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January, friends. When resolutions are held (for a while at least), healthy food is eaten, chocolate lays about the place unbought and unwanted and when, naturally, our DSL connection degrades in a manner that can only be described as slovenly and untidy.

High winds wreak havoc on our connection speeds. I don't know yet if it's a temporary thing (the sync speed of my router has recovered from the paltry 192Kbps it showed this afternoon to a somewhat healthier 1.7Mbps) or if I'm going to have to go through the rigmarole of getting BT out to look at the line some time this week, necessitating downtime and, of course, stern warnings from the service provider that, should the fault prove to be with my equipment and not theirs, they will charge me something ridiculous like £70 per hour for the engineer (and of which, I'm sure, said engineer will see not one penny).

Looks like I'm going to be having a slow weekend then. Time to catch up on some reading. Or maybe even writing, perish the thought. 

Christmas, as people have often remarked, changes a lot as you get older. For one thing you get less presents (mainly because you're more fussy, I think). For another you feel less excited about the whole thing (maybe because of the lack of presents that you're getting). All of which could lead you to thinking that Christmas should be a miserable time of year for everyone over the age of, say, thirteen. The truth is, of course, that as you get older Christmas, in fact, gets better.

I can explain why with two phrases:

1. Spoil yourself! It's Christmas!
2. January sales

The first one is, of course, the most insidious. It makes you think that sixty quid on DVDs here, a hundred and fifty quid on overpriced clothes there is okay because "It's Christmas!" And number two backs it right up. Not only is it Christmas! it's also January Sales time, which means that you can say to yourself "Well, I'll never be able to get this overpriced tat for that price at any other time of the year and, hell, spoil yourself! It's Christmas!" and somehow convince yourself that this is logically sound.

And so your bank account empties slowly with a noise not unlike an expensive bottle of red glugging down the plughole. And late in January, as payday is just out of reach enough to make things a stretch (especially if your nice employer brought payday forward for you so that you could spend even more of your wage over the Christmas week) you find yourself thinking "well, maybe I shouldn't have bought all that stuff on Amazon on Boxing Day. But it was Christmas! And January Sales! So I suppose it's okay," whilst your children turn blue with hypothermia and the cat dies because you haven't been able to afford it for a week and a half. Actually, strike the bit about the cat. They can sort themselves out.

And of course, dear reader, your humble blogger hasn't been able to avoid temptation this year any more than any other member of homo sapiens would when faced with a massive amount of price reductions and a seemingly large amount of disposable income (or in my case money that is given to me in lieu of presents by people who feel guilty enough to still want to give me something every year).

Which is why I'm currently waiting on deliveries of not only a new bass (of which more in a moment and to which the title of this post largely pertains) but also the entire collection of Buffy DVDs, £65 delivered, courtesy of Amazon, seasons 1 and 2 of Life on Mars, also courtesy of Amazon and seasons 1-4 of teachers, yet again from Amazon (but through Sarah's account rather than mine because, you know, she's the teacher and I just get to laugh at the show).

All of which is all very nice and pleasant and, you would think, would give us plenty to be watching on the great glass teat as we try to shrug off our post-Christmas torpor in time for the New Year (when we will, of course, replace it with a post New Year torpor or, quite possibly, a hangover). Trouble is, of course, it doesn't quite work like that.

The DVDs, which were ordered at various stages over the last seven days, are due to arrive sometime between next Wednesday and two weeks hence. The Buffy DVDs were supposed to arrive yesterday but have yet to show, and my bass... well, let's just say that I should have known better than to place an order for a bass with a company who uses TNT Express to deliver their customers' goods.

TNT have, allegedly, tried to deliver my bass twice. Except that they haven't been trying very hard because not once have they actually knocked on my door. The first time I could have understood, since ours is not a house that's easy to find even with GPS (GPS, incidentally, will plonk you right on top of us but there's no indication of which house is which on our little site). But I would have thought that after I'd had the whole "here's my phone number, get the driver to call me" conversation with them I would have at least got a call to say "I can't find your house," or "Are you actually in." Better still, they could have done what DHL and UPS do, which is to call first and say "I'm on my way... can you give me directions please?"

I offered to go and pick the bass up from their depot (if the mountain won't come to Mohammed...), which all seemed fine and dandy until the depot, which I had been assured would stay open until three this afternoon, magically closed at twelve. Apparently I can go on Monday to pick the thing up - but only with the right ID and paperwork (funny, they seemed perfectly happy to deliver it to my house without any ID whatsoever). All of which leads me to wonder if some minor deity or other hasn't decided to toy with me for the sake of amusement over the period between Christmas and New Year, when too many people have become virtuous and not enough people are getting drunk enough to be interesting.

