Mass Update

Of course I've left this all a little late, but oh well. It was the silly season after all.

We spent Christmas over at PreZ's aunt's house, as per usual. Dashiell made off with the best haul, of course. For the third year running we ended up with one of those bathproduct baskets, even though the ones from last year (we got 2 from them) haven't even been touched, and the one from the year before that is only partially used. The fact that we don't have a bath in the apartment doesn't make using those items any easier either.

I got one sweater with a reindeer on it. That had tinsel and ornaments in its antlers. Somebody shoot me now. PreZ got a plain black long-sleeved tshirt. Why couldn't I be that lucky? At least Dash got a $50 gift card for Gymboree, so I can live vicariously through him by buying him cute stuff.

( Yeah, *thanks* Santa... (pic) )

What is the deal with festive holiday themed clothing anyway? Most of it, especially the Christmas stuff is hideous, it's not like a fun Halloween costume or anything, it's just a gaudy piece of clothing you wear once at most (and probably only to please whatever relative decided to torture you with it). This particular sweater will most certainly go unworn, and I doubt I could even unload it on Ebay. Oh, and she got it for me in XL. I'm kind of tall at 5'8", but I'm hardly wide enough to warrant XL.

Other than that it was good. We had gotten Alex a game for his PSP which he'd received in November for his birthday. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I ended up running down the battery on his PSP playing it that evening. Heh, oops. Not that he cared, he was playing with one of the other gazillion toys he'd received. I will say that the PSP has amazing graphics for something so small, but console games really don't do it for me. I like a little more depth to my gameplay than just left-right-up-down and A and B button type games.

Fast forward a week to New Year's Eve.

We went down to New Brunswick to meet up with darkvervain, vgnwtch, anachronaut, nadya_lev, jezzylin and littleweirdgrrl, as well as a bunch of darkvervain and vgnwtch's friends for Ethiopian food at Makeda's, which was outstanding as usual.

Dessert and the countdown to the New Year was back at darkvervain and vgnwtch's place. Having a large group of geeks of various stripes is always fun. Talk about computers, books, movies, photography, Firefly, Dr. Who, Laurell K. Hamilton... comparing cameras and learning new tips and tricks, playing around with the gothling, all whilst eating yummy foodstuffs and beverages.

We had a lot of fun, and it was nice to be able to catch up with littleweirdgrrl who was visiting from California. Sadly I didn't get a chance to talk to jezzylin who was seated elsewhere at the dinner table and had to leave right after dinner. Hopefully this weekend will change that :)

Die Spammer Die!

"An Midwest internet service provider was awarded an $11.2 billionjudgment against a Florida man for sending millions of unsolicitede-mails advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services."

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,69966-0.html

Sadly though it doesn't make much difference, but I like the fact that they nailed someone over it just the same.

"John Mozena, co-founder and vice president of CAUCE, said Kramer's lawsuit will likely not solve the spamming problem.

"There have been regulatory actions and even criminal actionsagainst spammers, but it has not made much of a dent in the totalvolume of spam we see," he said. "Spam is still roughly two-thirds ofall e-mail on the internet.""

Filthy Lies

http://filthylies.net/d/20030806.html