So that was Christmas.

A week of non-stop alcoholic meals did a very good job of ridding me of the desire to blog. The usual complement of books, socks, and this year a rather funky-looking black microwave that strips me of my final plausible excuse for not cooking. I guess from now on I'll just have to not cook with no plausible excuse. More relatives than usual. My first Christmas outside Perth since 1983, thanks to the rest of my immediate family leaving that town this year. Queueing for The Two Towers, on the 26th (opening day here in Australia), which was way cool.

Right now, I'm down to one functioning computer: the Powerbook is in for service to fix a broken DVD drive, and on the morning of Boxing Day, my home Linux box managed to let all the blue smoke escape from its power supply. I had to salvage a power-supply from the Windows box in order to ensure I could continue to receive email and get on IRC (two things that are very difficult for me to live without).

Of course, I couldn't find a PC parts shop that was planning to be open before the New Year. This left me with my sole user-interface being an 80x25 black-and-white console.

It's quite amazing how little of the Interweb you miss when you're using Lynx. Most of the sites I visit are still perfectly readable, although I implore everyone to learn how to use alt tags properly. Grr. Remember boys and girls, alt="" is always better than no alt tag at all.

New Years Eve is going to be fun. There's two sets of fireworks over the harbour: one at 9pm and the big ones at midnight. Right now the plan is to see them from different locations. Getting a cab over the bridge at 10pm is going to be... interesting.