happy new 10th january

it's taken a while but here i am in 2006 (blimy this millennium seems to be going fast). the christmas break was good, including a whole two weeks off work. but christmas, and the whole lead up to it, took it's toll and after all the seasonal excess i'm currently enjoying a bit of comfortable normality.

so, back to basics, some lovely links from recent surfing;

- google video is worth a bit of time. just trawling through the random group has delivered some random treats, including very clever christmas lights, chinese tv adverts, russian free running and welcome to pittsfield
- drawing interface for flickr (spotted at boing boing) - searches for pictures similar to your drawing, seems to be mostly colour matches but pretty cool none the less
- celebrity chefs escape censure over animal slaughter - despite being a veggie i'm on the side of the chefs here. people are too used to knowing meat only as a plastic-wrapped ready-chopped food product. the more processed and packaged the food product is the more distant it is from ever having been an animal. good on the telly chefs for actually reminding people where their food comes from and showing how it is killed for them to eat. chances are the animals killed on both programmes were better reared and more humanely killed than the millions of animals processed through our factory slaughterhouses to fill the supermarket shelves
- what to call ming's backers - another year another leadership contest. trivial but amusing article on main contender menzies campbell and debate on the title for his band of followers; mongos or mingers?