Merry Christmas, and welcome back from my two-week hiatus. I've been putting in mad amounts of overtime recently, to the point where I didn't really feel like making little pithy updates on a daily basis when I got home from a day of computing (see Dec 13 and Dec 20 for examples of such pitiful pithiness.

I will still be working a lot this week, but should be cutting back to my regular schedule starting in the new year. To make up for my recent lack of updates, I'm going to try and post a review of one thing per day for awhile, whether it's a movie, book, CD, game, or foodstuff. What could I be reviewing tomorrow? That's the kind of crazy excitement you get for free by visiting this site.

Besides work, I haven't done much of anything this month (the last two days I spent completely work-free were Christmas Day and November 7th). I had my annual holiday dinner, bought lots of CDs, played some WoW, and started exercising again. The bar continues to sit woefully unfinished in the basement, and cats continue to be cats. I spent Christmas with my family in Alexandria and had an earache on Christmas Day. Besides being painful, it made all the music I heard in my left ear sound a quarter-tone flat with a tinny reverberation akin to an 11KHz compressed WAV file. The pain has gone away, but the musical effect persists, so all my new CDs sound like crap.

Since this is something you can only understand through experience, I've made a sound clip for you, to show what things sound like at the moment: