Welcome to ned Productions

Wednesday 5th May 2010: 5.00pm. Rather like in the last entry, the last three months feel more like six! Which I suppose is probably a good thing in a way, but I do feel quite tired-in-a-way-sleep-can't-cure sort of way. Right now I am on a three day break from working on the extended Applied Research Associates contract in order to catch up on all the many, many things that need doing (writing this entry being one of them), and I must admit to looking forward to contract completion at the end of May. With me being as busy this past three months as I have been, I haven't progressed much with the website shop and the content filtering boxes are still lying in stock untouched. At this rate of progress I may just have to sell them on eBay at a loss seeing as I start my next Masters in Autumn (but more on that shortly).

After the last entry I knew that I had a few weeks before I'd have to really start digging in again during the PhD funding applications, so having seen the outstanding metascore on Metacritic giving an average of all reviews rating of 94% for a game called Mass Effect 2 (you can see the list of top games on the PC of all time according to average review score here where Mass Effect 2 is currently the eighth best game ever) I ummed and awed for a while, and then made the purchase mainly because Amazon were doing a deal for £15 and I figured it was worth the punt. I ummed and awed mainly because I wasn't sure if it would be my kind of game - for example, Half Life 2 is at the top of that list of best games of all time and I got bored of that game after about three levels of it and I never played it again - too much running around through padded out eternities between the good bits for me. I worried that as a mostly story driven game with strong role playing elements that it really wouldn't be my cup of tea, but then I thought Grand Theft Auto IV outstanding even if it had tedious boring sections (like too much driving around), and indeed just last night I purchased its extended missions off Amazon because they'll be way better than most of the gaming dross out there (e.g. Prototype, a real waste of a great concept). Just as so you know, I am a 1990s style gamer who gets bored very quickly unless I am repeatedly and very frequently wowed - my idea of the greatest game ever is Duke Nukem 3D which is so good that I play it on impossible difficulty without cheating. That's how much I like Duke Nukem - I don't cheat. And there hasn't been a game since Half Life 1 which I have played through without cheating (I cheated heavily in GTA IV, because I couldn't be arsed driving around in anything less than ultra fast and I couldn't be arsed worrying about guns and ammo or money).

Anyway, I am very glad that I did buy Mass Effect 2. It's an outstanding game, though it does suffer from major failings such as a stupid boring resource collection system which made me immediately go find a cheat to bypass it, and it's riddled with boring repetitive puzzle minigames which I just skip entirely when it's possible. There is also a major omission of ship fighting, so you're in this ship in which you can physically wander around talking to people and for which you're constantly buying upgrades but you never get to pilot it in a full on space battle which left me feeling quite underwhelmed. However what it's good at it definitely is very good at, and at times it really does feel like a sweeping, epic and cinematic movie experience but it's interactive because you choose the dialogue, direction and story. Even though the graphics are for ancient 2006 hardware (thank the consoles for that!), you still get that prettiness and wow factor when the camera pans round onto some sweeping vista because the graphic designers have cleverly combined low quality textures (e.g. the clothes) with high quality ones (e.g. the faces), and I suppose at least old computers can play this game just fine. The story and settings sometimes reminds you of being in the old Star Wars movies or Babylon 5 in its galactic sweep and breadth, especially the way you can just hop off your ship arbitrarily onto any one of dozens of planets and space stations. In short, I am impressed!

Here's the first ten minutes of the game in 720p HD, complete with your old ship getting attacked and your character walking through a hatch and suddenly finding themselves in a blown out part of the ship looking into space with debris floating around - I went like, wow!, isn't it amazing what you can still do with what is very obviously four year old graphics technology? And yes, it is Martin Sheen who voices the guy who is smoking - they have an all star voice cast, including lots of famous actors.

One of the more interesting features in the game is the ability to design what you look like at the start (male or female too), so needless to say I went with the cutest and hottest girl I could cook up in the face designer and whom you can see in her informal wear on the right and in her uniform on the left (you can change clothes any time you like in the game). It took quite some time to get her right, but I'm fairly proud of her look and she's definitely easy on the eye during playing the game where she'll be in each and every scene. I will apologise right now for the general darkness of the photos and the way she looks waxy - I grabbed them by literally finding an illuminated place in the game, taking a screenshot and cutting her out.

