Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2005; but ...

I'm sure Christmas cards are not intended to fill the writer with gloomy thoughts of entropy.

But as I write them, I realise that there are lots of people who I know well on IRC and on Livejournal, but of whose postal address I have no good idea. Sometimes I remember I've seen a change-of-address on LJ, but it'll be friends-only so unGooglable, and will have passed beyond the skip=50 barrier so become almost impossible to browse to.

At least those are people who write about what they're doing, so I feel in touch with them, and hope that, when not on Saturn, I write enough about my life that they feel some degree of contact with me. I can offer them a merry Christmas and my best wishes for 2005 here, even if I can't find postal addresses, and our Livejournal posts tell them I still exist and know they exist, which is really the only other function of Christmas cards.

But there are people I knew from school and from Oxford, who I really don't want to rationalise as having forgotten entirely, but of whom all the information I have is a three-year-old mobile number, a four-year-old street address, and a vague idea of who they were working for in 1999. Whether separately or together, these data are about as useful as three-year-old mince pies, four-year-old satsumas and a vague recollection of what someone got for Christmas in 1999; people move houses, move jobs and move phones more often than that, and mail seldom forwards.

Maybe my cunning anti-SAD purchase of three desk lamps with bright compact-fluorescent bulbs was inadequate, and I should get more of them.

HL2 finished

I've finished Half Life 2. It's beautiful, great effects and excellent set design from beginning to end, and I've enjoyed it all the way through, even if the action goes through interesting and obvious contrivances in order to move in a remarkably straight line. It got frustrating from time to time (the climactic Strider battle; the second defence in the prison), but never hopelessly so: I have a Gamecube which I have not touched for months, having spent hours failing to defeat Flaaghra, to handle the giant beetle in world two of Pikmin, or to creep sufficiently subtly into the Forsaken Fortress. It was absorbing all the way through; I haven't played Doom 3 for months because the game-play was getting too tediously repetitive.

It's also, as far as I can tell, impossible to re-sell, since the registration process has locked it to an account access to which is required to play any of my other Valve games.

Nice walk today

A very easy walk: my housemate gave me a lift to the top of the local hill, and we walked around it for an hour and a half. The weather was crisp and cold and the light attractive; there wasn't much haze, so you could see across the Vale of Gloucestershire. The Malverns with Great Malvern at their base were obvious, you could clearly see Tewkesbury Abbey, just about make out Gloucester Cathedral, and see towns out to Worcester. There was a faint suggestion of brightness just barely visible in the far distance, which I think must have been snow on mountains in central Wales.

No, I don't think a single 400-pixel-wide photo needs an LJ-cut tag; it's no larger than a reasonable text entry, and with "width" tags it doesn't have any effect on page rendering times even on a slow connection