Thanks to Greg and Adam for hosting a little Christmas Eve’s Eve get together, and showering me and Min with gifts. We had some rather aggressive Indian food, music hand selected from Greg’s bizzare christmas record collection (including “Santa Is A Black Man” — perhaps you could provide us with some MP3s Greg?) some presents, and rounded out the evening with a Rankin and Bass classic, ‘The Year Without A Santa Claus’.

Gift wise, I scored a few pieces of vinyl, the Knight Rider board game and a gummi-burger so large that it could probably maim a healthy horse.

As usual, check out my (pro, again!) flickr stream.

I hope everyone has a fantastic day tomorrow whether you’re alone at home or out celebrating with friends and family.

Good: Having the forethought to buy new rechargable batteries for my camera for christmas.

Bad: Not having the forethought to have a haircut in time for the christmas photos.

Good: Sleeping in late.

Bad: Stinking out my room with my own sloth due to late sleep ins.

Good: Watching loads of movie (I counted 15 in two weeks).

Bad: Loosing the ability to tell which characters and situations are from my real life (I blame the large TV for this).

Good: Having a most blogalicious experience today.

Bad: Having my conscience battle out the ethical issues of writing off someone I just met in a public forum.

What say you? Spill the beans, or hold the gas in? (… like I don’t know what you’ll say)

Have you heard about the wacky new sitcom heading to Channel Ten?

It features a leading Australian surfer male who in the first episode gets married to a Southern American big-shot laywer, also a surf enthusiast. She also happens to be the daughter of an important military man of some sort (think the bosses on JAG or similar). Anyway, they all head to Australia to have a lovely wedding. This wedding is also attended, naturally, by our leading male’s father, who has a great knack of talking for too long about usually the wrong things. It also just so happens that BOTH fathers AND the new wife are all lovers of Blue Grass music (think banjos and the same chord progression in every song, just with different lyrics each excrutiating time).

It also just so happens that while the attendees are sitting down to eat their dinner, a three piece blue-grass band show up and start to serenade the audience with their out of tune playing, accompanied by the vocal stylings of the three Blue Grass devotees. The band — with an imaginative name such as “The Local Blue-Grass Players” — settle in for what they hope to be a long night of blue grass, interspersed with informative lectures about the history and current status of blue grass music, including “This is the Banjo. It can be played loud and chipperly…” (gives us 8 bars of “loud and chipperly”), “or soft and sweetly” (gives us another 8 bars of “loud and chipperly”).

Their captive audience, growing quickly tired of the straw-chewing musicians, begin talking amongst themselves. This does not please the specially imported artists, nor the 3 or so people in the audience who were seemingly under the employ of our prior vocalists. Suddenly these people start demanding “shush” from the majority, who ignore their pleas and the musicians play even more “loudly and chipperly”.

… If you haven’t heard of it, it’s because this nightmare was only too real ¹. It happened about a year ago. I realise now I did actually blog about it earlier, but only in a passing mention. I was reminded at the family gathering on Sunday just how outrageous the whole scenario was.

My extended family always amuse me. Every one of them is such a character and in many cases larger than life, as if they were the hand drawn imaginings of some wiley cartoonist. When I’m around them, I prefer to sit and watch and take it in. I think that’s my natural tendancy anyway, and most certainly linked to my love of acting and characterisation, but I do have groups of people whom I stop watching and just engage with.

Sometimes my extended family blows me away. On sunday I got up to greet my closest-aged cousin who I hadn’t seen, on my best guess, for at least 2 years. The first thing she said when she came over to me was “New glasses!” I’d have trouble telling you what colour hair she has, and even how many eyes she has, but there you go.

I guess that’s the strange joy of family, they’re everything at once to you.

^1. It’s more of a Channel Seven thing anyway. They go for those family sitcoms.

It seems the wind is ripe with change. I decided to make a break from my previous FruitBoy design which has served well since September 2005. Over the year and a bit, I had been continually refining it in small doses, making the changes I needed along the way. The capture above is what I referred to as Fruit1.1, taken just before the switch, although I never documented the smaller changes I made.

The whole thing was becoming a bit unwieldly and I didn’t know what code I was using and what I wasn’t. A fresh start, writing all the code from scratch seemed the best idea, and this now, Fruit2.0 is the result.

The change in design was mostly inspired by a slight change in direction with the site. I’ve basically decided (as the more perceptive of you will have noticed a few weeks ago on the site) to discontinue any hope of a regular podcast. The effort and time required to put them together was impossibly huge, something I couldn’t sustain. I also had serious questions regarding just what kind of content I wanted to deliver. That’s not to say audio content won’t return at some point, in some form, but I have no idea what that form might be.

The new design is also a lot more flexible than the previous design. It gives me room to display larger photos (actually, the perfect width for integration with flickr: 500px wide), and a nicer, white backdrop to present them against. I know some people will lament the colour, but I hope to be providing colour in other, less intrusive ways.

This design was fairly quick to knock up. It has remained pretty much intact since the first draft about I did around last friday, but the patterned bar and logos have moved, changed colour and form. I spent more time designing than coding this one, mostly due to all the revisions I made to the mock-up. I paid careful attention to sizes and making it possible to incorporate new elements and features later on down the track. The coding took place in about 24 hours, mostly due to its simple layout. The code (if not the images) is fairly well contained, although it did get a little sloppy at the end trying to accomodate for Internet Explorer as usual.

I’ve recieved mixed reactions so far - some people think it’s fresh, some people lament the loss of colour. I’m interested to hear what you guys think, so if you have any questions, opinions, or bugs that you’ve found, leave a comment below (hit “comments” and it will drop down automatically… no need to refresh). For the record, this is what it is supposed to look like, although perhaps not with that body font.

Yesterday was the annual six-hour round trip to visit my Grandmother’s house for the family Christmas get together. My father’s side of the family has slowly diverged over the years since my childhood when we used to have a special Christmas morning breakfast in just the next suburb over. Everyone would hop in the car and be there a few minutes later, when now people are travelling from Queensland, Canberra and even America to be there.

My dad is one of five boys. That means a lot of uncles, aunties and cousins. We spanned a large range of ages from newborn to 15ish. With so many kids running around, Christmas was a big deal with loads of presents and seeing family we didn’t see that often. Each year my grandparents would cook a great big tub of frankfurts and we used to have hotdogs for breakfast. It seems odd now, but as a kid you were so excited with all the toys you’d eat anything put in your hand. I guess it was also cheap to feed a lot of kids. We even had our photo taken one year and were on the front page of the local newspaper. I must see if we can dig that up.

Years ago my grandparents moved to a rural area near Lake Macquarie, and another family moved to Queensland. With another family already in Canberra, our tradition changed from Christmas morning to the weekend before Christmas.

Now it’s only my grandmother and all the cousins of my generation are getting jobs, moving and can’t be there on the day, the dynamic is different. I did get to see two of my cousins I hadn’t seen for two (or more) years, but as usual we could only stay a few hours before hopping in the car again.