16th December

The pier to Pub has closed. We are fully subscribed and now all that remains is the production of the final lists. I just have to move a few people into the superfish category and then barcodes can be allocated and people assigned to waves.

This year we had 2200 of the 4000 entries as Internet entries. This is really with little or no advertising. I am fairly pleased that there is this level of support for entering via the internet, espessially after so much effort went in to getting the system working.

18th December

The skinny Where have I been, well the software ate my life and I got one at the same time. I have been taking lots of Photos. See PhotoAWeek

The Surf club has once again consumed a lot of time. Built the start of a mail interface which when complete will allow for bulk mailing of competitors. At the moment it provides an interesting new way to search.

Built a listing of the top N places eg 1..4 and the prizes that they got.

Integrated many of the features that i had started to rework at the beginning of the year with the rest of the system.

In the mean time work has continued to be interesting. We have grown and grown and consequently grown databases, code bases and in numerous other ways.

As I said I have been doing lots of photography and getting ready to produce a calendar for the new year. Exciting.

I am well down the design track for building a defect management system. Something that I have been wanting to build for the longest time. It may become my summer project.

Well with all this excitement I had better get to it.

25th December

Christmas and all its excesses is here. And how I love them, turkey with stuffing, ham, Plum Pudding, the list of delights rolls on and on. I enjoyed with my friend John and his family the one great secular western tradition.

This year was mild and thus perfect for winter roasts, mulled wine and other treats for snow. Usually it is gloriously hot and even eating a roast seems a massive comitment let alone sweating over the fires to make it.

the fashion lately is to decry the "comercialization" of Christmas but personally I think this is nonsense. Christams was made by the Victorians into a fantastical middle class feast fusing ordinary British glumness with eldritch German pesant tradition courtesy of Albert.

Throw in a bit of Dutch traditional ritual and you have the modern and wonderful pastich that is Chistmas. That it is to most extents an entirely secular holiday shouldn't take away any of its maneifest delights. Stupid crackers, twinkling lights, presents of socks and hankies form distant relatives.

All of this should be seen as the last great western holiday. The one event that many or most western nations have in their anual calendar.

Its Christmas, its been the presents are unwrapped, the toys played with, the champage drunk the sofa snored apon and now we have that long season of cricket to guide us through the doddering holidays.

I have my sister coming to visit. Should be fun.

And in the season of fond bonhomie, of peace and goodwill, George the yonger is thinking of a war. The diminutive prime minister is sniffing at his arse waiting to join in like some disgusting peakinese trying to slaver over the bloody bone that the big dog gets.

But these thoughts are thoughts for a day when all of the food that gets eaten is only twice the food that should get eaten and only half the food there was.

27th December

LOTR The two towers.
All the reviewrs that I have read said that this movie begins with no exposition to bring the viewer up to date. They eventually sort of get to the idea that this movie is the in between movie. Bullshit this is not realy a movie in any more sense than the book the two towers was a book that stood on its own. The Lord of the Rings is a single book presented in three volumes. Peter Jackson is presenting a single movie in 3 volumes.

Of course because all movie critics have to have the one script to read from no one seems to have grasped this simple point. What did I think of the movie? I loved it, when finally it ends with Frodo and Sam with Smegol about to begin the climb to Shelobs lair I just wanted the movie to go on. Three hours had flashed by.

I think that this is a movie where CGI has come of age. It isn't really possible to tell that its computer generated except where you realize that you have never seent a walking tree (an Ent) or Gollum or any of the other characters.

To think that we have to wait a whole year for the 3rd part is just gauling. I for one will be signing up to watch the full 9 hours of the single film.

30th December

Well this week I have seen the best of things and the worst of things. Or in this case the best that a New Zealand director can do LOTR and the worst the latest bond flick Die Another Day.

Crap Scripts, poor CGI woeful plot appalling directing and they were the good points. Bond flits around the world with consummate ease but most unforgivably survives where he could not have and doesn't where he should.

We all know the Bond persona is indestructible but can anyone wind and parra surf off the edge of a falling glacier when the giant "laser" is trying to cut him up. It strains belief, and even for the film makers, at the vital moment they had to cut away while bond hanging on an ice cliff by the of course slipping grapple is wrestling the parachute out of the rocket sled he has escaped from the baddies in and is fashioning a surf board out of the part that comes off the rocket sled, but then how would I know the director realized that this was impossible crap and hid that bit from view and instead we have bond trying to look cool while surfing down programmers waves and flexing his muscle to avoid the programmers moguls. Ice lumps in this case.

Of course if it were real and there really was someone surfing off the end of a sea glacier that had calved but then like I said it strain credulity.

At least Hallie Berry was cute even if the producers and writers forgot halfway thought and turned her from the sexy butch bitch to yet anothe simpering Bond girl.

Bond is such a tart and we love him for it but we want him thawing frost not mooning over cold hotties. Don't get it, well you just have to watch this execrable film.

On a different note my sister who I haven't seen for a couple of year came for a few days. She tried to die another of my t-shirts and we ate a lot but didn't say much.

The last few weeks at work I was impossible to motivate and have been on this holiday. Normally I can crank out code like a 1934 Riechmark printing machine printing 1 billion pefineng [sic] notes, except mine is good (not exactly a billion lines of code maybe a few 100 a day) but lately I have been demotivated and writing crap. For someone who loves writing hard taunt code this was hard to handle, but then I blame along year, the state of the world and the cunning plots of the evil Christmas rubber chicken.

Over the break I have chased down the list of things to do on pGal and despite the desire to holi, holi, holiday have kicked a few things off the todo list. The big ugly graphics are gone to be replace by smaller more discrete but still ugly graphics, but mercies no frames. Dear Bruce loved the frames that IBM bequeathed us and in the port, more later or elsewhere, we went from 4 to 2, frames that is, Texas Justice, black death (whoops Beverly Hillbillies theme song).

A menu frame and a page frame. But frames are horrid for a wide variety of reasons. Mostly to do with harboring an area of the screen and never letting it go. Well I wrote a few tag libraries and I get to see a frameset packing up its worldly goods and walking out of town next on a sway back donkey and a small scabby Monkey. But thats frames for you.

I have just a few things to do and pGal will be great and not just good.

Out great and good have released a set of adds that basically say. Australia is a nice place. {true} And Australians are nice people {not true} but if you see anything suspect then ring it in. Now apart from stating the bleeding obvious these adds are really flawed.

Aussies friendly, yes we will lock you in the desert if you arrive on a boat but if you arrive on a plane you are OK. Nice, yes we are nice to a fault, racist as a matter of pride and mad to win sport so we can be big men in a small world, or have I got that around the wrong way.

Suspicious!! like what. Oh hello I just saw a man buy four tons of chicken manure and he must really not want anyone to find his C4 because he hid it at the bottom of the pile and doused the chicken shit with fuel oil.

Give me a break. I wouldn't recognize Suspicious activity if it asked me to hold the red wire and the side cutters. This is all about our craven vox popped prime minister appearing to do something so that god forbid anything should happen he can say well look we had a program

Who do these spastics really think they are aiming at. Terror or the backlash when the Aussie government gets payback for licking the Americans arse just a little too much.

All the way with LBJ, ...

We are in trobul ya, wid G Wlya.