<rant mode on>

I will also say now that I am appalled at how it is still impossible in 2010 to contour flow text on a webpage around two side by side images on the same page. Even by using the old "CSS position absolute and use invisible divs to block out the space" trick! It works with one image, but not more than one where it will cause the second image to go too high and get overwritten by text because the browser calculates absolute default coordinates for absolute things before adjusting them for floats. In other words, the top image's divs consume space which pushes the text lower than it ought to be, and it doesn't shove the second absolutely positioned image down along with everything else because the second set of floats interfere with the first set thanks to the block elements in between. And you can't just add an offset because the amount of shove required varies according to screen width, so you'd need some javascript to calculate it for you. Gee, isn't that just great!

So I fell back how you'd do it in the 1990s by manually splitting the images into horizontal sections and then floating them to the side. Slicing images sucks, but at least we don't get text being overwritten. Even then the stupid CSS box model shows itself, because the source HTML specifies that they ought to be side by side. Are they side by side on YOUR web browser right now? No! CSS can only float things of equal height to both left and right at once, so above you can see it drops the left hand image so it's just above the bottom of the right hand image, so where the HTML says side by side you're getting the left one next to this paragraph instead. It's a shame really - with HTML5's new canvas element we finally can programmatically access arbitrary images from javascript within the browser, and then reflow the text on the fly - as indeed the jQSlickWrap jQuery plugin does. But javascript is just as hamstrung as anything else by the broken CSS box model and to avoid the same problem above it would still have to manually offset it whenever the page was resized.

Why they don't just add the CSS "float contour" property already is beyond me as it's been a proposal since 1996, then this VERY common problem of wrapping text around non-rectangular images would be finally fixed. But hey there's standards for you .

</rant mode off>

So, that was much of my month of February. Around the start of March I got a phone call from social welfare who informed me that I had reached the end of yet another processing queue, and that very shortly I would be processed and finally I'd get my dole including nine months of backpay. Could I supply him with a letter from UCC indicating when my studies finished? Sure I said. He then asked if I'd had any work in the past nine months. I said a few hours here or there, not much. He asked me to send him a list of what hours and when, so I did.

Well seeing as it is now May and coming up to the one year anniversary of when I applied for the dole, I guess me being honest was a bad move because obviously I have got myself stuck into yet another processing queue and who knows when I now might exit that. It's actually become a non sequitur now because you no longer make any assumptions as to when you might get it, so I have stopped borrowing money off anyone other than Megan for the simple reason that I no longer have a clue as to when I will be able to repay. I even managed to repay my sister her amount actually, though God knows how I'm going to raise the tuition fees for the Masters in Research I intend to start in September.

Ah yes, the MRes! I spent a large chunk of March and April preparing various formulations of this online funding inquiry for the John Templeton Foundation and other grant making bodies in which I (or rather my proposed supervisor) requests approx. €50k to fund the research part of my intended PhD which is entitled A study of the strategic and policy implications of modelling organisations using the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP). The hope is to reach the second stage of funding application which we'll find out at the end of this month - the IFQ stage has a 90% rejection rate on its own, so if we get to second stage we have a 50/50 chance thereafter of moving forward. The research component is scheduled to start from Sept 2011, and yes it would be in Helsinki in Finland as there is an expert in the topic there called Arto Annila who has gone far beyond the pale in helping me out so far.

So what happens between now and then? Well, I got me some research methods to get yet another bit of paper in, and it's currently looking like the Masters in Social Research Methods with the University of London External system which is the original distance degree programme having started all the way back in 1858 under Royal Charter. Their system is quite unlike the Open University's in that they hand you a reading list and then you turn up for the exams in May in which you sit exactly the same exams as their normal full time students, and the entire lot are marked together so there is no chance of being treated more favourably. Unlike the OU which very much spoon feeds you, with the London External system you're on your own. Their failure rate, needless to say, is rather high but the lack of spoon feeding appeals greatly to me.

So the theory goes as follows: if I get the PhD funding, then I complete the training examinations of the MRes but stop short of the thesis, thus earning me a Postgrad Diploma and then I finish next summer and am ready to go to Helsinki. If I don't get the PhD funding, then I carry on with the MRes thesis and I get me my third Masters degree which, as the MRes is ESRC recognised, will allow me to jump straight into the OU's PhD programme without having to take their research methods training which sucks down three years on its own. Either way, Niall gets his PhD by 2013 whereupon he will be the sombre age of thirty-five! And, weirdly enough, I'd actually be one year younger than if I'd got that paid PhD studentship at UCC last Christmas!

