Reduce the population and size of the earth such that it has a total of 100 people
Split them into the breakdown on the earth based on ethnicity and various statistics to create the miniature earth.
It shows how stark the divide is between those who live in the western world and those who do not

Link for those not reading it from my blog and don’t get the embedded video

I’ve been meaning to get one of these for a while, and just my luck there was one in the returned items sale at the weekend.
It’s great fun and has meant that I’ve started to tinker around with FreeBSD again which is installed on an old Dell PC.

What’s a KVM Switch you ask? Well, what it lets you do is have one keyboard, one mouse, one monitor running off 2 computers: Keyboard, Video, Mouse Switch. It has a little button that you press to switch between the two.
The video is the key part and that works incredibly smoothly. The Keyboard and Mouse part seem a bit choppy, though that’s probably more related to FreeBSD not being setup to use USB Keyboards & Mice. I’ve got PS/2 ones plugged directly in which seem to do the job.

It looks a little messy but believe me it’s an absolute joy to be able to switch between the 2 at the touch of a button.
And infact, I’ve got the network configuration linked into the router so I can use the internet connection.

Konqueror Running in KDE on FreeBSD:

It was version 4.9 that I installed before, and things have moved on so much – I reckon I mucked the install up a bit when I did it as the only user that seems to work smoothly is root, and the shutdown command breaks unless you put the -h flag (halt). Therefore, can see myself reinstalling it all – probably the latest version.

Anyway, this gadget should keep me amused for a while

I don’t know if it’s that we have thick walls in the house or i’m just unlucky with routers, but after my Linksys WAG-54G router’s 4 port hub died I decided it was time to upgrade. I went for the Belkin Mimo G+ Router.
It’s been generally good with one exception – the wireless part of the router is a pain in the neck. It’s as if it goes to sleep. Having tried everything in the settings, forked out for something they’re now calling a range extender.
They’re clever gadgets that piggy-back off the ring main electrical circuit, essentially turning any plug socket into a network point. They’re not cheap, and the one i’ve gone for is the wireless version, so doesn’t involve any change from a user end.

It works like this:

So what you do is plug a cable from the router into the XE102 plug which is plugged into the mains
Then you simply plug the WGX102 in in the room you want to get the access and you have wireless networking in that area. Takes a bit of configuring to get all the settings synced up but is pretty easy.
So far, it seems to be working well.

On another subject, I thought I’d seen every video format that’s out there from mpg, avi, divx, qt mov, asx, wmv, mp4 etc… the list goes on. But I came across one last week that had me completely baffled: MKV
And the reason for it’s appearance: Hi Definition TV recording
It’s a container format similar to avi, asf, mp4 so will play in MPlayer, Perian for OS X

Yesterday my iPod crashed while I was listening to a Sigur Rós album
Normally when that happens (not necessarily while listening to Sigur Rós!) I hold the menu and enter buttons down for 5-10 seconds and it reboots, but this time that didn’t work
I did a google search and found a forum post on macrumors.com that worked a charm:

- Plug the iPod into the power charger ONLY and not the computer
- Toggle the hold switch to on and then off
- Hold the MENU and Select (center) portion of the wheel down simultaneously for ten seconds.

It means you need to have a mains charger which you don’t get out of the box when you buy a new iPod
I was about to get the putty knife out and pull the battery out to reboot it, which am glad I didn’t have to do

While our family doesn’t generally celebrate christmas these days I did get a present this year and it’s kept me occupied the last month or so
It’s a book called The Book of General Ignorance.
It is a book about urban legends and questions & answers, and makes for a great trivia book. Therefore it’s right down my street.
A lot of it is fairly waffly, so I’ve summarised some of the more interesting ones below (apologies for the excessive use of wikipedia links – it was just easier):

