Happy New Year! And let’s be happy our world hasn’t panned out like Arthur C Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two.

I’m fairly certain I recently passed a rather pathetic tipping point, and now own more unread books and unwatched DVDs than my remaining lifespan will be able to sustain… The bastard things are going to outlive me. It’s not fair. They can’t even breathe.

›› Charlie Brooker is a really funny guy

• had a few hundred lines of compliant CSS shot to pieces by IE6, which got me wading neck-deep into the muddy waters of the Underscore hack over a few late, late nights.
• was trying out this funny joke about how two antennas got married — apparently, the wedding was terrible but the reception was great!
• discovered that to get an RSS feed of your Amazon wishlist, you now have to authenticate your request with a secret key, find the wish list ID, request for an XML file, create and apply some XSLT, store some of this somewhere on the Amazon Cloud, blah, blah. All this acrobatics for an RSS feed of my effing wish list — how about just giving me a bloody RSS feed like everyone else, Amazon?
• broke up Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story, The Last Question, into manageable 3 minute sections to read to my daughter before she sleeps.
• stumbled onto a bookmark for Nutrition.com.sg, a horrendously ugly but possibly useful site which lists nutritional content of local foods.
• have been playing a wee bit too much Nintendo in my browser than I should be.
• was wondering if the 4 day × 10 hour work week idea would make any sense/difference in some industries.
• thoroughly enjoyed the new Arctic Monkeys’ new album Humbug, although I am a little disturbed to realise that the first track might be about a guy singing about his penis.
• visited makephotoshopfaster.com which has precisely two tips to make your Photoshop go faster.
• installed The Onion Router for fun and now occasionally run a (non-exit) node.
• read a poignant essay from the Iraqi shoe thrower.
• was really excited about getting the first printed XKCD book, though I haven’t quite had the time to buy it yet. (Yes, that’s how crazy things have been the last week or so.)
• found a new way to reset my sleep pattern and it seems to be somewhat working.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

›› Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., (1841 – 1935)

Super talk by Alain De Botton, though it seemed very short. His latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, suddenly looks pretty interesting to me…

Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me… Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.

›› Sage advice from Michael Caine

Over the next day, hug your spouse, kiss your child, call your relatives, watch the sunset, watch the sunrise, thank your God and relish your life.

›› New York Times’ David Rohde after his Afghan Taliban escape

Kodachrome is dead! Long live Kodachrome!

It’s been a wild ride through 2008 and the new year looks like it’s gonna drag our wallets through the mud. Having said that, there are people on the other side of the world who are going through shit that makes you want to throw up.

Yeah, belated happy new year to you, too.

From one of the most useful Wikipedia pages…

• Sun Tzu did not originate the saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” in the Art of War or in any other text.
• There is no dark side of the Moon; every part of the Moon’s surface (save perhaps deep craters near the poles) is illuminated by the Sun roughly half of the time.
• Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue, with slightly increased sensitivities in different locations depending on the person.
• Shaving does not cause hair to grow back thicker or coarser.
• Koalas are not bears; Monkeys are not apes, and apes are not monkeys.
• The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is completely false.
• While the Earth’s north magnetic pole is near the geographic north pole, it is a south magnetic pole in physics terms.
• The Sahara is not the world’s largest desert.
• Pong was not the first video game.
• Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb and Guglielmo Marconi did not invent the radio.

The richer we have become materially, the poorer we become morally and spiritually…
We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

›› Martin Luther King Jr.