So, so far so good for my primary resolution of 2010! All that PhD stuff took me up to the middle of April as the submission deadline was the 16th. This schedule was not helped by needing to visit the North with my sister as we annually do at Easter whereupon we discovered that Grandpa's house needs quite a bit of maintenance doing which is hardly surprising considering, so I'll need to zip up there for a few days this summer. Furthermore, ARA came back with a further contract at the start of April which at the time, to be honest, surprised me because I thought they were going to let it slide. Given my other time pressures at that time, I had no choice but to politely ask that they wait until the end of April, so after the 16th I took a day or two to do things like mow the lawn and other necessities, and then I launched into a fairly gruelling seven day week to try and get a first alpha to them by the end of April - which I succeeded in doing. Weirdly, when I submitted my invoice to them last Monday I realised that I had only worked a cumulative total of just seventy hours (i.e. 8.75 days) over fourteen days, which at the time felt impossible as I was utterly exhausted.

I guess that's because in a normal job in the Anglo-Saxon world most workers only work half the time unless there is something like a conveyor belt forcing their pace. This is why in France they have such high marginal work productivity, because if you only spend thirty hours at work then you still work more or less the same as you do in the Anglo-Saxon sixty hour week. The difference of course is that in France you pay them much less as they spend much less time at work, so you get fuller employment and a population who isn't too knackered to kick up fusses and get upset about stuff which is both a good and bad thing. Much of Management theory is all about finding supposedly new ways of getting people to sustainably work even 1-2% harder, and whoever finds even a statistically significant sustained productivity improvement will become the next management guru earning millions in consulting and speaking fees.

In my mind, in the knowledge industry at least, there are very, very few workers who can indefinitely sustain more than four hours of actual work a day each and every day. I have noticed a huge amount of people faffing around, or browsing the internet, or simply walking around the office in a slow moving but giant loop talking to anyone who will listen, or doing anything to look like they are being productive when they're not. Even in high end finance, a lot of what is presented as work - a very good example is client meetings where you're all dressed up in fancy suits - is in fact faffing around and yet another way of marking down time. I bet that if you added up the time which actually contributes to the bottom line, you'd find a fairly universal ceiling of an average of four hours per day in any knowledge industry.

I have noted that I am hardly alone in making this observation. It appears to be particularly noted in computer programming, and it is also well known that the number of hours you can sustain drops as you age up to the point where there isn't much point being a computer programmer anymore. Still, the management ethos of the Western world has no formalised conceptualisation of any of this yet, and it still treats knowledge workers as some kind of atypical factory worker which must be specially mollycoddled, but otherwise driven to schedule and treated as a readily substitutable unit just the same. My PhD research topic is intended to begin the development of "an Econophysics of Organisation", so perhaps using such modelling tools as MEPP we might enable managers to some day be a bit more sophisticated in their approach to knowledge based organisations?

Well we can but hope I suppose. Anyway, I have a raft of academic papers to wade through next, so I shall be off. I hope that this entry finds you all well and happy! Be happy!

Wednesday 3rd February 2010: 5.42pm. So much for my birthday entry being anywhere near my birthday! Still, being two weeks late is not that bad considering the three month gap before the last entry I guess ... and I have been oh so busy since the last entry. Firstly we had that great freeze in Ireland (and indeed Europe) which effectively extended everyone's Christmas holidays by quite a bit, and because everyone was marooned in their houses not a lot happened for anyone at all really. Our water got cut off because the mains water pipe froze, but we weren't as badly off as a lot of people who had been cut off due to pipes bursting - for a long time now Ireland has had some of the leakiest water pipes in Europe with more than half our water going into the soil. No one's that bothered - we're blessed with lots of fresh water, indeed often too much fresh water due to us cutting down all the trees surrounding the upstreams of our rivers such that our rivers and towns get frequently flooded much as happened very severely before Christmas when most of Cork city and western Ireland got submerged. Anyway, by the time we got to my birthday everyone had just about got back to work and stuff started moving. My main preoccupation at that time was putting together my company's first annual return, and thanks to the assholes at Microsoft we first had to find a replacement for Microsoft Accounting 2009 which they had suddenly retired without warning. That meant evaluating a series of ERP and accounting packages which sucked up a week or so. I eventually plumped for the almost unknown but very highly respected VT Transaction+ which has garnered rave reviews from small business in the UK for years now, but it was not an easy choice at all.