1. Henry VIII had 2 official marriages out of the general 6 he’s meant to have had
2. The human body has 4 nostrils (2 are hidden)
3. Antarctica is the driest, wettest and windiest place in the world
4. The largest living thing is a giant mushroom in Oregon
5. A blue whale’s throat is the diameter of a grapefruit
6. A chicken in 1945 lived for 2 years after having it’s head chopped off
7. A goldfish does not have a 2 second memory – according to research it is more like 2 months
8. Mosquitos have killed 45 billion people over the years from the 100+ fatal diseases they carry
9. The Bobak Marmott of Mongolia is largely responsible for all plagues (which have killed approx 1 billion people over the years)
10. Chameleons change colour based on emotion not the background
11. Polar bears are not left handed
12. Marco Polo was born Marko Pilíc in Korcula in modern day Croatia and he did not introduce Ice Cream and Spaghetti to Italy
13. Walter Raleigh did not introduce Potatoes or Tobacco to England/Ireland
14. Champagne was invented by the English – they shipped in flat wine from Champagne and added the “fizz” and started fermenting it by adding sugar
15. Seven prisoners were freed by the storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789. They were 4 forgers, a sexual offender and 2 lunatics (one was english and thought he was Julius Caesar)
16. The Swiss eat their pet cats and dogs after they die – apparently as part of the recycling process. Some is turned into lard & cough medicine
17. The Nursery Rhyme Ring a Ring a rosie has nothing to do with the great plague. It dates from a 1790 Massachusetts rhyme about a girl name Josie.
18. There are at least 15 different states of matter
19. Glass is not a liquid – it is a solid, and the reason why church windows are thicker at the bottom is because medieval glaziers didn’t always cast a uniform sheet of glass and put the thicker end at the bottom
20. Silver is the best metal at conducting electricity and heat
21. The moon smells like gunpowder and the moondust feels like snow
22. The moon goes round the earth, but the earth also goes round the moon
23. There are an additional 6 satellites that could be considered moons of the earth
24. The average distance between asteroids in an asteroid belt is approx 1.25 million miles, so the chance of hitting one when flying through one is very small
25. Light travels at 300,000 km/s in a vacuum but when travelling through diamond it only travels at 130,000 km/s. The slowest speed it has been recorded at is 60 km/h when travelling through a block of sodium frozen at -272ªC
26. A centipede with 100 legs has never been found
27. A two-toed sloth has 3 toes on each foot, it is so named because it has 2 fingers on each hand. Two toed sloths are not related to three toed sloths
28. A European earwig has 2 penises
29. There are more tigers in captivity in the USA than in the wild combined – there are thought to be 12,000 owned by private owners. It is only illegal to own tigers in 19 US states.
30. The Shaftesbury memorial in Picadilly Circus is of Anteros, Eros’s younger brother (not of Eros as it is commonly signposted and referred to as)
31. Only 5 people were officially killed in the Great Fire of London
32. The Romans gave the thumbs up symbol at the end of a gladiator fight to signify the loser should be killed. They buried their thumb in their fist to indicate he should be saved
33. Most accused of witchcraft were acquitted or hanged – very few were burnt at the stake. Most were men.
34. The number of the beast is 616 – it was mistranslated from the original Book of Revelations until it was redone in 2005
35. The Universe is beige
36. Water is actually a faint shade of blue despite appearing colourless in small quantities
37. There is no word for blue in ancient greek
38. The Coriolis force is not the main influence on which way (clockwise or anticlockwise) water goes down the plughole – in fact it is going to be negligible
39. Camels carry fat in their humps and originally come from North America
40. Technically there are only 46 US states:
Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts are officially commonwealths.
In addition there are 2 commonwealths: Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. They drew up their own constitutions declaring themselves commonwealths of the United States. Neither are US states, and are officially unincorported territories so not included in the 50 “US States”
41. George Washington’s false teeth were mostly made of hippopotamus ivory
42. Baseball was invented in England
43. Thomas Crapper as not the first to invent the flushing toilet however he was involved in the sewerage industry and holds 3 patents for water closet improvements.
44. Mozart’s middle name was not Amadeus. His full name was Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.
