Merry Christmas! Check out this short video of Holden playing part of the song he is writing. He is playing on his new Ibanez RG120 that he got for Christmas. Pretty impressive if you ask me (but I’m biased). That is his little sister yelping in the background while playing a video game.

Here, for your viewing pleasure is a very shaky video of the youth choirs at my church performing this past Sunday evening. My tripod is a piece of junk so I pulled the camera off and… well you see the result. One of these days I’m gonna get me one of them there fancy tripods. Holden is playing the drumset and Lizzy is singing in the first choir. Wendy is singing in the second choir and she hates those robes! Just FYI. I’m using a very cool Wordpress plugin by Alex Rabe to manage the video on this site.

We decorated our Christmas tree this year (for the first time) the week after Thanksgiving. Pictured to the left is the first time. There were a few lights out (more than usual) while Holden and I were putting them on. I decided we would go ahead with it and replace the burned out bulbs later (stupid idea). A couple days later a couple more sections went out, the next day a couple more. Within a week, this is the pile of lights that had gone out. After searching all over our town and the next town for plain ole clear white lights, I finally found some. I purchased nine boxes thinking that would be more than enough. Three quarter of the way up the tree Holden is putting on the last box and guess what? When he plugged them in half of the string wont come on. Oh but wait, we have two whole strings of lights that still work from the original decorating only a week ago, lets use them. Well now only one of those string work. ARGH! Did I mention that we had to remove everything from the tree and start over to put on the new lights? Man, I tired of working on that tree. Hopefully now it will stay on until Christmas. (note to self, buy lights for next year while they are on sale after Christmas)

For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa. The tradition began after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. store advertisement for children to call Santa on a special “hotline” included an inadvertently misprinted telephone number. Instead of Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.” The Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, received the first “Santa” call on Christmas Eve 1955. Realizing what had happened, Colonel Shoup had his staff check radar data to see if there was any indication of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Indeed there were signs of Santa and children who called were given an update on Santa’s position. Thus, the tradition was born.

Romania-based software firm InterAKT has been acquired by Adobe. InterAKT is responsible for many Dreamweaver extensions and the Eclipse based editor for JavaScript. It looks like Adobe is really getting behind the Eclipse platform. Great news! You can download JSEclipse from Adobe Labs. Read more here