Most UK and Irish small business uses Sage which royally sucks as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use it will tell you. Sage is extremely expensive for what it does, it has an appallingly bad user interface, it is extremely unintuitive, it causes anyone using it to mostly spend their time ripping out their hair and cursing it - and best of all, its more recent SME editions have dropped multi-currency support which is jaw dropping in the European context. There are others such as MYOB, but Sage bought them not too long ago so I don't have high hopes for its future. The other big contender is QuickBooks, but they suffer from an idiotic business plan where they lure you in with time-bombed features in cheaper editions which suddenly expire and then it demands a paid upgrade to start working again. Before you know it, you're handing over two thousand euro a year for a package which does what you need and moreover, they basically did a Mafia extortion on you.

Those are the two big boys, and both are rubbish options. Both vendors deserve to go out of business for their ethics and the shoddy quality of their products. If you do any internet research at all, you will quickly wonder how the hell they ever get any new customers - but then again I guess most new business owners never bother researching the internet before they buy because you can do one hell of a lot better than either Sage or QuickBooks AND for a lot less money.

This leaves a SME ERP solution - ERP systems are basically an operating system for a company, so they tell each worker what to do and when to do it and the ERP system (is supposed to) manages everything else such as the accounts and stock levels. I evaluated two options for an ERP solution: (i) Adempiere, probably the most featured open source ERP currently available and (ii) Interprise Suite, because they offer a free one user licence. These two were chosen for evaluation because they both supported European VAT and multi-currency - both are absolute necessities for an Irish company as we tend to do a lot of importing and exporting - which almost every other solution I could find on the internet doesn't do. Boy do I miss Microsoft Accounting! They had such a great product for its price .

Both of these solutions were very good - both had all the right features and both were well implemented. Interprise had a much better user interface as it runs as a native application on Windows whereas Adempiere has a nasty Java/Web interface. Adempiere, like so many open source applications of its kind, required an awful lot of setting up and lengthy configuration - so much so it got discounted because of it. Interprise had pre-written templates which did almost all of the config for you, thereafter it was just lots of tweaking. What put me off Interprise was that the demo/single user edition they supplied was last updated in 2007 - hardly boding well given the extensive changes to VAT rules since 1st Jan 2010 (and precisely why everyone had to drop Microsoft Accounting so quickly), and I got the feeling that they'd hardly be bending over to support a single-user licence like myself. And besides, I had a natural aversion to getting into bed with another company who wasn't 110% committed to the product - I didn't want to have to do another Microsoft Accounting style migration as trust me, migrating between accounting systems is painful.

So in the end I went with VT Transaction+ which is not an ERP solution, it's just a simple accounting program. However it costs just £200 a year as compared to £1700 or so for Sage/QuickBooks or £1000 or so a year for Interprise, plus it has full support for VAT, multi-currency and it has really good Excel export so it spits out a very nice properly formatted set of accounts in Excel ready for submission. Having purchased the software, I then fully migrated the accounts, hacked at the templates to fudge the UK accounting format into the Irish standards (thankfully the regulatory standards are similar, it's just that all the laws have different names for obvious reasons) and finally submitted my annual return today!

Meanwhile, throughout all these fun and games I also finished the contract with ARA which took another twenty-three hours this past month, though I only had the NTE for twenty hours but I like to finish a job properly. And lastly, mainly because I've had a VPS sitting in Los Angeles doing nothing since November, I finally rented a VPS in Atlanta and implemented a geo-directing DNS server such that nedproductions.biz and other hosted sites now use their local server rather than having to go to Europe all the time which is really very neat. Who knows, soon I might even be in a position to start selling Plone webspace at long last (I need to finish configuring the shopping cart first)!!!

