I haven’t posted much lately. I think it has something to do with the days which have become far too short. Today sunset was at 4:32 P.M. — way too early if you ask me. I might just start celebrating the Winter Solstice since I’m looking forward to longer days more than I am looking forward to presents under the tree.

I’ve been drinking way too much coffee lately, I’m quite sure that can’t be improving my mood. If I start seeing anything like this latte art staring at me from my coffee cup I’m certain I’ll immediately spill all over myself.

… and another thing, if I have to listen to any more debate about "Happy Holidays" versus "Merry Christmas", I’m going to tell them exactly where they can put their festivus pole.

I’ve got the bug to cook up holiday treats this year. I started by pestering some of my favorite cooks — begging them for their favorite holiday cookie recipes.

Last night I made "booze balls." This is not a malady; they are a variation of rum balls made with bourbon. I have to say they were pretty good.  

On Sunday I made ginger cookies which also turned out pretty good. There was some discussion of whether they should have been softer or crisper but somehow they all vanished from the coffee nook at work.

I rarely use the shuffle feature of my iPod.

I hit the shuffle recently out of curiousity since I kept noticing people posting these little top five lists on their blog. Here is what I got.

• Steady As She Goes – Li’l Cap’n Travis
• Cibavit Eos Ex Adipe Furmenti – Benedictine Monks
• No Time This Time – The Police
• Speaking of Fueled – Michelle Malone
• One Week – Barenaked Ladies

It wasn’t unlistenable, I guess …

… but it wasn’t nearly as good as my favorite playlist, "Not Recent, but Good". That playlist gives me  songs rated as 4 or 5 which haven’t been played in the last 30 days. That playlist rocks everytime. 

Predictably, people are talking the "keep the Christ in Christmas talk" which is followed by Young Joel‘s annual "keep the Saturn in Saturnalia talk."

Ironically enough, some churches are cancelling their Sunday morning service because Sunday happens to inconveniently fall on Christmas Day. You can read an article on it in the NYTimes. (Sorry you’ll have to register or something and this link will prolly only work for a week or so –talk to the NY Times about it.)

When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off

You can add my church to the list. Good thing people are used to Easter falling on a Sunday.

Reminds me I haven’t posted the link to the "Keep the Chan in Chanuka" t-shirt.

[Link Courtesy of The Revealer] 

Matthew’s godmother, Colleen, invited us to brunch on the 4th followed by a play. The play was “A Winnie-the-Pooh Christmas Tail” staged at the Stages Theater in Hopkins. The kids loved the performance and sat completely still during the play. Brunch was of course amazing. Colleen put on a brunch that could have served as an audition for having her own show on HGTV while simultaneously helping the kids with a craft project.

Here are some random bits for your web surfing pleasure. 

Aras wrote up a nice bit on his recent jury experience.

Here are some instructions on "How To Make A Hip End of the Year ‘Best Albums’ List". Whenever I make up a list like that I worry, will my friends think I’m cool after they read this list? Did I have at least on obscure hipster title in the list? Then I remember, they already know the truth — the indie movie or unknown cd in my list can’t possibly begin to fix my image.

This guy, Harry Eng, put a lot of impossibly sized, weird stuff into bottles. 

Microsoft Research has been putting out some interesting software lately. Groupbar is pretty cool. It allows you to create these application groups you can save and then restore later. In the end I don’t need yet another task bar. Snarf worked fine, but didn’t answer all the questions I have about my email corpus. The thread view is pretty cool. I don’t know why Outlook isn’t as slick in that regard. I really want to try the virtual wi-fi software. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Why do we rename really shabby streets after Martin Luther King? Here is a flickr pool of photos of different streets named after Dr. King. Here is a little more info about this project.

Worst analogies ever. 

Matthew read a book to me for the first time. He’s read words here and there for some time, but this was the first book he’s ever read cover to cover. I’m so proud I could burst my buttons.

Someone posted excerpts from a CIA Sabotage Manual on flickr — "designed to destabilise the nicaraguan government and economic system."

tax, originally uploaded by Mickie Flick.

I was really fascinated & amused by this until I slowly realized that my kids actually have a play book for their household destructiveness. Until today I had always chalked the destruction at home to lack of impulse control and youthful exuberance.  Now I realize they are a tiny but determined insurgency bent on my eventual overthrow.

I recently ran into the lovely term, "Architecture Astronauts." Joel Spolsky recently mentioned this lovely  term recently in reference to the hype surroundin Web 2.0 and the long ago hype surrounding P2P . I’ve had similar feelings although I never had such a neat term for it. I first had this sensation when I ran into material where people think we should re-organize the web into neat little ontologically correct collections where you can reliably search for synonyms and always get the one you meant and not the other one.

I’m always relieved when I realize that working code always wins out over complex but architecturally correct diagrams.

I installed a new firewall at home this weekend.

I had been using Smoothwall. I liked it when I first installed it, since it was flexible, linux based, easy to administer and had regular updates. Lately, though it seemed a bit like abandon-ware with very few updates. I decided to switch to the forked version of the smoothwall project, ipcop, mainly since the security updates seem to be more frequent.

I like ipcop much better. The interface is much easier to navigate and it seems better maintained. If you have a always on internet connection and an old PC you aren’t using you should try it.