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…

What does one do whilst waiting for said updates? Hack around on the desktop PC, of course. I now have a (pretty much pointless) installation of Horde on my domain, and a copy of PINE on pip, the SRCF’s linux box, appropriately set up to read my Google Apps email account via IMAP.

This will probably now solve all possible need-to-check-email scenarios; I fully intend to never be too far from my USB stick with Portable PuTTY, if I think I might not have access to a terminal of some description. Of course, in the majority of places, Firefox will do nicely, Thank You Very Much: the web interface is, for me, far superior to PINE (which doesn’t support things like starring messages, and deals awkwardly with labels, and the general “never delete a message” philosophy). But for those situations when bandwidth/memory/time are really short, PINE is a good thing!

Oh, and Napoleon Dynamite is, to be completely honest, not as fantastic a film as I’d been led to believe. The famous dance sequence is hilarious, but other than that, it’s pretty forgettable, and takes forever to get going (arguably, never getting beyond first gear, but then subtlety-of-plot is a valid artistic idea). Just not my kind of humour, I suppose.