45. The largest capital city is technically Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii. This is because the boundary of the city of Honoloulou is the county of Honolulu which consists of the entire stretch of the North Western Hawaiian islands which are 1500 miles long or 2127 square miles
46. The Largest man made structure is a rubbish dump on Staten Island called Fresh Kills. At 4.6 square miles in area, receiving 650 tons of rubbish a day until it was closed in 2001. It reached a height of 25m taller than the statue of liberty
47. We are still in an ice age – an ice age is defined as any period in earth history when there are polar ice caps
48. The inventor of the biro was called László Biró and from Hungary. However the first person to patent the ball point pen was John J. Loud, but he never exploited it
49. Chalk isn’t used to make blackboard chalk – it’s made of Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate as opposed to Calcium Carbonate)
50. Cockroaches are not the most likely creatures to survive a nuclear war. They may be able to live for a week without a head, but a fruit fly can sustain over 3 times the radiation and a parasitic wasp can take 9 times. The creature most likely to survive though is the bacterium Deinococcus Radiodurans
51. Violin strings have never been made of cat gut – they sometimes used sheep gut at least until the 1750′s (and maybe even today)
52. The greater the number of floor you climb before you throw a cat out the window, the more likely it is to survive. According to a US study that showed cats that fell out of buildings up to 7 stories were more likely to sustain injuries than those falling from higher floors.
53. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand
54. Your fingernails and hair don’t continue to grow after you die – it’s because your body dehydrates tightening the skin that creates this illusion
55. Alcohol doesn’t kill brain cells, it just makes new cells grow less quickly due to the dehydration
56. James Bond’s favourite drink was not a Vodka Martini – it was bourbon which he consumes 58 glasses of in all the books whereas he only drinks 19 Vodka Martinis.
57. Jaffa Cakes are cakes (not biscuits) – a landmark legal case was involved, as under British law biscuits and cakes are not subject to VAT, but chocolate covered biscuits are (luxury item). The evidence to prove they were cakes was that Jaffa cakes go hard (like cakes) when they go stale. In contrast, biscuits go soft.
58. It doesn’t matter how close you sit to the tv you won’t damage your eyes
59. The more hours sleep you have at night the more likely you are to shorten your life. However, not sleeping enough will reduce your IQ, memory and reasoning ability
60. Half an hour of exercise 3-5 days a week is likely to be just as good a treatment for depression as the medication your doctor prescribes you as it reduces symptoms by 50% according to surveys
61. Hitler was not a Vegetarian though he probably should’ve been as he suffered from chronic flatulence – not eating meat would’ve helped this
62. The Spanish invented the concentration camp in cuba in 1895 several years before the British used them in the Boer Wars
63. The Hurricane aeroplane was more successful than the Spitfire in the battle of britain essentially winning the battle
64. 1 dog year is not equivalent to 7 human years. It’s a sliding scale that starts quickly and slows down in time. It also depends on the size and breed of dog.
65. There is no such animal as a panther – technically all large cats are panthers, but what is usually being referred to are black leopards/jaguars.
In the US they often mean a black puma – however none has ever been found
66. The banana plant is a herb and the banana is a berry
67. Botanically,Strawberries, Raspberries and Peaches are not berries – they are drupes – raspberries and strawberries are aggregated drupes.
68. Almonds are drupes, Peanuts are Peas (legumes), and Brazil nuts are seeds – none are nuts
69. Captain cook did not give his men limes to cure scurvy – he gave them sauerkraut. Lemons were given to sailors from 1795. By the 1850′s to save money limes were given to save money. Limes contain very little vitamin C, so scurvy came back with a vengeance.
70. Captain Cook did not discover Australia and he wasn’t the captain of the ship, he was a Lieutenant. British explorer William Dampier explored Australia in the 17th Century. Another contender is the 14th Century Chinese Admiral Zheng He
71. The Australian slang for an English man, POM (or pommy), is short for pomegranate because it rhymes with immigrant when said in an aussie accent
72. There were between 2 and 20 wise men or magi and at least one of them may have been a woman. This is according to the English church’s 2004 revision of the description of the Magi
73. Panama hats come from Ecuador. They were named so because they were given as standard issue to men digging the Panama Canal
74. St Patrick may be the patron saint of ireland but he is not irish – he was from somewhere around Pembrokeshire