So, I am now thirty-two years old, and as always in the birthday post it's time to look back on another year of life. This is what I have done this past year:

• Escaped the BIS Masters in UCC
  Looking back on it now I can't believe how much I hated that course or indeed that entire academic year. I disliked academia enough in St. Andrews, but at least they generally weren't as pig ignorant of their own field, and moreover my time in St. Andrews was made worth it by all the non-academic stuff going on which, much like in Hull, was the real education. That real education was non-existent during my time in UCC, and so it was nothing but bad all the way through, not helped by the chip on the shoulder which most Cork people have anyway towards anyone with talent.
  
  I am extremely glad to not be doing that anymore. It didn't help that I was mentally and physically absolutely exhausted after St. Andrews and simply no longer in the mood for any of that bullshit. I have been deliberately taking ten to twelve hour sleeps each night since last summer and my overall health and wellbeing has massively improved. When I look into the mirror I no longer see anything like the lines on my face or dark bags under my eyes and I no longer wonder to myself if I might have cancer. When I compare me now to photos from the end of St. Andrews, I literally look five years younger. I feel about ten years younger though, and it's great!
  
  Now all that said I did meet some good people during my time in UCC, and the prize money from the Enterprise Ireland competition kept both myself and Megan alive for nearly four months. For the prize money alone I think the BIS Masters was probably worth it overall, and I suppose it's an extra arrow to my bow for the foreseeable future. Winning the prize certainly sounds good - in the interviews I've done since you can see them being noticeably impressed. It's funny how people value such things. So overall, I think that I will remember the 2008/2009 academic year as being rather like my year at Trinity College Dublin: not a lot of fun at all, but an edifying experience which stands to you in the long run even though it shouldn't if there were any justice in the world.
  
  
• Set up my own company
  I have dreamed of setting up my own company and working for myself ever since my experiences working in EuroFighter where I saw that the contractors were the guys on top of the pile, and while I was working sixty hour plus weeks, I was being paid for thirty-five and therefore getting an equivalent of €7/hour after tax. Meanwhile they were being paid €50/hour upwards with time and quarter overtime when management fucked up and made you work late. Had I been an IT contractor at that time I would have been earning €80/hour given it was pre-IT bubble burst. I suppose it helps a lot that the lads I grew up with all started their own businesses, plus my mother's family were entrepreneurial, but I really have to admit that I particularly value the ability to work on what I want when I want, and if one day I wake up and I don't feel like working then I don't have to.
  
  Moreover, let's face it: I have a personality which many people find disagreeable, and I also find working with many people stressful because they don't give a toss about doing their best. Not having to work with such people, or when I do they are paying me for their screwups, well I find that very pleasant indeed. I don't mind at all someone wasting my time if €100 is going into my hand .
  
  I guess what I mean to say is that I have a value inside my head of what my time is worth to me, and I strongly object to working any job where my time is not similarly valued by my employer. Because I value my liberty so much, I have a fairly high valuation of my time - sufficiently high that most ordinary jobs won't pay such a figure to someone as young as myself. Therefore, for someone of my age, the only route to such high marginal earnings has to be self-employment.
  
  Anyway, I last tried to form my own company after returning from Spain back when I was trying to commercialise Tn with venture capital funding. Without the backing I decided not to proceed, but had I not gone to St. Andrews then I definitely would have formed my own company. Well now I have, and while I haven't made much money yet I am hoping to report large profits this time next year!
  
  
• We survived!
  For much of this past year I fretted about how I was going to feed myself and Megan - indeed, for much of the last eighteen months we had between two and four months worth of money to go before we were destitute. It is truly a horrible feeling because you never truly relax - and no, social welfare has still not paid out though I am glad to report that my dole application has left the Dublin processing queue and has entered the Cork processing queue, so the welfare office currently think it'll probably be a full year from application to payout. Hopefully they will backpay me in full because I am now about €4000 in debt!
  
  We have been immensely lucky in hindsight. Firstly things like the car haven't spectacularly broken down or anything bad and unexpected happen like an accident or sickness. Even in the positive sense things have gone well when they might have not, such as us both passing our driving tests okay which was great as hitherto we were driving illegally, and it was a great relief to be finally actually covered by our €1000/year insurance. Secondly on every occasion when the bank balance started to enter the "fumes remaining only" level something unexpected has magically appeared in the nick of time e.g. the Enterprise Ireland prize money, the ARA contract or indeed Megan's work permit to name but a few.
  
