Milk’s Site

Christmas for me started with my work’s xmas do which was held in the conference room at the recently built, vaguely post-modern looking, expensive-to-stay-in Apex Hotel near the Tay Road Bridge. Everything was free, including a champagne reception, three-course meal and a DJ. My colleagues and I were surprised; why the hell are they lavishing us with these treats when they treat us like shit at work? Then it dawned upon us that they probably hadn’t put much effort into the night, seeing as it was a Sunday (i.e., they got the room on the cheap), the “champagne” seemed to run out after 30 mins, and everyone agreed that the turkey was tasteless, the ‘block’ of potato was undercooked, the stuffing was more like a burger than stuffing, and the DJs taste in music was questionable.

The next Christmas do was at and ’s place. Loads of peeps turned up (I can’t be bothered listing them all :) which was cool, and we were served with a proper meal complete with turkey, stuffing, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, etc. Very delish; top marks to Stu and Teresa :)

I finally started feeling in the holiday mood on Christmas Eve – my last day of work until January the fourth. It snowed beautiful two-inch wide flakes for several hours in the afternoon and we hardly took any calls – everyone was happy and smiley, all good fun, that last day of school feeling again. Spent Christmas Eve night at my parents so we could do our traditional thing of dragging ourselves out of bed at 11am to open presents together. I received a nifty little Creative Zen Micro mp3 player which has since come in handy for my early morning trips to work. The only downside with it is that I have to try really, really hard to stop myself from subconsciously dancing when walking down the street or waiting for a bus.

Usually we have a thing with our mum’s family on the day itself, then a thing with my dads family on boxing day, but this year we made a break with tradition (shock horror) and visited my Dad’s sister on The Day, then went to my Dad’s brothers on the Sunday for a big do. My aunt and uncle currently reside in a farm in the middle of no-where that was converted into holiday housing for some American family a few years back which they currently rent. My cousin also lives there in an open plan converted barn that has stone floors, a massive roof, leather sofas, a pool table (a sort of family heirloom :) and one of the biggest open fires I’ve seen in years. Wow, what a pad. So simple, almost minimal, but so homely. Good times were had, drunken karaoke was sung, recordings of said karaoke were made on afore mentioned mp3 players and replayed at breakfast the next morning for all to cringe at.

This New Years party was at ’s flat with a load of Dundee friends which was great fun, especially as Rich’s flat is fairly small and almost 20 people turned up so it was a cosy affair. I got merry on Cherry Lambrini and Bucks Fizz (my new favourite alcopop tipples), had my hair straightened by and her lovely assistant Kashfa (a.k.a. puke girl – long story). Everyone piled outside for the bells, hugged and kissed, then piled back in again to party for a few more hours. Mental note; have a party at mine soon, they’re good fun.

That’s about it, don’t think I’ve missed anything important out, but it has taken me a month to finish this damn post. Later.

I’ve made a few changes to my portal and blog pages, plus my Audioscrobbler profile has updated and is now displaying a weekly top artist chart and weekly top track chart. Need to rip more music though, especially futurepop/ebm/industrial stuff. Plus I need to finish that Xmas/New Years post…

• Some ‘interesting’ buildings
• “Reno man taken to hospital after self-castration procedure”
• (19:04:02) <tribs> Check out these puppies!
• I’m so haujobb
• The Apple Product Cycle
• Angry Snowmen

Woo, a review of the Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Pre-release. Extremely informative and interesting article on the new hardware and OS, plus a brief history of the Amiga and its downfall. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of this, or rather, if anyone other than hardcore Amiga enthusiasts will buy the new system when it comes out. Anyway, it was good to see the ol’ Miggy logo at the top of /. again.

“State bill could cripple P2P – A bill introduced in California’s Legislature last week has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don’t stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs online. … it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don’t take ‘reasonable care’ in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies–or child pornography”. I’m very much against this, but I’m wondering if they’d ever consider something in a similar vein for gun companies when people use their products to do Bad Things.

Air Guitar, signed by Hendrix! Zeppelin!

Just to say I’ve moved web site hosts and have converted my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. Things I’m planning to do include changing the my blog and wiki themes to match my main site index style, finishing of (and starting) posts on Xmas and New Years, sorting my finances (ugh), and getting broadband! Plus trying to run a dns and possibly a jabber server (for fun of course).

this is a drill, this is a drill

“The once-famous Commodore computer brand could be resurrected after being bought by a US-based digital musicdistributor.” – Their list of commodore computers is interesting – it lists the “commodore Amiga 1000″ but goes no further. Nice one BBC. Link.

“In another demo, Garriques showed off a Motorola RFID tag that allows a consumer to continue to play a digital music or video file while moving between locations and devices. In the demo, a music video clip moved with him as he walked among an LCD TV, MP3 player, laptop computer and mobile phone. The tag is part of Motorola’s “Liquid Media” technology, and it is slated to be available later in 2005. ” – I’ve fantasises about this technology many a time, especially when I come home from work with my headphones on, bouncing along to a great track, and then had to turn it off half-way through the song (or alternativly, walk around the flat for the next 4 mins doing stuff with my headphones still on feeling a bit of an idiot although I get to hear the end). Why couldn’t I have an automatic and seamless transition of the music from my mp3 or minidisc player to my computer and stereo speakers? Well it looks like this will be possible in the not to distant future. Link.

On a related note, a company in america had been granted premission by the FCC to develop ultra low power, ultra wideband (UWB) active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Will be interesting to see what applocations these doohickies can fufull. Link.

As Joel of Gizmodo says, “That’s a badass sewing machine”. Link.

“A museum guard told Julia’s parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.” – Now that’s a bit silly. Link.