New Years Blog

This is my first Blog of 2005.
And ye - I was much remiss in 2004. For many days and nights I Blogged not. And Blog viewers looked upon my page and thought thus to themselves "he's buggered off!".

But now behold and be quiet - for I am BACK.

I had a Christmas of book and film. As usual, I largely boycotted broadcast television. Over the years, we have been buying the 4-DVD sets of the Lord of the Rings movies. Over Christmas, we watched all three extended movies - about 1.5 hours of extra movie in total - and it was Damn Good. Now we are picking our way through 9 hours of extra features - and most of them are really good too. The thing I particularly wanted - to bring the thing to life for me - was an interactive map. The book was largely about journeying and questing - so the idea of a map that traces the travels, and allows you to see what happened where - that's what I really wanted. And it's there! Very cool!

I got four books for Christmas. The two Pratchett books were from immediate family, and very welcome. A Pratchett book is always a safe bet with me. So I was kind of expecting "Going Postal". What I wasn't expecting was the Almanak (details here) - haven't looked at this yet.

The other two books were Bill Bryson's "A short history of Nearly Everything" and Marcus du Sautoy's "The music of the Primes". This was to have been the year of me learning about Quantum, but, with my interest piqued by having recently read "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time", and now this, I think the writing (or perhaps the numerics) are clearly on the wall. 2005 will be my year for exploring Primes. I'm sure you can look forward to future Prime-related posts.