurt rant, where he starts with a chance remark from a checkout girl in his local branch of Sainsbury about the number of yogurt's in his basket and spins into a baroque, paranoid, aspergers syndrome fantasy. Oh, and he also did some cock jokes ...

Surreal, but not as weird as the drive by potatoing when we were getting into our car.

Tales from Dogwood

Well, I did say I might be sometime ... I can exclusively report that Animal Crossing : Wild World on the Nintendo DS is SUPERACESEXBEST with CHERRIESONNATOP! I had a momentary worry before I started playing that I would have seen it all before, but boy, was I ever wrong. From the moment I started walking round my village, with the snow crunching under my feet, meeting my new neighbours and finding out exactly how deep in debt I was to that shyster Tom Nook, I was hooked. I wake up in the morning wondering whether I'll have recieved a letter from Pecan the Squirrel yet, or who else has moved into the town overnight.

I've already been fishing, started my fossil collection, visited another town on the internet, sent and recieved letters, built the base for a snowman, paid off my first mortgage, spent enough money in Nook's shop so that he's expanded it to a Nook'n'Go, designed a shirt and a constellation, planted flowers and trees, made money from beachcombing for shells. I've noticed that the moon in the sky matches the phase of the real moon, the light changes through the day with the real time, the music and sound have a superb surround sound effect and the animation is silky smooth, particularly with the scrolling effect as you walk around.

In short, I've been busy ... :-)

If anyone out there would like to visit Satsuma in Dogwood my friend code is : 064 485 635 776

La Dolce Vita

Birmingham was not too bad today. A clear run on the roads in the morning and mostly clear on the way back too. Work was ok too, with an upgrade to our sales order software and some niggles with the firewall on the web server sorted out. We had lunch bought for us (well, jacket potatoes and cheese toasties) whilst we had a reassuring talk from our FD about the forthcoming takeover. It's pretty much as I thought - nothing to worry about for at least six months (well, apart form the usual stress of year end reporting in April), and after that there is a good chance that our accounts department will take on the functions of some of the smaller companies in the group, so it should at least be interesting (as in interesting times).

Ah well, home again now - the fencing episode of 'Combat Club' to watch with Jamie whilst I pootle for a bit, and could that be a parcel from Cananda I spy on the side?

I'm off to Animal Crossing - I may be some time ... :-)

The only way is up ...

I woke up early this morning from a bizarre and vivid dream in which I felt a palpable sense of disappointment as my lovely apricot tart that I had ordered in a cafe had been knocked on the floor by careless Mike Tucker from the Archers. My head was muzzy with the beginnings of a cold and I felt like a zombie trudging round with my normal morning routine in the dark.

Jamie has been off school today with a nasty cough, and I had something of an epiphany with the game Mercenaries. I'd got about three quarters of the way through the game and realised that it had all got a bit repetative and samey, and there was no story or plotline to speak of other than arresting various North Korean baddies and blowing things up. I decided to delete the save game and allow Jamie to load on a completed game save from an xbox magazine cover disk so he could concentrate on finding hidden items and having a bit of fun with the cheat codes. It was the first time that I had been into the save game section of the xbox dashboard, and I was mildly shocked at the amount of stuff on there stretching right back to Buffy the Vampire slayer that I conceded defeat on when I was stuck on some awful spinny-platformy-jumpy bit and had died $hilariouslylargemadeupnumber of times.

It strikes me that buying a console without a hard disk, or some other form of large non volatile memory storage, is a bit pointless. Why on earth do microsoft offer the Core version of the xbox 360 without a hard disk for what works out as a trivial saving when you factor in the cost and inconvenience of memory cards?

I felt a bit better as the day progressed, and brightened up even more when I received a surprise hamper from work with lots of goodies in, just before I got the email telling us that we would all be getting one. Hurrah and huzzah!

Time for a walk, and then try to pacify Alicia who seems to be determined to get her knickers in a twist about a form she's got to fill in for a work placement at school next year.

Parry Mince Pie

After some minor trouble with getting Alicia organised for her fortnightly visit to her Mother, including a last minute search for her phone which actually turned out to have been in her bag all along, we set off for the sword whores' christmas party and fencing fun day, and most excellent fun it was too. I arrived just in time for the random weapon tourney which was surreal in some of the combinations that came up - Luisa was stuck with just a buckler on both of her bouts and I fell victim to the SPOON of DOOM! on my fight with Burgi ... congratulations to Dave for winning the tourney overall.

After that, we got stuck into the food and the Prof's sword film trivia quiz with questions and film clips ranging from the obscure to the ridiculous, with some hilariously bad films in amongst the classics (Barbarian Revenge, anyone?). Kat, Rick and Charles won this one with a combination of knowledge and some inspired guess work. I was relieved to find that I wasn't the only person in the world ever to have seen 'Hawk the Slayer' though ... :-)

Finally, we finished the day with some more bulldog with random weapons, all in melees and 2 vs 2 combats. I discovered that I quite like using cloak and dagger as a weapon combination, and that rapier and dagger is probably my off hand weapon of choice. SUPERACEBEST fun and I think that we all worked off some of the calories that we had stuffed into our faces earlier on.

Thanks to everybody for pitching in with food, fellowship and fun, and special thanks to Burgi and the Prof for a year of excellent fencing tuition. Salute!

Tired

This week has really taken it out of me. I stumble out of bed at six in the morning, walk through the pitch blackness of the woods with the dog, slog through a day of work, out in the woods again and it seems that I haven't forgotten what blue skies and sunshine are like. For the last two nights I have fallen asleep on the sofa and then woken up not knowing where I am. I feel like I am marking time until the turning of the year and the return of the light.

We've just had an email from our Chief Exec - we are in talks with another company with a view to being acquired. I'm not entirely sure what it means for us - there's no immediate threat to jobs or anything, and from my point of view there will be a shed load of work to do on integration for company systems. I should get a good price for my shares as well - twice what they were last year (but half what they were at the top of the dot com bubble). Akkk, I don't know - it all feels like more upheaval to my preferred quiet life of noodling away with systems and carving myself a little niche of indispensibility.

I just want to run away to a little town with blue skies and friendly faces in Animal Crossing and stay there until spring time ...

Jerry Springer - The Opera redux

You might recall a small kerfuffle about Jerry Springer - The Opera caused by a particular group of ignorant bigots.

According to The Independent:

Major retail chains have bowed to pressure from a tiny fringe Christian group by withdrawing copies of a DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera from stores around the UK.

Woolworths and Sainsbury have both taken the unprecedented step of removing the film from shelves because of “customer” concerns about the content of the musical, released three weeks ago. Sainsbury has admitted it received just 10 complaints.

You might like to contact Woolworths and Sainsburys and tell them exactly what you think of their commercial policies ...

Bricking It

Talking of creepy lesbo, can I just say how all round excellent bricking it is ... more please!

Stroke my bunny

This sounds just right for Creepy Lesbo - an interactive bunny stroking game ... :-)

Convoy

One of the benefits of the gloomy winter afternoons and the dark evenings, is the chance to actually get around to watching all of the dvds that I bought on impulse over the summer.

The Sunday matinee yesterday was Convoy, the archetypal trucking movie based on the novelty country & western song by CW McColl. The plot, such as it is, concerns the misadventures of a roguish trucker by the name of Rubber Duck, played by Kris Kristofferson at his twinkly blue eyed and bare chested best, who has a run in with a corrupt Sheriff and finds himself at the head of an impromptu and rapidly growing convoy of trucks making a break for the border. There are a couple of subplots with a feisty photographer played by Ali McGraw tagging along, and a black trucker being brutalised by racist cops, but the movie is really just an excuse for director Sam Peckinpah to film lots of big rigs in the Arizona and New Mexico badlands kicking up dust, smashing up cars, driving into, through and over anything else on the road and finally exploding in glorious slo-mo. It was a clear influence on one of my all time favourite video games, namely Interstate 76, and I will admit to a sneaking fondness for the original song, so this movie really went down a treat.

Ten-Four good buddy!

Cats n dogs

With thanks to Lisybabe for the link, Biddy, Frank and Barney now have their own Catster and Dogster accounts.

The JCB Song

From this week's b3ta.com newsletter comes this utterly charming little song that made me smile this morning.

Batman: Dead End

Go on - you know that your inner fanboy wants you to watch Batman: Dead End ... :-)

Anticipation Eschaton

I don't know why I spend so long thinking of titles for my blog posts. For some reason, I have to have the title in place before I start writing - perhaps I should write the post first and then fit a title to it? The above title is a track from the bizarro rave concept album 'Arbor Bona Arbor Mala' by the Shaman, and it fits mainly for the subtitle 'Be ready for the storm'.

Anyhoo, what a dark, dank and miserable day. Work has been relatively quiet, apart from testing a fix to a bug I reported ages ago, so I've been running through some data integrity checks prior to running the month end analysis reports. I had a nice compliment yesterday for a report I cobbled together in about ten minutes, compared to the one on Wednesday which was a darn sight more tricky and took half the day with nary a word of thanks. Harrumph.

Last night saw some serious Mario Kart action. I've finished the first set of 50CC grand prix races and started on the second set of missions. They're an interesting mix of different skill tests and boss fights - things like getting a certain number of power slide boosts in one lap, or knocking a boss character off a platform in a sumo stylee. It's a good way to learn the game, although my m@d l33t KRATZ SK1LLZ seemed to desert me when I went online and I didn't win a single match, although I came frustratingly close on a couple of games.

I think that I need to experiment with some different character and kart (sorry, that should be KRAT) combinations and find one that fits my driving style better than my usual choice of Luigi with the Standard LG. The more I play it, the more impressed I am - it's a fabulously deep and subtle racing game with some lovely touches and there really is nothing quite like racing real people from round the world whilst you are sat on your sofa watching "I'm a celebrity - I can't believe it's not butter".

Ahem. Three days plus posting time for Animal Crossings ... fret fret. Time for some chilli noodles with peanut butter and a nice cup of tea methinks.