We live near the Tyne, close to the coast. Every year, many of the ships on the river sound their horns as their native New Year occurs. I like it. I’m not really enthused about New Year, but I like the idea of a wave of New Years sweeping across the timezones towards, and past, whereever I am.

We want a dome home. Slightly ‘Star Wars’, a little ‘Hobbit-hole’, with a fair bit of Roger Dean. Roomy and cheap too. The main problem is that while the USA has lots of cheap land so building new, wide structures isn’t very expensive, in the UK we’d probably have to buy an existing building and remove it first. That said, it looks as if these can be turfed over, so the planners could be appeased by an almost invisible structure.

Link: Sample Residential Dome Homes

Using a recent Mac laptop is much better with the caps lock disabled so that it doesn’t get pressed accidentally every two minutes.

Link: uControl

Ecstacy has reached New Jersey, and local drugs expert Terrence P. Farley explains the horrors that will destroy the area’s children. It’s both scary and funny that people can believe such nonsense. It reads as if he’s quoting The Onion. Articles like this undermine all the real efforts to educate people about drug effects.

I’ve seen rather a lot of people using ecstacy, and it most certainly does not cause users to immediately vomit, crap themselves and suffer immense teeth-grinding pain. A few quick searches with Google show that the only person in the world using phrases like “disco dumping” is, er, Terrence P. Farley.

Prosecutor: Parents beware of teens with pacifiers

It’s very good. Not perfect, but it’s taken me (an expert grumbler) hours to think up any complaints, and they aren’t very good complaints. It deviates from the book, which may be a good thing, and it uses Gollum and Gimli for humour, which may also be a good thing, but I’m less sure of that. Gollum is very well done.

I’m not going to bother reviewing it any more than that, so here’s a summary of real reviews if you’re interested. I’d recommend just going to see it.

Link: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

A conflict between Indian elephants and villagers, in which about 200 elephants and 150 people have been killed. It doesn’t help matters when the elephants steal beer and get drunk first.

Link: Drunk elephants kill six people

I wanted to see what time ‘The Two Towers’ was playing at the big new Odeon in Newcastle. The UCI website isn’t particularly good and sometimes contains incorrect information, but it works. The Odeon website is an absolute masterpiece of bad design.

Odeon Website Compatibility Linux/Mozilla 1.1? No. Linux/Konqueror? No. Mac OS X/Chimera? No. Mac OS X/Opera? No. Mac OS X/Mozilla? No. Mac OS X/OmniWeb? No. Mac OS X/Internet Explorer? Yes, but slow, glitchy and ugly.

For some unfathomable reason the whole page is built from external Javascripts. Believe me, no one is going to “steal” the code to this mess. It even has blinking navigation graphics. Eurgh.

Link: The Odeon

Motorists report seeing a car crash, so police investigate the location. They find a car containing the body of the driver, but the car had been there for five months….

Despite looking like an urban myth, the references in the story seem convincing enough. Many urban myths are born from real events.

Link: A3 crash skeleton is ‘wanted robber’

When I was staying in the USA I was more than a little worried about brown recluse spiders. Brown recluses are closely related to black widows, and have nasty and possibly fatal bites. A local museum had a display case showing what brown recluses could do to their unlucky victims. Bitten areas can rot away, and the spiders lurk indoors.

It looks as if my spider fears were unjustified. Like most poisonous animals, the brown recluse isn’t really very dangerous at all.

“The family collected 2,055 brown recluse spiders during that six-month period, including some they found crawling on them as they slept, or stuffed clothes into the washing machine, or picked up the newspaper. The spiders were found in every room of the house, including “high human use areas such as bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom,” according to the study.

Yet here’s the most astonishing part. During the six years that the family has lived in the house no one has received a single bite. Not even one.”

Myth and misdiagnosis are to blame for the spider’s reputation. It can cause horrible wounds, but it’s very unlikely.

This reminds me of a news item a couple of months ago about how the incredibly poisonous sea snakes are quite tame and friendly, so much so they’re gathered up in handfuls by ecologists.

I’d still rather avoid them.

Link: Bad Reputation (not a permanent link?)

That’s it for work this year. For the last few years I’ve been Last Person In The Office as my coworkers go off to the pub, and I wander around the empty office for a couple of hours, staring at servers and worrying. This year I’m spending my unused holiday days on an early departure and the guilt-free intention to have absolutely nothing to do with the network until 2003.

This might be my last time off work for a while. I’m considering saving my holidays next year so I can trade them in for cash when I migrate south. At the very least I’ll need to spend them carefully.

Side effect: my brain is convinced that today is Friday. I’ve almost wandered off to watch ‘The Osbournes’ on TV and wondered why NTK hasn’t arrived. Doh.