While I love these French protesters against the New Year, I cannot agree with their sentiment. There is a new Skinny Puppy album coming out in a few short weeks, and it looks as though a new William Gibson novel will be available this year as well. I can only look fondly on a year that seems slated to bring me such bliss.

After much procrastination, I finally made a start at cataloging some of my many books. I used my iSight to scan a bunch of them into Delicious Library, which was satisfying but not as seamless as I had hoped. Many of my older books and almost all my science fiction and fantasy were either not correctly identified by their UPC or were not identified at all. (Why especially those genres, I wonder?) So I ended up doing a fair amount of typing in ISBNs, but all in all it wasn’t bad. Then I exported my library and uploaded it to LibraryThing, a site which delights me on a very deep and basic level.

I only have a couple hundred books in there so far - I lack whatever type of endurance is required to scan more than that in one sitting, and anyway many of my books are packed away in boxes in our various closets because I do not by any stretch of the imagination have enough shelf space to hold them all. And clearly I still have a lot more tagging to do before the thing becomes really useful. But nevertheless it’s a great site, and one of the very few social networks with a wonderful and clearly defined purpose. I guess Last.fm would be another.

I guess it’s been a while, again.

I spent a chunk of last week in Massachusetts being extremely festive, as you might expect. Although I had much less time off this Christmas than I have in the past couple of years, I still ended up at the folks’ in time for plenty of wrapping and baking and unwrapping and eating. And while I’m the last person in the world to get sentimental over any winter holiday, I have to say this year was really nice. The assortment of remarkably apt gifts I ended up with, for example, made me realize how well my friends and family must know me - the ones that weren’t things I had already wanted were things I would have wanted if I had known about them. Highlights included the massive PBS New York documentary on DVD (eight DVDs, actually) and a bewildering array of Nightmare toys from my own CMOAT, a box of gloomy delights from stl, a spooky doll from Melissa, and a giant heap of CDs and DVDs and books (including a beautiful handmade blank book from my aunt). And a crock pot! I am filled with glee.

I also ended up back in New York with sacks of loot from Trader Joe’s - while not strictly speaking a Christmas present, this was thanks to my mother offering to drive me home. The concept of buying more groceries than I can comfortably carry by myself has become strange and alarming to me, but my cupboards are now full of sauces and pastas and nuts and other wonderful things, so who could object?

As for New Year’s Eve, the CMOAT and I maintained our tradition of ignoring it almost entirely. We stayed in and watched several hours of the New York documentary and consumed a respectable quantity of Magic Hat. I was happily asleep by 12:30AM.