Next weekend, though. Next weekend, I think, might be a geeky DVD-fest of epic proportions.

Yes, Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. No, this isn't exactly the best news ever in the history of literature.

But can people please, please, please stop eulogising? As the man himself said:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else.  For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell.

The man aten't dead. Please try and remember that before you start rending your garments and gnashing your teeth. 

From BBC news (link):

A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported.

Which is bad enough. I mean it's a teddy bear for heaven's sake. And it was named by children. But oh no, no, this woman deserves to go to jail.

That's not the best bit though. Read on and you'll find:

But Sudan's top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.

Now, before someone starts telling me how I'm being anti Islamic or failing to understand the religion or some other such nonsense, I'll point out that (again according to the BBC) Sudanese bloggers have roundly condemned the whole business:

Other comments on the site (sudanesethinker.com) criticised Sudanese Islamists: "Once more, Islamic hard-liners are making their religion look ridiculous. How sad."

"Astonishing backwardness, oh people!" said another posting, in Arabic.

"I hate the stupidity of this," one entry on the forum said. "More attention will hopefully mean the release of Ms Gibbons without getting jailed or lashed so bring it please!"

Pretty much everyone who reads this will know that I have little truck with religion, though I've often expressed my envy of those who do believe in supernatural things. But tolerant as I'd like to think I am I have nothing but contempt for people who use their religion as an excuse to mete out unnecessary punishments for crimes that nobody apart from them - and by that I mean nobody in their own religious group, never mind us Godless heathens - recognises as a crime in the first place.

Stephen Law made a good point the other day when he said:

Religion, it seems to me, is a bit like nuclear power. Immensely powerful and (arguably) useful. And, perhaps most of the time, it runs quite happily, doing not much harm.

But unless it is extremely carefully controlled and monitored, it can very quickly run out of control. Indeed, just as with nuclear power, you can predict the unpredicted. Somewhere along the line, something probably will go wrong, and when it does, you have an extremely toxic situation on your hands. A religious Chernobyl.

This isn't quite that bad. Maybe it's more of a religious-fire-at-Buncefield than a Chernobyl, but even so.

Religion can be a wonderful thing and for a lot of people can bring meaning and hope to their lives that they may have struggled to find elsewhere, I'm not denying that. But wherever you find a religion you find someone willing to twist it, even if they're just twisting it into something ludicrous (as in this case) rather than something terrifying (like, say, 7/7 or 9/11).

People, as always, are a problem. 

(Posting this in the morning from the conference; my hotel wifi went away last night and I'm damned if I'm going to pay another 10 Euros just to post this...) 

Dinner's over and, for a conference dinner, it was fantastic. I should have taken photos of the food itself; the omnivore main course - which should, I think, have been called the carnivore option given its content - consisted of some courgette, some carrots, some mashed potatoes with herbs, gravy... and the biggest piece of lamb I've seen on one plate. Except there was one on each plate. It was delicious, but I think I've eaten my red meat portion for the week.

I was sat at a table with Tim Parkin of Pollenation Internet and Russel Winder of Concertant LLP, amongst others. The conversation meandered pleasantly between photography, Python, business accounting, physics and university. Conference dinners are often a bit naff. This one was pretty good.

There were only two real blights on the evening. One was the cheese-smeared eighties pop muzak that started to blare from the PA system shortly after the after dinner speaker, LUG Radio and Canonical's own Jono Bacon, had finished (excellent speech Jono, by the way). The other was that, before dinner was served, we were asked to stand. No one told us why, and like obedient sheep we all did, only for the MC for the evening (I think it was John Pinner, the conference organiser) to say grace. Well, I say "grace"; what was said was "For what we are about to receive, let us all be truly thankful."

Let's state this in no uncertain terms. I spent my own money to come to this conference. I came down on the train last night, spending the weekend away from my girlfriend - the last weekend of her summer break from college, by the way - and I spent my own money to make sure that I could still have WiFi access and work whilst I was in the hotel. I came to learn and to talk about Python.

I did not come to have someone say grace for me. In fact, I find the fact that someone decided that they would say grace for me, assuming my consent, without consulting me first, to be deeply offensive.

Which brings another thought to mind.

We ask people about their dietary preferences. When the PyConUK delegates signed up for the conference they specified which menu they wanted (omnivore, vegetarian or vegan). We deliberately go out of our way to make sure that people eat only what they want to eat; we don't force them to eat something that goes against their personal preferences, whether their reasons for those preferences are logical or not.

So why is it considered okay for people to shove their religion, their personal, spiritual and to me irrational beliefs down my throat without so much as a by-your-leave?