>Presents
>Family
...
Still have some shawarma from last night, I will enjoy that instead. Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Vale.
Sorry don't got more to say, but I guess honest feelings and wishes of having a pleasant holiday are enough when sincere.

\o/
I have down episodes every now and then, so I've been doing my best to ensure I have a good time this time.

Ordered my favorite cake (Black Forest) in a reasonable size so I can eat it on my own. Have a pub meeting with secret santa and got myself a nice gift. No figures this year though, not enough furniture top space to put a new one.

Thanks, I will try to have a great day.

Not really, my gaming magazine growing up was Club Nintendo and that one died a peasant's death long ago. Not only that, but due to the intricacies of publishing and distributing all over hispanoamerica, the magazine was sold one month after it was originally released in Mexico.
In other words, it was rendered completely obsolete the second internet became accessible.

People have a lot of nostalgia over this, but magazines have always been an static one-way medium. People will look back with better memories to being part of a community and a global dialogue rather than just reading what a few have to say and only getting a chance to share your thoughts if you were lucky in the Letters to the Editor section. Better signal to noise ratio though, that's for sure.

Cute Manuel Noriega was pretty good, my family had a good laugh over it since they lived through the Invasion of Panama.
I guess that's my favorite sort of anthropomorphism, the ones that contrast the reality with cute females. Military hardware, operating systems, war criminals... The bigger the difference is between the original object and its representation, the cuter it is overall, for me. I guess that's why I've always been fond of meido as a representation of non-cute moderation.

It's been snowing for a couple months now. The fun thing is that your body sort of adapts to the new temperature baseline and you find yourself thinking "Oh great, today's is going to be a bit warm. 0 celsius, how nice..."
Can't get too comfortable around it though, hands going numb from the cold is no fun. But yeah, winter up here is pretty fun. Grow a beard, wear a silly furry hat and enjoy the crunching sound of walking on snow.

>pointless
Was the netbook a tech dead end if it actually fills a niche? You didn't really see it in the first world where the increasingly more powerful smartphones/tablets quickly overtook its market, but the netbook became almost essential in the third world, specially in higher education. Cheap, accessible, easily hidden from muggers and basically an available device that allowed you to get internet and basic stuff. Don't need to break the bank for that.

With that in mind, I like tablets, specially the new smaller size ones in the 7" format. Larger tablets were, well, just not portable enough to be useful on a daily basis. There's also the question of "do we really need to be connected at all times" that still requires more data to be answered. Society has been changing around consumer tech over the years, we still have to see if it's just another toy to waste money on or an actual element that augments us and we'd feel naked without in a couple years. And Jones will argue me on this point, but if you actually think that not being location/information aware is good enough, then there's something wrong with you. Additional layers of data out in the real world is a benefit.

What would actually be interesting is if the vision from the scifi writers of the 50-60's actually comes true. To keep costs down and because bandwidth is (in theory) increasingly cheaper and more accessible, most personal devices turn into just terminals, capable of input and output while leaving all the processing to central machines elsewhere. We're already seeing steps into more cloud based services, and not just storage. Mostly because it's trendy (cloud is the new black!), but if it means a sub $100 device that handles most of the digital requirements of the average person, then that's already a game changer.

One thing I wish we moved away from instead of going head on into it is voice recognition, but that's just me being a sour puss because Google can't figure out my accent and never will. I mumble, even my family has difficulty understanding me.

One last thing though. Influenced by the efforts of Apple with the iPad of making tablet computing a crippled, easy-to-access affair I feel like current tablet devices are not used at their full capacity. As powerful as Android can be, it's still held down by the ecosystem of apps and the UX tenets of the original iPhone. Not only that, but the fact that we're seeing this as consumer electronics competition, where profit is the final goal and patent wars are seen as acceptable ammo, well, we can't expect much evolution quickly. Things would be far better if the 3 major players stopped wasting resources and collaborated. Open Handset Alliance already proved things work better as a team after all, even if they mocked the idea all those years ago.

My tastes are pretty vanilla, so I don't really have a preference. But I guess I'd like to experience burying my face into fluffy tails