Well it’s back home now and why not give my blog a new name. The title bye for now no longer seems appropriate now that I’ve returned to Canada. I suspect a lot less people will care – including myself – about what I write now that I’m not traveling. So I’m basically going to write what I’m up to in the next while including Christmas and New Years.

Christmas I’m spending at home this year. Last year I was in Jaca, Spain and, even though it was not with my family, it was still really fun. It was with my second family that was established in Scotland at Castle Rock hostel in Edinburgh. We did a small gift exchange and I experienced a few things I hadn’t before. Midnight Mass. Caroling. And, primarily, Christmas without my real family.

New Years Eve last year was in Edinburgh. There is a festival called Hogmanay every year and it’s pretty mad. We rung in the New Year on Princes Street with thousands of other people counting down, screaming, drinking and enjoying a copious amounts of fireworks exploding in any direction you were facing. This year I will be in Vegas with a few close friends and I imagine it will be similar to to the last time we were in Vegas, but with tens of thousands of extra people. I can’t say I’m not excited for it, but I’m also not expecting it to be much different than last time I was there, which will be good, because I had a blast.

I’d like to close with saying I bought a Macbook Pro. I didn’t really need a new laptop, but I decided it was time to make a point to Microsoft and companies that sell laptops packaged with Vista (Like Dell). I no longer want to use Microsoft Vista as my operating system. It is horrible and it is time for a change. Windows XP was by far the best operating system Microsoft has ever released and Vista is a joke in comparison. I don’t suspect I will be buying another PC with a Microsoft operating system again. I also don’t suspect I will ever buy a desktop computer again. As I game less and less, I find that PCs are too hard to maintain for the 1 or 2 games I’m interested in per year. Besides Vista is basically trying to mimic Mac’s OS X, so why not just use what they are trying to copy?