A picture of Snow near Lincoln Gate

Winter hit Ireland like a bomb again this year. I’m definitely in the camp of those who think it’s pretty for about six hours, but then would really rather get back to the things that need to be done. It’s probably principally a result of living in the city centre, where pure white carpets become projectiles and/or brown muddy slush far too quickly.

One immediate problem with snow around Christmas is that it can make deliveries extremely unreliable. That can be a major hindrance when you, like me, prefer to do all your holiday shopping in one intense burst on Amazon and related sites.

It’s a complete mystery as to how these things get resolved. Amazon.us continues to be the most reliable, getting stuff to Ireland faster than Amazon.co.uk, admittedly for a higher cost. I was relying on two other services for a new PC which I have ordered. The first was a fairly small parcel service, and the second was the far-better-known company.

In both cases, the services decided that they couldn’t reach the delivery site to hand over the boxes, which was infuriating because the second company had just dropped a box off in the worst of the blizzard without a complaint. I ended up driving out the the depot in Sandyford. That proved fruitful, they were very helpful in getting my parcel, but it was somewhat treacherous escaping deep snow in the Industrial Estate.

Far more annoying is the issue with the second service. It always annoys me when customer support people use an avalanche of jargon-filled text to try and put off complaints. I don’t feel satisfied by that sort of stock response, and it doesn’t solve my problem. It’s also an irritation to discover that they not only haven’t got any idea when your parcel is ready, but that they have also closed the depot to customer pick-ups.

“Not only have we failed to fulfill our service to you, but you can’t take matters into your own hands to resolve it. Double inconvenience.”

Here’s hoping that the tracking system will update over the next few days to say that it’s done, but with New Year’s Day in the middle, it doesn’t seem likely.

I usually like Christmas. A lot. This year a series of mildly irritating circumstances in the immediate runup to the holiday reminded me of all the stuff I really despise about Christmas.

I’m lucky that although I am technically a part of the retail phenomenon that is the problem, neither I nor anyone else in the shop feel the need to force Christmas down anyone’s throat. In general? I blame retailers for everything I hate about Christmas. Starting as soon as they possibly can, sometimes before Halloween, we are whipped into a frenzy of spending and preparing and stressing to create the perfect day, which nearly always falls flat because we are all of us human. After months of preparation, Christmas leaves people exhausted. This is perfectly timed, as people are thrust into contact with their extended families with whom they may not get along even on the best of days.

We are told to shop for everyone, regardless of whether they want anything or can use the token you’ve procured for them. We either abstain from shopping for ourselves, or we buy stuff anyway and feel guilty. And then we still binge shop the day after Christmas. There are even sales for facilitating this.

Meanwhile, as Dublin is hit with weather we’re not equipped to handle, some people are left stranded and unable to travel wherever they’d planned on spending their Christmas. It throws things into sharp perspective, when you’re out shopping at the last minute for someone you may not get to see after all. You remember that what you (and they) really want is just to be home for Christmas.

I am lucky in that I usually get what I want for Christmas, which is to be home. After the frenzy dies down and everyone is enjoying the results of their frantic shopping, I can enjoy being home. It’s a lot easier these days than it used to be, but I don’t appreciate it any less.

I hope you’re enjoying your Christmas, wherever you are, whoever you’re with, and whatever you’re doing.

Civ turned up after that and its ebbed and flowed over time but I’ve logged thirteen hour days empire building on every version, every expansion pack since Civ 1.

The first one that worried me myself was Buffy, where you could for a time shuffle across channels – Sky, BBC, Channel 4 – such that you watched four or five hours on a Friday (I think) in a row. The false memories of conversations with these people who did not exist was when I decided it was time to ease up.

Harry Potter briefly – mostly the worrying thing there was the fanfic. Buffy/Harry crossover fanfic. Reams of it.

Mass Effect is getting there for me now, but I have discovered the counter! Revert back to earlier fandoms; short out those neurons wherever they are. Thus for the past fortnight I have been rereading the Potter series, going to the movie and digging out the old Drop in the Ocean crossover fanfics. Which oddly, lead me back to Spoils of Vanity, which I must say was actually rather good in its good bits – and has inspired me to get back to writing again on Book Two (own original stuff).

Which is a good result so I’m going to chalk up this fight fandom with fandom strategem as a success. Goodnight, internet.