The next time you listen to your iPod/MP3 player or use a memory stick to transfer files you should thank Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg who discovered Giant Magnetoresistance (or GMR) in the 1980′s.
Were it not for this, hard drives and memory sticks/cards could not be as small as they are today

Nearly 20 years later, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for independent discoveries leading to the same conclusion published in November 1988 and in March 1989 respectively.
It was a discovery ahead of it’s time which probably explains the time period between discovery and the prize being awarded.

Fundamental to the phenomenon is RKKY (Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida) interaction

H represents the Hamiltonian, R_ij is the distance between the nuclei i and j, I_ij is the nuclear spin of atom i, Δk_mk_m is a term that represents the strength of the hyperfine

It’s all rather nasty quantum mechanics – but in fact this interaction discovered in the 1950′s predicted what was to become GMR

As usual I’ve not posted anything for about a month now, so thought it was about time I posted something.
It’s been about 9 months since I stepped into the 21st century and got myself an iPod
It took a lot longer than I thought it would to get all my music digitised, but pretty much 99% of it is done. Have still got a few albums that are problematic, a few archives of mp3s kicking around but I don’t expect it to increase much more than the 25.1 days of listening time I have already.

Back to the iPod.
First and foremost, for those that don’t know I got the 80Gb Video iPod back in September 2006 while I was in New York. With the exchange rate it was stupidly cheap.

It makes going on holiday so much easier, because it had got to the point where I was taking 100 CDs with me which takes up a lot of space in hand luggage, and I always hated not having the covers with me to tell what tracks were.
An ipod fits in your pocket and holds my entire music collection which is amazing.
I’ve also started listening to albums I’d forgotten I owned and with smart playlists i can choose my favourites and with normal playlists i’ve created some good mixes of tracks which in the past I did with mix cds.
Overall it is truly brilliant and I can’t imagine being without it

On the downside, I’ve found I don’t listen to whole albums these days, as I am able to flick between tracks, listen to playlists or shuffle tracks
I do like the ratings ability, though I find that I don’t have time to rate all tracks, and my rating is inconsistent depending on the day.

I’ve found a glitch or two, there are features I find annoying, and there are features that I wish you could have

Glitches:
1.If you play a track through a playlist, then go into the list by album and select the same track it will restart the track from the beginning instead of selecting it
2. If you rate a track on the iPod and iTunes it will take the iTunes rating in preference to the iPod one next time you sync it – not really a glitch, but would be nice if you could choose.

Annoying features:
1. I have quite a few music videos i’ve transferred onto my iPod (i have about 120Gb on DVD which wouldn’t fit on the iPod, so have picked a select few). The music videos subsection of videos acts like a playlist in that if you go into an artist with more than one video, when it finishes it will move straight onto the next video. Compared with the movies section which will bring you straight back to the movie list
2. Podcasts: I like podcasts and have quite a few but find it difficult to listen to them because as soon as you finish playing an episode it takes you back to the main menu – stupid

Features I’d wish for:
1. Four buttons along the bottom of the screen. These would let you get additional info on the track being played. Currently the only info you can view on the iPod are Artist, Track, Album, Rating. What about all the others. You can browse by genre but can’t view the genre while playing.
2. If you are playing a track I’d like to be able to drop into a menu which would take you straight to the album you’re playing and play other tracks from that album or by that artist
3. Creating playlists – you can create on the go playlists which are good, but limited. Why restrict it to that when you can clearly create them from the iPod. Creating smart playlists from the iPod would be really useful.
4. The one i’d really like is the ability to create more sub sections to videos. You get Movies, Music Videos and Video Podcasts. I have been copying lots of videos from youtube and would like to sort them by category.
5. Similar to 4, a category section for video podcasts, I’m currently using the comments field and smart playlists to do this but it’s not ideal, as every time there’s a new file in a podcast you have to add the comments to this file.

I think that pretty much covers things, and I hope that apple will continue to upgrade their non-phone iPod with features in addition to their capacity increases.

The subject is about two entries really but I’m going to combine them into one blog post even though they’re not related apart from they were both thoughts/observations from the week.

I’ll start with Cyclists…

I think it’s simply too dangerous to cycle in many parts of London, and being a Car driver I am largely going to have a streak against cyclists (apparently they are never wrong if you are in an accident with one). Having said that, I really think that they do bring some of it on themselves and shouldn’t carry the holier than thou attitude that many seem to.

I will never forget the morning where I was millimetres (it felt like that at the time and was probably a few metres) away from hitting a cyclist who jumped a red light. They were very fortunate that I was alert, that my brakes were in good working order and was therefore able to stop in time bearing in mind i was travelling at 25-30mph as I went through my green light. I will never forget the look on her face – there was no regret, apology or thank you. I was in complete shock. it was lucky I was only 10 minutes away from my workplace (though I was running late as usual) otherwise I would’ve had to stop in order to get my head straight.

