I’ve been a bit pre-occupied in recent weeks to make many posts here. Suffice to say it was by far the busiest, most tiring and stressful supposed “holiday” I’ve ever had and if I’m going to pick any new years resolutions it will be that next year things will be done differently. I’m glad I didn’t waste any unnecessary annual leave since it would have been wasted and I’d rather use it more appropriately at a later date. I did actually manage about two days of free time during the holiday period but most of that was spent on much needed rest recovering from the rest of the holiday.  -_-

On an amusing note I did discover that parties are far less fun when you are 100% sober. In saying that I’m not implying that I’m normally trashed at parties by any means; I haven’t been especially intoxicated in any situation for 2-3 years now but even one or two drinks does seem to make a surprising difference to the experience strangely enough. Either that or I’m even more jaded regarding the whole party scene than I realise. Another pet-peeve that reared it’s head recently was that I’m quite sick of the trend of playing “retro” music at wedding receptions, etc. I could understand it in years gone by when the music was aimed at the age group of the people for which the event revolved around, but today it’s like they’re aiming at the parents or the parent’s parents. I like the oldies as much as anyone else but the suggestion that no good music has come out in the last decade or two is just ridiculous and plain ignorant. This is especially the case when the hired musicians or those choosing the playlist are shamelessly scraping z-grade crud from the bottom of the retro barrel. Material that people wouldn’t even be caught dead listening to back when the tracks were originally released (Sometimes I curse having a long memory for such things.  ~_^).  I swear if I ever get around to getting married or otherwise require some kind of auditory accompaniment I’ll be very carefully crafting the playlist on my own, and a few people may well expand their horizons and find something new to enjoy.

I’ve not really had the time for gaming or catching up with friends at all lately. Not even had much chance for listening to music although I did have a few interesting arrivals including the Radiohead “In Rainbows” discbox consisting of two CD and two vinyl 45s. This was bought as part of Radiohead’s online “donation” system where you could choose what you wanted to pay. Essentially if you paid 40 pounds they’d let you download and would send you this discbox later. Some of the online press focused on how many people offered nothing and downloaded for free entirely missing the point that without the record company taking the lion’s share of the cash it didn’t matter. By all indications Radiohead made a tidy sum of money from the exercise; enough that they wouldn’t appear to need to care about leaching downloaders. I’m glad I spent some money getting my vinyl rig operational again last year since I’ve picked up a reasonable amount of new vinyl lately. Oh, and so as not to forget the important things, In Rainbows is a good album B.T.W. Even people who’ve disliked recent Radiohead albums seem to enjoy it and the critics loved it (no surprise to me).

I’ve been following the high definition video format war reasonably closely and am happy it’s essentially over at this point for all intents and purposes given Warners move to Blu-ray exclusivity from their previous format neutral stance. Warner alone accounted for about 40% of the high def disc market in 2007 so it’s a massive shift in the landscape and has formed a massive black hole in HD-DVD’s lineup.  The HD-DVD supporters are taking the loss pretty hard and are coming up with all kinds of crazy rationalisations, but the format was already on death’s door and nothing is going to save it now. Other than a lack of disc space there’s nothing especially wrong with HD-DVD, but one of the two formats had to go and if the supporters actually understood the specs properly they’d realise Blu-ray is superior in a number of important ways and deserved to win on technical merit if nothing else. Speaking of Blu-ray, Warner’s transfer on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was great. Much to my surprise Spiderman 3 was a better film than I expected too. Of course the audio and video were top of the class being a so-called reference level title, but even the film seemed okay to me. Either that or my judgement is impaired due to Bryce Dallas Howard as a blonde being just as bewitching as when she’s a redhead. On second thought that’s entirely possible…