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I've had a great few days recently. I'll try to catch up on blogging everything, back to my christmas party, but a few highlights.

* I had a lovely time visiting my parents and extended family. Christmas dinner may have become more of a habit, but it is nice, and I feel content afterward. And we had a very nice visit everywhere else, talking to mum about maths, and grandfather about science fiction, and dad about cards.

* I went to Livredor's party at the Pembury tavern (Thanks timeplease!) which was very fun: a lot of people I know and it was nice to see (pseudomonas, mole, thursday), a lot of people I'd met once or twice but was very glad to run into again (hairyears, deborah, livredor) and a lot of people I'd met at most once between them, but was glad to see (hold on, I remember real names but I won't post those on livejournal just in case, I'll check aliases on livredor's post)

* I had some time relaxing here, making innovations in house-stuff-organisation, and so on.

* I went to the Relativity new year party. I'd considered party hopping, but felt much more like relaxing somewhere comfortable for eight hours... It was very fun, packed to the gills with nice and cuddly people and insane conversations. Unfortunately, most of it was untranscribable. Probably the best comment was Mark, 00:04, "So far, so good."

I learnt the words to Auld Lang Syne (well, the first verse and chorus) which makes new year much more satisfying. Last year someone brought print outs, but I never actually knew the words. It is a very rousing song. Especially when you're in a topologically circular house and can form a ring all the way round it.

Naath, Sphyg, and Clare all had fabulous outfits. I failed to kiss a statistically meaningful sample of people with respect to beard, but noticed a very disturbing trend amongst people's opinions, the correlation seems almost 100% women in favour, men against, and metrosexuals making some kind of comment-moderation joke. There will not be any livejournal poll, I don't think I want that much more fuss.

I got home about 4. I also have comments on Dinnerladies, I Am Legend, The Prestige, and the cineworld centre's gigantic snowman, but they can be in a separate post.

I am Legend

( spoilers )

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Outside cineworld, there is a giant 3d snowman made from lights, as if giant christmas lights were molded into that shape. It looks amazingly 3d. But it's not clear why, since it really *is* 3d, as is everything else in the area.

I can only guess that the tessellation of lights shows the contours of the surface in a way very typical of computer-rendered or other 2d perspective drawings, and is instinctively compared to those, but totally wins because it's genuinely completely accurate.

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1. Leap from bed, gloriously refreshed from an early night and contented sleep, and go to work.
2. Run the code from the correct branch, rather than the "that's funny, the code seems to have regressed rather a lot" previous trunk.
3. Feel productive.
4. Spod about it on livejournal.
5. Am gainfully employed.
6. Profit!

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From timeplease and Charlie Stross,

"Finally, can some rich, beer-drinking Belgian entrepreneur please buy Liefmans Breweries, which were unfortunately declared bankrupt last Friday? It's a cash flow glitch, due to bugs in a new bottling line and scheduled duty payments; the brewery should be long-term viable as a business."

I can't vouch for the details, but I assume they're correct. Since the Carlton introduced their fruit beers they've become some of my favourites. What I don't know is the Liefmans Kreik and Framboisen are particularly good, or if there are other equally good fruit beers that are just as good, I just don't happen to have tried them. I think I have one bottle at home someone gave me, if it can't recover, I'll have to have a little wake.

(no subject)

From http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1471, suggests that this should be a new form of “-punk”. Instead of Steampunk or Cyberpunk, we have some new kind of punk for 1970’s futurist big iron mainframe-style computer tech, with tape drives, blinky-light interfaces, and toggle-switch inputs.

The thing is, I'm just imagining future etymologists looking at the adjective punk[1], and saying "Hold on, so first there were all these people in green spiky hair and paperclip-piercings, and then all of a sudden they started wearing dodgy white jumpsuits and making retrotech? WTF?"

[1] What specific linguistic phenomenon do I mean? The "-holic" one, I guess.

(no subject)

Bujold's Barrayar and Komarr

( Background spoilers )

Vinge's out-of-phase perversion

( Background spoilers )

X3

I saw X-men 3 again. It's still well done (though still silly in all the ways people said it was before).

( Spoilers )