Cyclists, along with Pedestrians, Motorists and Motorcyclists are subject in the UK to The Highway Code.

While Cyclists cannot be punished as easily as motorists can, dangerous or careless cycling is an offence that carries a fine of up to £2500. Note that cycling on the pavement is illegal and could be subject to a £500 fine. I have never heard of either of these being enforced.

I believe that cyclists jumping a red light should be fined and this should be enforced. It isn’t because police officers are usually based in cars or on the street and unable to catch them since they are more agile. Bikes don’t have number plates and there is no way to catch up with them once they’re out of site. So, how do you enforce this? Light-heartedly, I suggested that police officers should be sent out with lasso ropes to hook cyclists in from the street but this is clearly not practical. With a bit more thought, I came up with the idea that enforcing the highway code for cyclists could be handed over to traffic wardens on a commission basis.

Traffic wardens in the UK have become notorious for finding means of extracting more cash than ever from motorists in parking fines especially when they clamp them or tow them away. There are many private companies that are employed by UK councils to maximise the income often featuring a payment on commission system. Traffic wardens are generally hated by everyone in the country apart from their boss which would make them perfect for enforcing the law. So much so that some wardens in Scotland are equipped with spit testing kits so they can hunt down those that spit on them. If anyone can make cyclists think twice about jumping a red light, traffic wardens are the ones for the job. They are inventive and are used to having abuse thrown at them. They use bikes, mopeds, buses and cars to patrol their areas, and like nothing more than extracting money out of the public. They will spot whether you have parked 2mm into a no parking area or whether you’re 20 seconds late returning to your parking meter.

Rant over, I know there are plenty of perfectly safe cyclists out there, but the number you see who don’t wear helmets or have no lights at night – I always say to them under my breath that you’re not going to live long if you continue like that. For sure we don’t want to discourage cyclists, but if you are going to cycle on the road you need to obey the laws of the road. Otherwise you deserve everything you get if you get hit by a car.

Next, OS X…
I was doing a bit of a cleanup at the weekend when I noticed one of the partitions on one of my drives was nearly full
So I fired up one of my fave apps WhatSize 10 to find out what was taking up the most space these days and I was slightly alarmed about how much junk was in my startup volume:
• 787mb of Printer Drivers (most of which I don’t have)
• 385mb of saved install packages
• A 173mb Console Log
• 1.56Gb of iPod Photo Cache – bear in mind that the actual photos only take up 379mb – what’s going on here!

What on earth is going on? I’ve spent two weekends cleaning stuff up in various folders because I need the space for my iTunes library. Have managed to get my main drive up to 16Gb available now after finding two tv series’ in my movies folder and a site rip of some site which came to 3.4Gb. I’ve backed all this up to DVD. Still have the mammoth task of sorting my “to sort” folder and not sure what to do with the iPod Photo Cache, but it’s looking better!

I’ve been tagged by MHC so that means I’ve got to conjure up 5 things about myself.

1. I was born 26 years ago in the hospital that I now work in – Chase Farm now part of Barnet & Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust. I nearly died before I was born because the umbilical cord got wrapped round my neck choking me. The registrar had to be called in to help deliver me using forceps and saved my life.
2. I have run a website for over 10 years. This has become stonysleep.com, but did exist as various names, hosts, guises and mirrors from 1997 to 2002. I’ve owned stonysleep.com since 17th January 2002 after Big Cat Records and then V2 Records didn’t renew the ownership. So it turned 5 years last month at it’s current address. The site is long overdue for an overhaul, but I never seem to have the time to do it. The plan is to run it through wordpress and link it in with the blog.
3. In real life I am an incredibly introverted and shy person. I’m a deep thinker and a continual observer. I sometimes hold grudges and regrets for many years after an event has happened but rarely reveal my true feelings especially if it involves other people. I have convinced at least 2 people that I was insane – this is not true, but I am certainly not what would be considered normal by far.
4. The thing I am most proud of is my music collection. I don’t know how many CDs or days that I own because I haven’t transferred it all onto my iPod yet and it’s increasing all the time. It was over 300 CDs last time I updated the list on my site but it’s continually growing.
5. It was not until I finished University and started working full time that I realised what a good memory I have compared to other people, and in particular what a knack I have for remembering small (and often trivial) details. I think I have a partial photographic memory. Having said that i always seem to forget where I’ve left the most mundane of items when moving from one room to another

