The Onion A.V. Club’s Best Albums of 2006 - With the limited time I get to hunt down new music these days, it’s nice to get the summary of what was actually good out there in the last year. Some real crackers on here - particularly impressed by the Decemberists so far, and special mention has to go to Scott Walker’s new album “The Drift” - genuinely the most disturbing music I’ve heard in a very long time.

The French Laundry Cookbook - a x-mas present in this case, with some really amazing stuff. Thomas Keller is an incredibly meticulous chef, and it’s interesting to pick up on some of the small touches he adds that can make a huge difference to a finished product - excessive straining is a recurring theme, but something like seasoning mozzarella cheese before using it as a topping seems almost obvious in hindsight yet is totally worth it.

Adidas Limited edition San Fran Sneakers: Different woodcut design on each shoe for mismatched awesomeness! Very comfortable too

Hamaggedon: The true meaning of x-mas is ham, as Cartman wisely points out. That’s why I whipped out an awesome 10KG Kurobuta ham which was very good - and continues to be, since even with 6 of us we barely made a dent on its porky goodness. Next step, figure out how to make a hamwich.

(stick a fork in it, it’s done)

The return of the Blackbook: after almost 6 months in the shop, it’s back, and reminding me what a good machine it is. Almost makes me forgive Apple, but not quite.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on Wii: Just beat it tonight, and it was thoroughly satisfying from about the second hour on. The first is a bit slow, and the first fishing section is incredibly bad, but it quickly recovers from the first stumble to finish better than Okami - which impressively is almost as good as Zelda (time to start wishing for a wii-mote controlled Okami in the future). Clover Studio, you were too beautiful for this world…

Bose QC-3 Quietcomfort headphones: Makes music sound new again. Expensive, but the quality of the audio has to be experienced to be believed.

Parallels latest beta with Coherence: Very slick - you can essentially have Windows apps running within windows in OS X. Still has the downside of running Windows apps, of course, but I can overlook that for work purposes.

Jamon Iberico: Sure, it’s $20 for about 5 thin slices, but boy is that some tasty ham

New Year’s Eve mixcast - just in time to party the year away.

Being in Sydney for the Holidays: It’s been a while since I had a solid couple weeks at home, and it’s a good feeling. Going by too fast already, though…

There are some simalarities in tone and setting to Director Guillermo del Toro’s previous film The Devil’s Backbone, which is almost a recommendation in itself, however it takes a different tack in exploring post Civil-war Spain through the concept of fairies and fauns, rather than the ghost-centric Devil’s Backbone. What was particularly impressive to me was what felt like an effortless mastery of the cinematic adage “show, don’t tell” - there were many points from early on that entire characterisations were achieved with little more than a look, a gesture or a word from the characters, which draws the viewer in rapidly and completely. This grounding in storytelling craft is probably what allows the film to then strike off onto wild fantastic tangents without losing momentum or making the audience lose interest in the “real world” story. Truly brilliant stuff, seek it out if it plays in a cinema near you.

My favorite quote: “…after 9-11 and Katrina, hasn’t this country suffered enough?”

Contrast this with my experience with no digging, where I haven’t had the use of my Macbook since July, and I’m starting to get very cranky… I bought pretty much as soon as they hit the country (big mistake) and ended up with a service job number and no physical laptop for the next 5-6 months. They’ve even managed to supersede the model (with the Core 2 Duo, natch) in the time it’s taken me to get it fixed.

And notch up another one for awesome customer service and support in Australia - my Nintendo DS Lite just broke last night - stopped charging completely. Nintendo Australia requires me to mail it away to them, at my expense, charges me $25 “appraisal fee” and wants 10 working days to turn around a repair. So at this time of year, I’m looking at February for a fixed unit. Joy to the world, indeed.

So here’s my Christmas wish: a consumer electronics brand that doesn’t take such glee in sodomising it’s customers in Australia.

Finally, the lack of stability coupled with inability to block spam (hooray for zombie botnets) made the switch necessary. Pleased to say it wasn’t too painful (touch wood) and I’ll see how it goes.

(This should explain any interruption in service or otherwise wierdness)

I have to admit, Typo hasn’t been a resounding success as a blogging platform. I’ll persevere in the meantime, but there may be a backend change here in the future…

“3. Tell me what it is, not what’s inside: I don’t care whether your service is powered by Ruby on Rails, .NET, AJAX, REST, or Vegemite, so don’t waste another breath on it. Tell me what it does and why I want to use it, and keep the nerdy chest-thumping on your Developers page.”

followed shortly by:

“6. APIs!: Speaking of playing with others: the technical details shouldn’t be on the front page, but they should be there. The gold standard of Web 2.0 is a well-documented interface that lets geeky users and other Web 2.0 developers get at all of your site’s data and roll it into their own desktops, web sites, and services in a variety of ways. Bonus points for nailing the trifecta: XML, JSON, and YAML.”

… so to paraphrase, avoid at all costs talking about the technology, you nerds! On the other hand, I demand APIs based on a random collection of buzzcronyms! (for those wondering, apparently the trifecta requires the use of two (count em) markup languages, XML and YAML. For the life of me, I’m struggling to understand why you would need both)

I think as far as rules for startups go, I would tend to agree with the Kevin Rose argument: paraphrasing, the first step is to build a cool website.

Add to this some pretty craptacular internet access at the hotels I’ve been staying in and it all adds up to a ghost town around here. Time to get back in the swing of things blog-wise and get into some regular updates over the weekend, so look forward to that.