I love you like an old, worn out tee shirt I bought at the rock concert of a band I no longer follow but have fond memories of. Does that sound sufficiently ambivalent?

The dogs are barking in the New Year.  

A couple days ago I was trying to pick through this year's posts to find the best ones. After about three hours work on this I realised how futile it was and gave up. I may try to pick out a representative selection of the year later today though.

I've noticed my weblog always goes quiet when there's a disaster. It's not just that I can't escape how petty anything I might otherwise want to post here seems. It's also that I simply don't think of anything to post. My thoughts don't wander the way they sometimes do.

The US Geological Survey earthquakes RSS feed (if you don't use RSS, try this web page) is interesting. It really gives you a good feel for which areas are most earthquake prone (I never realised there were so many in Alaska). The Sumatra area is still experiencing magnitude 6 aftershocks.

I go to sleep and 24000 people are dead. I wake up and the figure is 44000. I come home from work and it's 60000. I wake up again and it's 80000. It's heartbreaking.

I'm experimenting with using my business for charity. The response has been muted so far, but it's a quiet time of year. I wish I could do more. In fact I can. The nice credit card people will have to wait. New Zealand has pledged a rather humble $5 million, while the US has pledged a distinctly embarrassing $35 million. I gather the reason for that is somewhat bureaucratic though, as the money drained the Agency for International Development's emergency relief fund, and further funds would require federal budgeting.

For those of you who use RSS readers, I've just set up a New Zealand earthquakes RSS feed based on the information here.

More information on the Sumatran earthquake (the largest since 1964) and tsunami here.

Switches, knobs, dials, wheels, and levers were not counted. Hidden buttons such as a calculator or phone tucked in a drawer were not counted. Physical devices that use pressure to perform some obvious physical action directly (such as staplers or soap dispensers) were not counted, with the exception of button-actuated latches (as found on a microwave oven door). Only physical push buttons in exposed situations and intended for human fingers were counted (the button inside the refrigerator that operates the light failed on both counts). No buttons outside were counted as it was dark and a bit cold, with the exception of the car which was deemed an honorary room.

I think it gives a rough gauge of the relative technological complexity of different environments. The living room figure is heavily skewed by a preponderance of remote controls, whereas the office relies on a smaller number of buttons to greater effect, along with more diverse forms of interface and virtual on-screen buttons.

Bathroom	7
Bedroom	9
Car	71
Kitchen	28
Laundry	12
Living room	317
Office	155
Studio	30
TOTAL	629

How many buttons do you have?

Through the window, I'm watching a young starling (chocolate brown and wobbly on its feet) attempt to master a crust of bread. It is successfully standing all over the crust, and somewhat successful at keeping the sparrows at bay. But it hasn't yet mastered the eating. It pecks at the face of the break with an open bill as if expecting the bread to drop straight in. The sparrows stand in a ring at the edge ripping pieces off, which is the correct technique. And now the bird is still pecking, but it has gravitated toward the edge and it's having some success. I imagine it is standing on an ice floe, which melts and shrinks as it drifts into temperate waters. Finally the other starlings arrive like sharks and toss the remaining bread around like a toy.

Trans-Atlantic book-purchasing develops over the course of 20 years into a close friendship in this simple, true story.

I've been thinking myself for the past month or two about how people on the other side of the world can influence our lives, and whether in this age of communication they can play a meaningful role without that physical contact. And I've been thinking about the stories that might evolve from this arrangement, and whether what seems to be may be far removed from what is. If intimacy is understanding, then can there be intimacy? I guess there is certainly more freedom to be duplicitous. But then there is probably also more freedom to be completely open. After all, what does it matter?

As popular as this movie has been I just can't love it. The tacky milieu of the porn industry and just the Eighties in general turns my stomach.

There are three interesting aspects of the movie that I think deserve comment. One is that the porn movie industry is presented as a tawdry parallel Universe to Hollywood. The directors and producers have the same ambitions: to make "great" movies, to tell stories. The stars are similarly ambitious.

Another is that the characters have broken away from their own unsatisfactory lives and histories and formed new identities behind assumed names. With these identities, they've built themselves substitute family relationships. Julianne Moore's character acts as a mother to the two younger stars, even while she's having sex with them.

Finally, while the world may see the industry as an underclass, undeserving of respect, the insiders have self-respect, and integrity, and are proud of what they do. Rollergirl demonstrates this when she assaults the guy she went to school with after he insulted her. And, interestingly, we take her side.