This now leaves me with the tough task of who to tag:
Shamik, Ravi, Camilla
There’s a couple of others I know who have blogs, but I don’t know their sites, so will have to add them at a later date

Hi all,

It’s that time of the year again when I like to head off away from everyone in the UK for a bit of peace and quiet in Italy where we have a modest size appartment. We say it’s in Venice, and while technically it is, it’s not the place you’d stay if you were coming to Venice for a holiday. The block of appartments is on a natural island in the Venice lagoon called The Lido or more correctly Lido di Venezia.

It is technically larger than Venice itself and is home to approximately 20,000 people. The region we live in is called Malamocco. It is where the locals of the lido live, and parts of it are very rural. All the others in our block are italians, and while the majority of people speak english it isn’t brilliant, so one day we will need to speak italian decently. Travel to the main part of venice is a 20 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride/a long walk followed by a half boat ride from the vaporetto station Santa Maria Elisabetta.

Anyway, that’s the background to the place.
On arriving here I’ve been listening to all the songs I’ve put on the ipod i bought in september. I now have about 7 days or 3000 songs on there and having spent a good few hours travelling by taxi, coach, plane, boat and car to get here along with plenty of time hanging around in the airport I’ve had a lot of time to come up with opinions on the ipod.

As you have no doubt realised, I’m a late commer to iPods for a number of reasons:

1. I always had a scepticism about them
2. There was something I liked about actually putting a cd in
3. I never wanted to commit the hard disk space to mp3s
4. Until recently there was something very irritating about iTunes, and I still secretly pine for Cassady & Greene’s SoundJam to return

I finally gave in when it became impractical to carry 300 cds (well, I used to bring 100 of them with me on holiday) around with me. And the price and size of the iPods just got too tempting to resist and I got the 80Gb 5th gen iPod Video.

As I said, I’ve got quite a lot of my music on there, but I’ve decided there are still a few things I would find really useful in an iPod:

• Viewing Song/Video Details on the iPod – currently you can only see the song name, artist and album. Other details such as year, genre, bitrate, track number etc are not visible. This is particularly useful for a TV series as the iPod simply orders everything alphabetically. If the name does not contain the episode number you’re stuffed!
• I’ve been playing with the rating system and gradually rating all my songs on the 1-5 scale. This will no doubt take as long or longer than it will take to import the remainder of my songs. But, it would be nice to view all songs that have not been rated to make this easier
• It would be good to be able to create playlists and modify ID3 tags of the tracks. The iPod can clearly do that as it can do the ratings. I do not have my mac with me on holiday, and would like to customise some of my smart playlists but cannot do that except through iTunes. If I plug my iPod into the computer I am writing this on it will more than likely wipe the contents of my iPod as it has tracks for my dad’s iPod. On the subject of customising the tags this is useful because CDDB/Gracenote can often get things wrong, especially with the more obscure albums and cover discs which are not often used. I could not find a way to submit a change to gracenote so when I do notice a mistake I have corrected it on iTunes but don’t always spot this
• I thought of a feature which I would find useful when in shuffle mode: to switch to the album/artist that has come up in shuffle mode
• Finally, an option to switch on/off the backlight at will and also to make it switch on at the start of each track. This would be particularly useful in shuffle mode.

I’ve also found a glitch which I guess isn’t too much of a glitch, but all the same isn’t quite right in the logic:

If you are playing a song in shuffle mode then browse for that same song through the artist/album/genre/search and choose it from there while the song is playing it will restart it from the beginning. This is not how iTunes works so should not be how the iPod works. It should not affect the songs playing and simply bring the song up as if you chose “now playing”.

Apart from that, I think this iPod is great. I’m going to struggle to fill the 80Gb with music alone at the moment, the battery life is good, and it makes transporting music much easier. I’ve been a latecomer to the iPod but I do like it and know what I want.

To all those who I don’t get a chance to see before the new year: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year