Aquarionics

Another family christmas comes and wanders off into the sunset. I’m heading back to London tomorrow.

My parents’ current policy of not buying a “big” present unless we chose one doesn’t fit with my desire to be suprised, and I have a horrible feeling that, once again, it’s going to end up being combined with my birthday present at the end of the month, and be something for my new flat. Last time this was a tumble dryer, and it was all so domestic I wanted to hide under the duvet until I was five again and got a puppet theatre for christmas.

I can see the puppet theatre from here, actually. I’m in my middle brother’s bedroom – since he’s moved to Thailand to teach English as a Foreign Language for a while, which is suitable since he pretty much speaks English as a foreign language… – which used to be my room until I moved out (for the final time, to go to live in Cambridge with WingedKami & Ccooke. I’m wondering if I can put the theatre in my new flat somewhere. Depends on the flat, I suppose.

My attempts to short-circuit my flat-hunting by arranging viewings this week for next week have themselves been curtailed by estate agents having the work ethic of a retired dead battery, and not working at all this week. Not a single one of the agents with flats I’m interested in has been open all week.

For christmas I got: Chocolate (gone), Jelly Beans (gone), other sweets (gone), Kendal Mint Cake (freaky. Don’t ask why), A USB Coffee Lukewarmity Maintainace Pad and associated Coffee Mug, Sonic & Mario’s at the Olympics for Wii, A Bathrobe and a Radio Duck Which You Turn On By Exorcisting Its Head Which Is Faintly Freaky.

Oh, and bath stuff.

And, of course, socks.

My dad has introduced me to the fantasy books of Steven Erikson, which are Fantasy books of the deep/complicated/multiplotlined type. I’ve attempted to introduce my mum to Animal Crossing (My mum has a DS, Nintendo’s Blue Ocean thing in action) and I managed to distract my (9/10 & 12 Year old) cousins with Wii Sports for almost ten minutes at a time…

Oh, and I redesigned Epistula’s view system, started the new statistics package, cleaned up the comment posting and did a metric fuckton of work on Piracy Inc., not least working out what motivates monkeys.

Popular Statistics state that I start too many journal entries with the word “So”.

Also, Google’s fairly new charts API suffers from lack of debugging information. The bit where the canvas area has to be less than 300,000 pixels keeps catching me out, and “Your client has issued a malformed or illegal request.” may be true, but is less than helpful…

(Existence of “Im” and “Ive” in the above linked page is related to the statistics system, not my abuse of the English punctuation system. Mostly).

Also, going back though the archives, this is historically the week I add features to the site. It disturbs me that I’m this predictable.