2 words that are now synonymous with "Happy Holidays" - I first read about the uproar over SpyGate via Stephen's NewsTrolls service. Then, I've heard it several times since then on American TV networks. On freaking TV.

So, an "elected" president apparently tramples the constitution, giving the nod for government agencies to spy on citizens just in case they might be doing something bad - without the need for judicial review or approval. And, that's being acknowledged by Bush's own people as an impeachable offence - with the story broken in the Traditional Media by the New York Times.

They completely reworked how uploaded files are handled in WordPress 2.0 - they're now put into folders by date to keep things nice and clean. Very nice touch. And thumbnails are automatically generated and linked if requested as well. Very cool. If it works, here's a screenshot of the image upload form from WP 2.0...

First, you upload a file:

Thanks to Josh, I took what I promise to be my last mindless personality quiz of 2005.

Ouch. I was sure I'd be a geek or dweeb or something like that. I did spend a few minutes to slightly clean up the painfully bad HTML generated by the quiz... (finally resorted to a screenshot of the tweaked output, because even that hurt to paste into my blog)

The Calgary-Vancouver game just ended. Holy. Crap. What a great game. I kept thinking "Man, this is the best game I've seen so far this year!" It was fast, back-and-forth all over the ice. Few stupid penalties. Fights, and fast, physical play. Awesome saves on both ends. Kipper was on freaking fire - whatever he's getting paid, he deserves more.

Chris Simon's goal was absolutely beautiful. He made an impossible interception of a pass, then kicked the puck forward from his trailing skate, giving him a clean path to the net. First goal in something like 16 games, IIRC, and was he stoked about it.

Again, lots of interesting photos (and in this case, diagrams as well) on Flickr.

In yet another flip-flop in my preferences for primary applications, I just switched to Vienna 2 as my RSS/Feed aggregator. It's basically an Open Source clone of NetNewsWire. NNW kinda turned sour for me when it was bought out and the .Mac etc... features got tossed in the trash can.

Vienna is a nice app - it's a native Cocoa app, so it runs spanky fast. It uses the SQL Lite database, so it's pretty speedy - and there's a chance I could write something to do something useful with the database if I really wanted to.

Lamest. Game show. Ever.

Not even the pretense of requiring skill or intelligence. Pick a bunch of random numbers, and try not to be a bumbling greedhead. About as much of a "game" as Keno or Bingo. All you have to do is pay attention (a little). And the "banker"? Just some clown sitting in front of a simple odds calculator to give Howie a chance to ham for the cameras.

I'm packing it in until the new year, so officially signing off (yeah, right) for a little while. I hope everyone has a great [INSERT REASON HERE] holiday season!

It's been a big year for me. Lots of ups and downs, but I think I came out of this one ahead. Trying not to make a self-absorbed self-congratulatory post, but wanted to document some of the highlights. I usually forget the lowlights as part of my coping mechanism...

Bear with any barfage over the next few minutes. The upgrade went well on my desktop copy of the blog, so here goes a live update. Whee!

Update: Had a few moments of "oh, crap." when the WP back end stopped letting me in. Running /wp-admin/upgrade.php again, and nuking the cookies from my browser appear to have fixed that (but there is a "Bad request: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Request header field is missing colon separator." error message showing up in this editing form, and no "media" section is showing up... Uh, oh...

Well, iDoom, anyway. Finally got around to installing iDoom on my 3G iPod, and man, it plays nice. Surprisingly, it's about as snappy as the original game was on the smoking fast 486 DX 66 I played it on back at the Alberta Science Centre...

I was surprised that it doesn't use the scrollwheel to control movement - seems like it would be perfect for steering the little Doomer...

The "Performancing" folks just released a plugin for Firefox that provides a fully featured weblog editor, ala Flock. I'm trying it out now - it appears to talk to WordPress OK (well, if this made it to the blog, that is).

It appears to have a decent WYSIWYG editor, but the image embedding doodad doesn't seem to have an upload utility - so I think you have to manually upload an image and then paste the URL into the image widget. Not fatal, but an "easy" improvement to the plugin. (I know, "easy" is oversimplifying it, since the plugin is aimed at being platform agnostic, so you'd have to have special cases for WP, MT, Blogger, etc...)

Thanks to a tip/nudge from Cole, I've added a way to subscribe to just the podcasts from this blog, with a super happy fun link that triggers iTunes directly (and a less super happy fun one that just gives the URL so you can copy/paste to other podcatchers).

Links are in the sidebar of the blog, or through the wondrous powers of command+C command+V, right in this post.

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