We stopped off at the historic Cardrona Hotel for lunch. There wasn’t much on offer — and we noticed a sign outside saying “chef wanted.” So we headed for the café across the road, where the food and coffee was good.

While loitering in the hotel car park, I noticed something furry, dun-coloured, like the hills. Then a large, black, glassy eye. A rabbit lying there at the edge of the grasses. As I approached, it pulled itself up on its front legs then . . . nothing. I touched it: nothing. I turned it over, expecting to see something awful: nothing. I looked through its fur and noticed a few tiny red scabs, nothing serious. So I picked the rabbit up. It hung, apparently powerless, from my hand. I admired the beautiful ears, the soft fur between them, and that black shining eye. Its front legs started scrabbling to be let down just like one of our impatient cats, but the back legs did nothing, limp. I felt along its legs and spine. Nothing odd. Grace was there. We debated what to do. It might have been hit by a car. It might have damaged its spinal cord. There’s probably nothing we can do for it, we agree. So I put it down in a shady spot, looked into its shining eye, and left it.

In Queenstown, the ghost of the rabbit followed us everywhere, hopping along the Wakatipu Road to Glenorchy, visiting Bob's Cove, and Lake Alta high in the Remarkables. 

It’s not all that far back to Cardrona — perhaps 40 minutes.  The car park was just the same — the hillsides golden, the sky blue: it could have been the same day, but it was four days later. The rabbit was gone. Perhaps it recovered. More likely it dragged itself deeper into the grasses to die.

It's not easy to fill a weblog with personal details. It's taken me years to get to this point. If you look back at older posts you'll see they're very impersonal. Also very dull. Many people I've talked to keep their weblogs matter-of-fact, impersonal, mysterious, businesslike. Many of them relate stories about how hurt they've been by people taking what they've written and using it against them.

It irks me when people misinterpret what I'm doing here. This is not an illicit peek into my private diary. I'm writing this for you and I'll tell you exactly what I want to tell you, the way I want to tell it. It's selective, and it's subjective. You're not fooling me: I'm manipulating you. It's obvious, yet I'm surprised there are one or two people who don't seem to get this.

If you do feel compelled to judge me or the things I say then I hope you'll pay me the respect of expressing your opinion to me directly. Write a comment right here in public or else email me. If you are not prepared to do that then keep your thoughts to yourself. Better yet, try posting your own personal life, your own successes and failures, online, where I can choose to judge you, or not.

There. I'm done. I feel better. Love you really.

I was feeling vivacious there for a while at the weekend: joking with shoppers in the bookstore, showing people where to find prices on items, laughing with the gift wrapping staff, helping a little girl retrieve her balloon. That's not a word I'd normlly use to describe myself. But now I feel like a big half-inflated airbed. I may make it into work; I may not. One never knows.

My inbox is overloaded with unanswered email. All those little flags make it look like the poor thing is desperate to surrender. Poor customers. One asked if I was still alive. When I get home from work I have an energy window of about 30 minutes which I've recently been spending on long and undirected personal emails. I just never have enough left to analyse a bug. Then that's it for me until the next day.

Oh and the nurses keep taking my blood: I look like a junkie. And the receptionist recognised me from the newspaper.

I've been reading up, and I may or may not have my facts straight.

Drugs are metabolised by systems designed to remove toxic foreign substances from the body.

Some chemicals interfere with the enzymatic metabolism of other chemicals. These are called inhibitors. Grapefruit juice is a common example, which can cause drug toxicity by stopping the CYP3A enzyme from doing its job.

On the other hand, some chemicals can cause faster metabolism: these are inducers. St John's wort is an example. It can cause a patient to receive a less than adequate dose due to too-rapid metabolism of a drug.

The cytochrome P-450 2D6 enzyme which is used to metabolise fluoxetine is subject to genetic variability. Up to 7% of "Caucasians" produce very small quantities of this enzyme, and are "slow acetylators." The ingested drug has a longer half-life, and so this group experiences enhanced pharmacological effects as a result of higher concentrations. One child was reported as dying from fluoxetine due to CYP2D6 genetic deficiency.

My doctor thinks this might be why I feel like I've been run over. So I'm on a dose of zero now to bring me back down to therapeutic levels within a week. Unfortunately my life is piling up. I have an inbox full of software support requests. Dropping the ball. So tired. I'm like a little kid who's stayed up too late: over-excited, and utterly exhausted. I'm like a wrinkled up jalapeño that's been abandoned for too long in the bottom of the refrigerator.