I’ve paid the Twilight series little mind, given that everything I’ve heard about it has been crap, but I, xaosseed, heartily approve the above-linked. Sic ‘em, Buffy, stake him right through his weepy heart…

Effectively all her time since college has evaporated – she has no work experience despite being 6-10 years in (not sure exactly). Rumour has it she’s working these days in a field that requires no higher education and given that my appealing physical attributes are nil, this for me would be bad.

Thus, the ongoing embargo of truly interesting stuff goes on. Apologies to all. Invite me over some time and I’ll tell you a story but I’m not putting anything online.

Ye gods. I’ve got piles of notes, I know where the plots going, I can even visualise out the next scenes, know what should happen its all just waiting to be written. But motivation to do so …

Right! Right, thats its. Coincidentally on this night of pitiful wailing, it is also one calendar month before I come home for Christmas. Thus – I shall have an mark two draft ready for then. I will do corrections on the airplane. No more Fallout, no more Fall from Heaven – no loading Halo or Oblivion or Bioshock! No ordering more books (not more than the half dozen on their way already) – no nothing!

Fun time is over, time to write.

Wait, this was fun time?

Quiet you.

I’m a big Bruce Sterling fan, down to the point that I *know* there’s a conspiracy to supress his work – have you tried to buy a Sterling novel recently? They’re not to be had anywhere – despite the fact that theres about a half dozen of us that I know of that look – sure theres Amazon, but fuck sake, why isn’t it on shelves?

Anyway – my point being, Bruce’s S.’s big trope is that your/our reality is being messed with on a near continuous basis and almost no vector is as heavily engineered to be a harpoon through your brain into your wallet than the girl-band super-group of which the Spicegirls were a paramount example and the Pussycat Dolls are the latest incarnation of easy-on-the-eye earth-stalking devourers. As you can see, the memetic attack vector has evolved.

If you listen to the lyrics its the same ultra-consumer stuff that’s been cropping up ever since the A&R men started pushing it back a few years ago (I think it was My Humps that they first put numbers to the ‘value to the brand of a top X song mention’) when they realised that getting the flavur of the moment to say ‘my baby buys me Grey Goose’ was worth $20,000 in sales. The big underlying thing to the PCD stuff is motorshow stuff – cars, speed, high-tempo, high amp stuff – subtle things like ‘zoom, zoom, zoom’…

So, really, is it any wonder that people aren’t so up with the ‘your world is about to get smaller’ stuff thats the probable case? The Committee for the Apocalypse has apparently revised things recently …

… actually, piecing things together, the kind of ‘money no object’ sorts that were ever going to be in that party set in the first place are probably going to shrug off fuel at quadruple the price. Ach, what the hell, it’ll be grand.

Bastards, thieving fucking swine with their moat cleaning and trouser presses. I’ve taken a 20% pay cut through currency differentials since I started down here.

Heigh ho.

I have never been too good at sticking to only one track, and at one point I was effectively working one full-time job, one part-time and trying to write my thesis. That was too much and I hit December 23^rd little more than a cinder.

Thankfully, the part-time work is now largely finished, and I managed to write some fun software that did a job really well. I get a nice warm glow when code works, especially when it runs a hell of a lot faster than expected.

I wrote the code in Python, which I have to say is a rather excellent language. If there’s anyone out there considering learning to program for doing functional stuff quickly, I think the new version of Python would be a great choice. You can deploy web application stuff to the Google App Engine as well to get it online.

My new job is as a postdoc on a very large research project. It’s a totally different experience for me, since my PhD was individually funded. I am really interested to see what support I can give the students that arrive to the project, and what the advantages are of such a big network.

As we get into 2009, I think I just want to get the writing finished. I have a feeling that it is taking a really heavy toll on me now and that letting it drag on would be a catastrophe. On the plus side, I will be a new man when it’s done.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, President-Elect Obama has posted his first video. It’s more opposition talk, which I suppose is fair enough since he’s not yet been sworn in.

On the other hand, I find it kind of hard to see what he’s pointing to here. The notion of something that will relieve the squeeze is nice, but it’s really not clear to me what he’s talking about in concrete terms. He seems to point to a new New deal by putting people in work in road-building (middle class?) and greening up 5 million people.

I really don’t expect him to outline something in detail in a 4 minute youtube piece, but this really feels vacuous.