Christmas 2004

Already it's only two days before my 23rd Birthday and six days before I return to work. Fifteen days before my college thesis presentation. Holidays go by far too quickly if you're me. Christmas is no exception. I'm sure it happens to the majority of us but having decided on a list of things to do, some being more important than others, it's unlikely there'll be many, if any, crossed out on my list. Part of the problem might be that I suffer from mild burnout due to long periods of frenzied work interspersed between moments when there seems to be nothing to do at the office. There are those in this world who'd love nothing more than not to have to do any work but I'm not one of them and instead my reaction is to wind up and grow increasingly frustrated. No such thing as nothing to do in my office. No such thing at all. There'll always be a pile of work I haven't been given yet, which I should have been given weeks ago, that I'll be given at the last minute. Therefore in the evenings and most weekends I honestly don't have the willpower to do anything. Same goes for holidays. Sadly.

Christmas isn't about gifts
This season I only bought one present, for my sister. I don't believe in a need to buy people gifts for the sake of it being Christmas and prefer to buy useful gifts where possible. My parents never want anything which is difficult for me as I often feel bad about how much they do for me and how little I seem to do in return. I don't have the sorts of friends one would buy presents for, which is a mixed blessing I suppose.

I'm easy because I never ask for anything. I always receive a cheque from my parents and to my surprise I'm still receiving money from my grandparents; more this Christmas than ever before. I received a £50 note from the office, which is step in the right direction for the £1100 or so they owe me still. Mum keeps up the tradition of buying Naomi and I two Terry's Chocolate Oranges. Naomi bought me a book.

My Thesis
I've done some work on my thesis and will probably try to finish most of that off before I start work on the 4th. Luckily my sister agreed to help me conduct a Roding grid survey of the land on which the proposed building is to be situated. She was remarkably patient with me considering she didn't have to do this when it should have been my colleagues. Lazy bastards. Just have to keep reminding myself that for all the work they're not doing, I'm earning more and more marks. For them to simply say "oh yes that's good Matthew" isn't doing themselves any justice. We're presenting for a planning application on the 13th and I'm hoping everything goes smoothly - it'll be a little embarrassing if I get a refusal though a conditional acceptance would be alright. I'm aiming for unconditional.

The movies
I've been to see The Phantom of the Opera and The Incredibles both of which being very different yet come as highly recommended & essential viewing.

Technology et al
Trillian Pro 3 has been released and is a nice upgrade, visually. There are, however, some major flaws with the software. MSN and ICQ transfers are still buggy and video calls aren't working, so I have to switch to the real MSN client for those. There are several other minor bugs or missing features, such as there being no option to disable notification alerts for individual users and no global option for the default size of toolbars. A lot of the changes to the software where a waste of time and sadly Cerulean Studios are running the risk of going down the path of the official AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! clients in terms of bulk. Trillian was not only about bringing the different mediums into one single client but also relieving the user of pointless bulk and on that count, they're slipping.

deviantART has been suffering technical difficulties lately with Notes and Comments being sucked into the vacuum of virtual space. Christmas is a terrible time of the year to have issues on websites of this scale. Still, with any luck they'll fix the issues and content will start to reappear once again...

I've been playing Lord of the Rings : The Battle for Middle Earth which is incredibly cool. Sadly I've just reached a stage that has me stuck in my tracks. No matter, I'll work it out someday. Armies of Exigo sits here on my desk waiting to be played which may happen soon if LotR continues giving me too much grief. I partook in the closed beta for Armies of Exigo and was greatly impressed with it's solid traditional RTS game play and beautiful graphics. I must admit these are games I've acquired online via torrents, although this means of sharing data is slowly being attacked by the MPAA. Thankfully it's impossible to collapse the technology without turning off the Internet and let's face it, that's never going to happen.

So...
I hope you're all enjoying the season, whatever it is you make of Christmas, and that you spare a thought for our friends in the East who are suffering at the hands of nature's awesome power.