Christmas is coming, Christ. That means tortuous weeks spent trying to find the perfect gift for an ever-growing circle of family, friends and acquaintances that have gifted you. Those bastards, now they’ll expect one! Fi on them!

This has never been easy for me. I hate giving token presents, they feel so shallow and thoughtless. Sure, the thirty dollar bauble from Pottery Barn is nice, but does it say anything other than “heck, I was willing to drop thirty bones on you”. Want another candle? Don’t think so.

So the search is on for meaningful presents – things that you have laughed over, obsessed about together, or anything that would cause instant delight. Super surprising is good and combine any of the above with real sweat and toil (aka homemade) and you have a jackpot present. In my short history on this planet, I think I may have hit two jackpots… maybe three. And I consider that pretty lucky.

As an aside, I thought this year maybe technology could aid me even more than last year. The internet has upped the odds of finding that perfect gift immensely, what with Froogle, countless buyer’s guides, shopping blogs and all that ilk. This time around, I went looking for a gift organizer and stumbled smack into Amazon’s service. Nice. I guess. I think it’s back to pencil and paper lists, one last time.

Back to the search, the flip-side to this rarity of triple-seven discoveries is the necessity of having to cope and find crappy, filler presents. This is the sole reason Brookstone exists. I also thought a trip to Macy’s in Herald Square would yield much, but that ended up a nightmare. It would make a great GTA level though.

Maybe I’ll see you out there this year. God speed my little gifters.

Radiohead dropped this the other day. Go look at it now.

No other band shaped my formative years as much. Driving home in the wee hours, I sometimes took the long way just to ensure that Fake Plastic Trees would finish.

Sure, I could get it for free, but their music has real worth to me. Heck, after buying the download, I’m starting to consider getting the box as well.

One of the very first things I do when inheriting a new computer is remap the Caps Lock key to an extra Control key. That makes Emacs less of an octave stretching exercise.

Thus it went, on my new iMac with its thin, fancy keyboard. But then I started making small mistakes in Emacs wherein the first modifier of a key sequence wouldn’t register. For example, C-x C-s == Save, but I’d often find that the C-x was completely missed. I just chalked it up to a soft implementation of the key and moved on, slowing myself down in Emacs so that I wasn’t making that mistake so much.

But now… an explanation emerges and it’s a brilliant bit of observation. Bravo.

Now I just need to find a way to get back my full speed Caps Lock/Control key…

The LimeSpot team blog is live and I’ve made my very first contribution. Yay!

Stay tuned for all things good and well. There and here. Here may even eventually be there. Spooky.

Before I recently plunked down for a spankin’ new aluminum-and-glass iMac, I was a proud Linux user. From Red Hat to Gentoo to Debian and finally Ubuntu, I had honed my Linux-fu, but more importantly I had become accustomed to zilch-cost software. Paying for code? You’re kidding, right?

All the best stuff on Linux is free free free: Firefox, OpenOffice, Amarok, Picasa w/ Wine (F-Spot… sigh). You’re an apt-get away from bliss.

But then I got a Mac.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love this thing. It’s bright and big and shiny and fun and satisfies that deep inner tech-fetish. But it’s a suck-hole for cash. First the 2G+ price tag and don’t forget the Protection Plan. Then the very healthy demo-ware scene takes its slice: SuperDuper, Transmit and Parallels. Soon I’ll be adding iWork and Leopard comes out at the end of the month? More sighing.

My solution is daydreaming about my own thirty dollar Mac application that somehow bankrolls me for the next ten-or-so years. I was thinking a Design Your Own Tattoo app – harness the power of the built-in iSight and it draws tattoos right on your body! Piercings coming in version 2!

To the middle manager who wouldn’t let my mother come and see her first grandchild in the hospital because he needed the help on the weekend…

To all the employees who couldn’t find it in their hearts to cover her shifts so that she could witness new life…

To all managers everywhere who see their employees as resources, as cogs instead of people…

To the living dead, who care more about facts and figures than family and friends…

To the jerk-offs that find pleasure in wielding power over others’ lives…

Fuck you.