New year's resolutions.

1. Eat less
2. Excersise more
3. Read more books, listen to more music, watch more films, play more games
   
4. Avoid failing my uni course
5. Avoid insulting satanists' girlfriends
6. Get a PS2, thus ending any fanboyistic hatred of the machine I may still have
7. Spend less, earn more
8. Drink less at a time, but more often
   
9. Rent a house in Bradford with a group of friends
10. Leave my room on a daily basis
    

The true meaning of Christmas.

I've only been awake 3 hours, and already I'm proclaiming this to be the best christmas I've had in years, maybe ever. No, I didn't get a PSP/X360/GPx2/Whatever for christmas, in fact, as I've observed, that isn't even the meaning of christmas for me any more.
I'm 18, so this is my 18th Christmas, bad time for the traditional children's christmas values, because it's the age when absolutely everybody in the extended family decides you're no longer cute enough to qualify for presents, which is far enough because, lets face it, at about £20 a year for just under 20 years I've drained them all of about £400 each, not one penny they have seen back, and in some cases, I haven't actually spoken to them since the mid 90s. Even worse, I am, as you may have noticed, a male of the species, which means that my friends are always too broke/slovenly/apathetic/satanic* to even consider giving out presents. As a recent PvP comic points out, if christmas was left to the men it would die a very quick death.
So, logically, this year I had the least number of presents ever. Less than the dog. I ended up with 2 bottles of unusual looking beer, a bunch of homebrew stuff (evidently people take the fact that I have joined BURAS, the Bradford Union Real Ale Society, as a cue to buy beer-themed presents; A very good decision, really), a book I already own, some cheap white chocolate, and £30. While the more I mull over it, the better a haul it sounds, and one I am eternally grateful for, I long for the days in which I would be around £300 richer at this point, possibly reading a Beano annual.

Thankfully, this is not the true meaning of christmas. Neither is the episode of Doctor Who, which is the real reason I've been actually looking forward to christmas day. I have finally realised the importance of my family to me. At university I find I am depressed and lonely. This would probably be cured if I left my room more often, but that would require finding an exit underneath all the pizza boxes; a daunting task. Today I've spent much of the morning playing video games with dad. Keeping in mind that the last game he played for more than 5 minutes which wasn't 'Who wants to be a millionaire', was Worms, the sheer fact that he is willing to play a full 18-hole round of Tiger Woods PGA tour, whilst trying to decypher it's cryptic advice and seemingly random events, not to mention the sheer task of decoding the Xbox controller (which has 3 times as many movement controls, 4 times as many buttons, and a completely new 'trigger concept' to the last controller he used.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and It means I can claim that the Xbox saved christmas.

* although in his defence, he hosted a couple of awesome parties for which he spent about £70 on booze and food. Rock on!

Alien Technology

I spent my first time on a Mac today.
Well, that is to say my first time on a mac other than the pre-'we're cool and stylish' apple era or the horrendous experience of the mac that was at my middle school that took an entire hour to rip a single track from a CD (which my IBM compatible laptop achieved in 20 seconds.
Also, it's my first time on TWO macs, as the first one was the thing that Macintosh apologists claim doesn't exist; a mac that's more buggy and intolerable to use than an old windows computer. It greeted me by telling me that I didn't exist, that I couldn't access my saved files, and that half of the programs installed on the computer didn't actually own icons. It then proceded to crash promptly every three seconds. Not that this slowed me down at all, however. I was too busy trying to find the CD drive (The button's on the keyboard, dumbkopf!) Eventually I decided to try another mac (after about 10 minutes of trying to find the logoff button; on the windows computers it's a bug button on the 'start' menu, on the macs it's in a big list of other very similar looking commands.), and tried another system, which thankfully worked.

Oh, and one-button mouse system? useless for stuff like photoshop. I don't see what people see in the format.