Well, not yet but in about 2 hours we'll be popping the champy and hugging strangers so I doubt I will be posting (especially since my GPRS won't work anymore!) Hope everyone's dreams come true... Have a great one, my legions of readers. And if you can take a minute or two to donate to those who are less fortunate than you and I it would be great. Thanks.

Ok, somebody tell me why Uwe Boll is obsessed with turning video games into movies. If he was any good I wouldn't mind so much but the TRAILER for House of the Dead put me to sleep so... Anyway, this guy has his plate full for the next 2 years with: Far Cry, Hunter: The Reckoning, Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark on his production schedule. This guy is either insane or a business genius.

I got myself a nifty little iRiver IHP-120 for Christmas. It was a present to myself; I agreed that I really deserved it. It's basically an iPod for geeks: it plays Ogg Vorbis, has upgradable firmware, it's detected as a standard USB drive, records audio (built-in mic, aux in or op-ti-cal in) and has an FM tuner to boot. It's just a fraction bigger than an iPod, a bit uglier, a bit more difficult to use and in a silver/black casing... You know, for geeks. Getting this thing was all part of my plan to streamline my whole media setup. I basically want to carry my music (and audio books) everywhere with me. I want it to be a practical and neat solution. So technically what I'd need would be a cradle at work, one at home, one in the car and some sort of man-bag with additional emergency cables and adaptors. Only problem is: there are no cradles for the IHPs, not for your desk, not for the car, nada. The general consensus seems to be that having cables dangling all over the place is perfectly alright but I just won't agree was that. Dangly cables are evil. So, like an elite few, I've decided to build myself a couple of cradles for the car and home (the office will have to wait). First one will be for the car as I will hopefully find a "universal" MP3 player cradle that I'll be able to tweak so the cables are neat. I will also need to find a way of getting a stereo or amp that supports some secondary input. I'll be doing this on the cheap so it might end in tears. I'll keep all you people (I think my readership has grown to 2 today, yay) updated.

Zurich insurance gives us this great little viral piece with women and men competing for who is the best parker. Worth a minute or two of your time. (Note: this seems to be a mirror of the original viral so I don't think the stats are actually getting stored, it's still quite awesome though.)

This is great: I've just setup this blog and posts are already trickling in! I've been asked some amazing things like "be funnier" and "check your spelling" which really means a lot but isn't as important to me as this little app. Konfabulator is just the most useful pointless thing I've ever seen. Write little Javascript apps that look lovely and float on your desktop. Things like an Alexoid Desktop Picture Viewer (or ADPV) comes to mind, you know, for the fans. Since I'm utterly crap at scripting I'll just wait for someone to do it. Hey, I'm the idea man not the worker drone...

A quick chat with Ant (shifty-eyed genius) has led me to try Gaim, the open-source multi-network messenger app. He is completely and utterly addicted to this thing, it's plug-ins and little features that make it so much better than most commercial apps (and all commercial IM apps) and I can start to see why... I won't go into a big review of the thing because this blog is purely here to get me to write again (and reviews will be reserved for the ever delayed Itchybrain.org) but I can say that in the same way I'd prefer to watch, say, an episode of The Sopranos instead of most big Hollywood movies, I'd rather play around with stuff like Gaim, or Flickr's cool RSS feeds than most big games released -- well, apart for Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and Burnout 3 but you get the message... Or maybe not, as I'm not explaining myself very well, maybe some other time. Back to work.

More Flickr goodness? Mais oui! I am writing this with predictive text on my phone and posting it straight to my blog. My thumb hurts but it's all worth it.

Well, if I had thought about this any longer I might have come up with something smarter but the best I could come up with is Happpy New 2005 year to all.