I’ve been blogging far less than I’d like in the last few months. Suffice to say that there really isn’t much spare time around my job for such things: (personal) email, feed-reading and facebook have all been relegated to fairly infrequent tasks. But I think I imagine far more mental effort in writing here than is actually required. Now I’m typing again, it all comes so easily. I’ve got a bunch of rough drafts of more interesting posts that I might, if I’m lucky, get around to expanding before I go back to work. Thanks are due to the vulpine scribe that (accidentally) reminded me why I should keep this going.

Merry Christmas to all, and I hope 2009 treats you well. Oh, and looky, new site theme! Additional static content may follow.

So yeah, um, busy Christmas. I’ve not blogged for a while because I’ve actually been fairly productive over the vacation, doing a whole bunch of academic and non-academic Things That Needed Doing. I still have a long academic “really need to do” list, and I’m back in Cam as of today, aiming to get ahead on it before lectures start up. I’ve become even more cynical about Christmas as a general-purpose holiday – but that’s another post that may never get written. I’ve made a lot of headway on my Part II research project, including finalising experimental details, creating all the necessary input files and a solid spreadsheet for analysing the output (combined with my killer sed script). I now just need two more subjects, and to fix times with them, and I’ll be away. *Celebrates*

I spent most of the pre-Christmas period doing the above, plus other various work-y tasks, and some job-hunting, ergo not finding time to blog. Christmas was spent at home with some rellies, and New Year again at home, with different rellies, and Georgie. The benefits of not going out to Totnes for New Year became swiftly apparent in a) user-experience of New Year’s Day, and b) examination of bank balance; though of course I missed seeing a bunch of people who I now, basically, don’t see any other time of year. Dad’s punch just about made up for it.

Just after New Year, I saw St Trinians’ with Georgie and Greg – whilst containing nothing to switch the brain on, it was a really well-spent 90 minutes. Perhaps that was *why* it was well-spent, in fact! Lots of gags and subtle send-ups: Firth gets wet in a fountain, and a dog is called Darcy; reproduction of the Entrapment laser-dodging scene; various musical references, etc.

I also did some shopping, for much-needed trousers, and got a handful of cheap CDs while I was there – Frank Zappa, Madness, Beautiful South, and some more Santana for my collection. I also got two Floyd albums (Division Bell and WYWH) around Christmastime, so my music collection has swelled enough to put me in a very good mood whenever I open Winamp . As ever, you can check what I’ve listened to recently at last.fm, a widget for which is somewhere on the right on my front page…