  Between all of these we have finally become financially okay for these last three months, and I no longer fret about everything suddenly crashing down. In fact if things continue well we may even take a small holiday this summer, nothing fancy but nevertheless a major step up.

I think that those three things are the most significant accomplishments of my past year from my present perspective. I do wish that I had got my PhD rolling, but it was not for a lack of applications made or effort invested. I haven't done much on rolling my own PhD in the past few weeks given my busyness, but now that the ARA contract is cleared, the accounting systems migrated, the Annual Return filed and the geo-targeting DNS server implemented, I am hoping to dedicate two days per week into it and writing my Economics study book. For the other four days per week I need to get a shopping cart implemented, then I can start selling my content filtering boxes of which I have three already built and in stock below as well as selling general Plone web hosting and services.

So, so far so good! Let us once again hope that 2010 is our best year yet! Be happy!

Sunday 3rd January 2010: 4.28pm. Wow, some three months have passed and it's suddenly 2010! Has this been the longest break in virtual diary entries in twelve years? I think so. And yet again when I consider what I have done since the last entry, I know that I did loads of stuff but I can't quite think of any of it. What I have done recently is fix the "All Things Niall" Feed which had broken itself because Yahoo Pipes simply isn't working properly anymore and apparently they aren't going to fix it, so I wrote up some PHP which munges together all the feeds and outputs a combined feed which works nicely: this "blog" (I prefer "virtual diary") as it appears on Facebook and LinkedIn and many other sites, is now working again.

I went to the US for Thanksgiving in late November with Megan's family, then went travelling around Europe visiting people I'm still in contact with (and my apologies to those of you who weren't close enough to my line of travel this time round) which lasted until just before Christmas. My travels were hardly boring: I managed to fall severely out with Johanna over a matter of ideology, and we are no longer in regular contact at my insistence. Most sad. I am very upset about it.

The Christmas break seemed longer than usual this year in the sense that I haven't done any useful work since returning home until yesterday - partially the fault of how the weekends fell this year, but also a determined attempt to have a proper holiday break this year considering that the prior two Christmases were spent writing essays or other coursework which did not aid the holiday spirits! I suppose also that I am hoping for 2010 to be the start of a whole raft of new endeavours now that the company is established and trading with a hopefully viable business model, Megan has permission to stay and work in Ireland indefinitely and now we just need to kick off the next round. I finally went ahead and purchased an exercise bike - the outdoors proved too cold and inconvenient to incorporate into my daily schedule, and the PhD I was invited to apply for at UCC researching Federated Autonomic Trust Management did not come through for me which was a surprise given my superb background experience in that area - I had been anticipating walking in each day from a remote car park and that way gaining the needed exercise. Either way I recognise that my cardiovascular system isn't maintaining itself with zero effort any more - as I age it appears to need increasing maintenance much as with my gums where flossing has become very necessary as otherwise they recede (i.e. gum disease!).

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I finally got around to erecting a proper company website for ned Productions Limited which is now listed on the navigation bar on the left and I also did some purchasing of stock and setting up of a shopping cart system such that internet users can buy stuff - probably Untangle boxes rather like this guy who beat me to it but thankfully he's US and dollar centric. During the latter end of October and the start of November I wrote a series of economic policy articles for the Irish progressive think-tank TASC copies of which I have placed on the neo-capitalism website as the last one was too radical for them to publish so they silently dropped me. I do remember doing some more work on nedmalloc for ARA and indeed I still have some loose ends to tie up there during the next few weeks, and hopefully before the end of January I'll release a beta of nedmalloc as it has so many new features. Social welfare still hasn't paid out which at six months now is breathtaking, but at least they owe me at least five grand now which is good since once again I will run out of money at the end of January. I also have the end of year tax and accounts filing for the company which must be lodged very shortly in a tax efficient manner i.e. cue me trudging through the Irish tax code.

Lastly, this year I will either get a PhD started or get that summaries of Economics papers book written. One or the other: failure to accomplish either is unacceptable now that the company is generating money though it will take some time before I can leave welfare support given the current economic climate. For the PhD, it all depends on obtaining research funding for which I firstly need a willing PhD supervisor - and that alone I have thus far failed to accomplish, but I am slowly getting closer.

Next entry will be in just a few weeks time: my annual "summary of the past year" post which I do around my birthday when I will turn thirty-two! Until then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!