So, what did you do with your Christmas tree after Christmas?

Recycle it?  Toss it in the trash?  Cut it up for firewood?  Whatever it was, it was probably not what these guys did...

Today's the day!

Yes, I admit it.  I am an Apple fanboy.  As such, I will be keeping a close eye on what happens at their media event today where it's expected that Apple releases their long-awaited tablet computer.  Will they?  Won't they? I guess we'll know in a few hours (it starts at 11am Mountain)...

If you want to follow along, here are a few places to do so...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-tablet-latest-creation-event/

http://live.gizmodo.com/

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/apple-tablet-event/

http://live.slashgear.com/

http://theappleblog.com/live/

Easily shrink pictures for uploading or sending

I guess that's why they call the app "Shrink Pic." This utility is for those of you who do a lot of picture posting to your own blogs or sending via email or IM.

Basically, Shrink Pic automatically creates a temporary copy, resizes it and sends it instead.

For instance, the below picture's size on my hard drive is 450K. When I insert the picture into the post (which uploads it into my storage), Shrink Pic resizes it to 52K in my blog storage, saving me a lot of space for more pictures! I've only had Shrink Pic for a little while, but it seems to work great! One small caveat, though. Shrink Pic doesn't seem to work for me when sending from Outlook 2007 running on Windows 7. I'm going to contact the author to see what's going on since the website says it's supported.

Shrink Pic doesn't modify the original, nor does it seem to change it when moving pictures from folder to folder, even if it's something like my online DropBox account. By the way, did I tell you Shrink Pic is free? Even better!

for Windows, via LifeHacker

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Top 100 books for 2009

Here is USA Today's top 100 best-selling books for 2009.

So, what sticks out?  How about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series' books taking the #1 spot.   And #2.  And #3.  And #4.  Yeesh.  In fact, the entire boxed set came in at #70!  (Not to mention #19 with The Host)

My son's favorite series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, nails down #7, #8, #18, and #24.

And finally, vampires seem to have a hold on readers in general.  Charlaine Harris had nine books make the top 100, mostly about vampires along with P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast with six books.

What's your favorite?

How Great Thou Art!

"O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed."


The lyrics of that song came to mind as I viewed the following photograph.  Just pretty amazing.  In fact, it's now my desktop wallpaper.  You can get your own hi-res copy here.

For those of you who don't want to click through to the Bad Astronomy article (I highly recommend reading it), it's a picture from the Hubble telescope.  You know how you go outside on a dark night and look up and see all those stars, and then you keep looking at one spot for a few seconds and more stars appear?  Well, this is sorta like that.  They pointed Hubble at an "empty" area of space and let it gather in light for 48 hours.  48 hours!  How long can you keep your eyes open?  Anyway, what Hubble was able to capture is light from galaxies 13 Billion light-years away!  The article says that some of the light from these galaxies is "only" 600 million years after the Big Bang.

Oh, yeah, one more thing.  The width of this picture only covers about 1/15th the width of a full moon.  It would take 30 million of these pictures to cover the entire sky!

"Thy power throughout the universe displayed" indeed.

Twelfth Night Before Christmas...

This past Christmas, my son had to memorize Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas."  You probably know it better as "The Night Before Christmas."  In fact, the Wikipedia article states that it was actually published anonymously in 1823 and is only attributed to Moore.  But I digress...

The reason for this post is to update the poem a little.  At least update the interpretation based on what Google Voice thought it heard from a speaker.  And no, it's not me.  And I can't vouch for how good the author's English is.  I won't post the text here since I haven't gotten permission yet from the author or from Google Voice, but it's pretty funny really, especially where Santa calls out the reindeer names.  Read it here.

The 'military intelligence' oxymoron strikes again!

Who the heck would spend $4.5 million on a remote control plane and not spend enough to thwart a $26 software app that steals video feeds?  Oh, yeah, the U.S. Government...

Thanks to boingboing for pointing this out.