Christmas Eve:
Meet mom’s boyfriend’s Italian family. Holy crap, people. Small, loud, pleasant group. Massive seafood dinner. Come home, watch some TV, sleep on inflatable bed.

Christmas:
Recieve assorted goods and services. Dole out same. Swag includes:
Shoes
Gift Cards
Monies
Shirts/Sweaters
A Fuzzy Blanket
Invader Zim Box Set (w00t!)

Breakfast with mom- Jonathan (younger brother) prepares. Scrambled eggs, garlic, bacon, cheese, chives, toast. Delicious.

Midday with dad. Very nice sneakers don’t fit. Must get new pair. Crap.

Night with dad’s girlfriend’s family. Holy crap, people. I know them all pretty well, by now. Recieve surprisingly generous gift from step-grandfather and step-grandmother (enough money to mostly buy a laptop). They were the only people who recieved hand-made Christmas Card for this year (Personalized comics- they go over well each year). Fantastic Christmas meal: Turkey, stuffing, potatoes, corn, etc… (See: “Curtis’s Love Affair With Starch & Fat”)

Boxing Day:
Wake up late. To Best Buy! Manage to use combination of general sexiness, dashing attitute and velour tights to secure place at end of line. Wait many minutes. Recieve laptop. $599+Tax, no extended warranty (fuck you, Best Buy.), 1.75Ghz Celeron M (ick) 512Mb RAM (ick) 100Gb HDD (yay) DVD-RW (yay). It’s not much, but it’s mine. Dead sexy, too. There’s always RAM upgrades. One core is enough, anyways, dammit. It’s not like computers are for ‘gaming’. (It’s all about the text-editing).

After exploiting line-related connections to brandish new laptop in fate’s eye, (Like so: Brandish!) attempt to return poorly-fitting shoes. Fail. Note that Athlete’s World is a trendy hellhole: Promise self to purchase shoes from less jackassish distributor in future.

Help Dad look at skis. (Looking at skis requires to people. One person to look, and the other person to stand nearby, also looking.)

Later, meet Kristen. Exchange further gifts- She recieves little crystal mouse. Curtis recieves Calvin & Hobbes Complete, (Motto: “It’s a metric tonne of entertainment”) Futurama Season 4, (Now have 1,3,4, and secret Season 8, recieved by blowing the magic warp-flute at the end of Season 4) and a framed picture of Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, and Tigger (Most of whom are in an overturned umbrella).

Time spent with Kristen. Family friend helped with purchase and installation of computer: Curtis recieves $100, + P3-833Mhz w/ 256Mhz RAM & 19in CRT for services rendered (Curtis was going to attempt to turn down the $100 until he spent 3 hours trading files around, configuring, repairing, re-working, and etcetera). Other family friend needs entry-level computer. Will install Ubuntu on system, flip to other family friend (free-of-charge, of course), perhaps. “For internet, e-mail and word processing only. You can’t figure out how to do anything else.”

Busy time with Kristen. Much to do, much to do.

An assortment of irritating movies and songs are floating around the office here.

First of all, from the Carlito Carlito Carlito album I posted a link to before, Diamonds and Business, (I’m scared of the future. Why are you scared of the future, Bolton? Because it’s scary. That makes sense- let’s sing about it!) and the 1*2*3 album.. (Silver Bells especially, it’s such a terrible song.)

On top of that, though, the George Washington (YouTube) song. He saves the children, but not the British children!

It’s an essay, not a book. An old one, at that.
I still think you’ll enjoy it if you haven’t yet read it.

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it’s tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity–it is, in a word, bourgeois–and so it attracts all of the same gripes.

So, Microsoft’s released a search engine that takes a long time to load and an even longer time to find any sort of results.
(At least I think it’s Microsoft. It says (C) 2006 Microsoft at the bottom)

The kick? It has an attractive, racially neutral spokeswoman in high fidelity introducing your searches and commenting on your choices.

My inner engineer is going “Oh, gads no, I want my searches finished RIGHT AWAY. No waiting. No irritating host chatter. There’s work that needs to be done. The novelty will wear off in less than an hour, then everyone’s just going to go back to Google.”

The Sci-Fi nerd in me says “They’ve finally done it. That’s so very awesome. It’s like something out of an Isaac Asimov book poorly adapted into a movie featuring Will Smith for some reason. Subservient Searching Girl. Neat.”

(From a conversation with the boss)

Colleen says: Good, because Troy has offered to do a Web 2.0 audit of MovieSet

Curtis says: A what with the whatnow?

Colleen says: From noon to 6 on Friday the 5th

Curtis says: … A Web 2.0 audit? What is that?

Curtis says: Are they going to pore through our website records to ensure that I haven’t been embezzling our interactivity?

Colleen says: He has some workshopping process

Colleen says: He will send me materials

Curtis says: (Because I haven’t.. I promise.. please don’t send me to jail, the Department of Web 2.0 of Canada is notoriously vicious)

My boss, Chris, is a fantastic source for music from ‘aspiring bands’.

Looking for depressing future-themed chorus music?
Diamonds and Business by Carlito Carlito Carlito on their CD “Magic: A History of Carlito Carlito Carlito”

Carlito Carlito Carlito” was formed with three out of four members of a basement band originally named “The Moon Patrol”. It all started with two keyboards and a three string guitar. Today “Carlito Carlito Carlito” is more streamline but we still like to keep it pretty raw. The concept for our most recent album was based on a book called “The Diceman” by Luke Rhineheart. Essentially we rolled dice to choose the style, genre, tempo etc of each song on the album from a random list of option. The result was a mix of rap, country, folk ballads and a touch of death metal.

Yes, they roll dice to determine what they’ll play next.

From Kent, (another co-worker), The Sound of Space Dance.  I’ll admit, laser disco is actually pretty catchy.

Do you know what Christmas needs more of? Cheesy 80’s hair metal.
On that note, the lead singer of Twisted Sister has a really shocking amount of makeup on.
YouTube- Twisted Sister – O Come All Ye Faithful

And the Worst Christmas Album Ever, available for download.
1*2*3 presents… Christmas Is Extraordinary

They manage to combine cheesy keyboard synth and horrific off-key vocals.