Death and Destruction Everywhere... and now, the weather...

It seems that the death toll from the destruction caused by the tsunami in asia increases by the minute, as far as I can tell it's gone up by over 50,000 people in the last 24 hours - shocking. My uncle is actually currently there on holiday (if you can call it that any more), and there was a bit of worry, but we got news yesterday that he is fine, apparently he was in a bar at the time (at 6am?) and "it's a bit wet". Hopefully he'll be able to get back relatively soon.

Christmas was good, I got a few DVDs including a Futurama box set and my brother kindly got me a shammy leather-type thing for the car - with the gift tag reading "This won't wipe away dents" grr.

I've been spending a bit of time in the kitchen over the last few days, created quite a nice turkey soup from the remainder of the christmas dinner, and tonight I used a can of some madras stuff (which was a bit dire) to make a BurtCurroi, alright, but I shall stick to what I normally make from now on.

I had a really bizarre dream last night.... I dremt that I was kidnapped, but kept in my own room, with the kidnappers using surveillance to keep me where I was (I could see the camera outside my window). After I'd dismantled all the electronic devices in my room to make sure they didn't have cameras in them, I finally escaped across the road to a friends house to call the police, but it was too late, they already knew that I'd left... The lights went off and the phone line went dead.....

Worryingly, I know exactly what this means.

Season's Greetings

Well, it's that time of year again, so I'd like to wish everyone a very happy christmas and a prosperous new year. I did attempt to send out some sort of mass email, but I think it got stuck in a spam filter somewhere, I'll investigate.

In other news, I've been informed that my diary is a bit boring (I tend to try and keep it employer and future employer safe :P ) so I've got a late night burtblog edition in formulation... Watch this space :)

Shocking News

Teen sentenced for crippling man Utterly shocking news, things like this just shouldn't happen... However, he'll probably get released early after doing three years, at the same time as people are getting three years for breaking speed limits.

Quote of the day

And on christmas day we'll be asking who really wrote the bible

- Channel 4 Announcer
Not entirely sure why this amused, but it did.

Christmas Do Pt II

Well, last night was the second of my work christmas events, this time in the form of a sit down meal. I actually was tasked with organising this one, and I am pleased to say that it seems that everyone enjoyed themselves, I had a bit of a worrying dream last week about what might have occured if some horrid allergy-related mistakes were made, but it all seemed fun in the end :) Apparently I was "a bit well oiled" and had a bit of alcohol fuelled tourettes - like yelling "cunt" at the top of my voice, and insulting a waitress but ho-hum. Roll on next year.

Today was quite a relaxed day, can't really remember what I did apart from have body parts ache.

Got a few bits to do at the weekend, so I may well be back in the office on saturday

Ringtones

I could do with some sort of new ringtone for my phone. All the ones on it are a bit pants, and I don't want a musical one, however that's all the sites seem to have, does anyone know of a good "ring sound" website or alternatively a midi or MP3 that could do the same trick?

Department Christmas Do

Thursday night was utterly splendid, department christmas piss-up with a 1920s theme. Everyone made an effort with their costumes, and the location was really good, quite a lot of gangstery-type outfits. As happens far too often, I got rather drunk, and there are lots of very bad photos of myself (and other people come to think of it) doing the rounds at the moment. Managed to spend at least £40 on drink too :/

There's a team christmas dinner next thursday, so I'd better get myself ready for that one... I guess I'll have to stay vaguely alive, I'm supposed to have organised it...

Quiet weekend, just been eating far too much curry and all these oniony things that were supplied with the popadoms... strangely it seems to have caused some sort of allergic reaction on my tongue, weird.

Brussened

There you go lowey.... Can't really think of a sentence to put it in... happy now? :)

Calendar Geekyness

While looking through the documentation for a software package, I found a rather long-winded description of how it handles dates. Which highlighted this; compare the following:

[burt@lucre burt]$ cal 12 2004
December 2004
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31

[burt@lucre burt]$ cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

This got me thinking... Obviously, this is from when the calendars changed in 1752, but I just thought that it was neat that it was properly handled. Annoyingly, I couldn't even get windows calendar to show me a date before 1980, and Outlook would happily display me the whole of September 1752 without any missing days. I guess this is a bug meaning that all of Outlook's calendar is wrong by two weeks :)

Chav-drop.TV

When I'm bored, I sometimes watch price-drop.tv, merely to smirk at some of the cheap crap that people such as 'Barbara from KESTON' decide that they need to purchase because it's cheaper than the "guide price" which is obviously an unrealistically high value plucked from someone's arse.

Well, the whole system is one story, but this evening, I saw that they are asking people to ring a premium rate number to *pay* for a "dropper on board" car window sign thing "dropper on board". Then again, if people will pay to do your advertising for you, I guess you can't really turn it down.