Wednesday I returned to work, but yesterday was my first work lunch with a number of people who took the first day back off. It seems a couple others had also decided to grow beards for the new year. runstaverun and mrfantasy and I stood next to each other in the hallway, making a "all the beards on one side" Erik the Viking-esque moment. It was theorized that we were just showing solidarity with the writers, like Letterman and Conan.

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Christmas and New Year's Eve were fun. Posted a few times during the vacation, summing up the relaxing time off. Spent some time with jedimentat's family and cessna182's in-laws. The difference between Cantonese and Mandarin unfortunately stopped jedimentat from being my secret translator, but she learned how to speak Halo 3 instead. A pretty chill end to December, all in all. Except for my drunken night with jedimentat (see her pictures here). ٍSee all of my holiday photos here. Some of these were in the photographic year of Kingfox post, but here's some of my favorite shots from the vacation:

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I remember all the crazy screams when STEAM was first unleashed on the gaming world. "Whaaaa, my HL2 no workies!" "Whaaaa, your system sux!" I remember how flakey it was at rollout. But it's pretty nice that, after finally setting up the software end of things for my new machine, I was up and running with all steam-y games in no time at all. "Hey, Steam came bundled with this piece of hardware, I'll throw it on. Hey, it's prompting me to install every game I used STEAM with. Nice, I can play FPSes with my new rig already!" Things should always be so simple.

Current Location: Drew University, Madison, NJ
Feeling: okay