Does anyone know why we continue to celebrate Christmas on December 25th when the true meaning of the season isn’t shown until the rabid slaves of consumerism descend on stores in droves on the 26th? Just something I was thinking about. Happy Boxing Day week!

Or, for those of you who are picky about that sort of thing, Happy Holidays!

If you have a computer nearby tonight, you might want to check out the 2004 NORAD Tracks Santa website. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been tracking Santa for 50 years now, and if you ever wonder how it got started, the story is pretty amazing:

This is the 50th season that NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa. The tradition began after a Colorado Springs store’s advertisement for children to call Santa on a special “hotline” included a misprinted telephone number. Instead of Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.”

The Commander-in-Chief did some quick thinking and the rest is history! So yeah, check it out. And as cool as the service is, and as great as I think the idea is, their website could sure use some work. It looks like an old Geocities web page!

This afternoon Dickson and I took Sharon to see A Christmas Carol at the Citadel Theatre here in Edmonton. Not only was it kinda cool to do something so seasonally appropriate on Christmas eve, it was a very well done production!

I was quite impressed not only with the costumes and music, but with the stage! The stage and effects were amazing! There was a bed that rose out of the stage, snow falling from the ceiling, ghosts and goblins flying around, all sorts of things.

Now if only it would snow tomorrow 🙂

You know what’s yummy? Smothered fries, chicken strips, and mini burgers from Denny’s. I also didn’t realize how many people would be at Denny’s at 3:30 AM. Mind boggling, really! That is all.

I think I am becoming addicted to XBOX. Instead of writing the entire story on my blog, check out Andrew’s post here and here. My sleep patterns are completely shot, as are my eating patterns. Dinner at 3 AM and bedtime at 7 AM don’t work so well when you get up at noon to do it all over again! Fortunately the last two days/nights/whatever have also included many, many hours of work, so not all is lost!

I am posting this more for future reference, because if you use SuprNova or any of the other BitTorrent sites, you probably already know that they are now offline. Although the SuprNova site doesn’t give an explicit reason for why they are offline, it is likely because of the recent lawsuits launched by the MPAA:

“We do not know if SuprNova is going to return, but it is certainly not going to be hosting any more torrent links” to content, said a message posted over the weekend to the SuprNova site, which was no longer available Monday morning. “We are very sorry for this, but there was no other way, we have tried everything.”

When I first heard the news, I almost had a heart attack. SuprNova has become one of my favorite websites, but I guess that’s why they have been shut down – it was a favorite for too many people! Fortunately, it was not the only aggregator of BitTorrent files, and there are still many sites up and running. It’s also good to know that BitTorrent itself is just the plumbing, and will live on:

None of this means that BitTorrent is going away. The technology is already widely used in legal ways, such as to distribute games and versions of the Linux operating system. It saves the content publishers considerable money in bandwidth by deputizing their own customers to help in the distribution process.

I don’t know why the music and movie industries are attacking their users. If anyone at those two organizations had a brain they’d figure out a way to harness the file sharing technologies so that they can make some money off of it. Shutting down one or two or even three torrent file sites isn’t going to stop file sharing. What happened after they shut down Napster? Better technologies were created to take its place. Maybe the same will happen because of this attack:

SuprNova organizers have been working on a more decentralized version of BitTorrent called Exeem, according to peer-to-peer news site Slyck.com. No word on that project was available after the site’s closure.

Read: CNET News.com

Although I have been doing quite a bit of shopping over the last week or so, it finally hit me that Christmas is upon us. Maybe it’s because my sister left town for “home” today, back to the frozen north in Inuvik, NT. Maybe it’s because a bunch of us went out for dinner last nite to Earls, the last dinner before people leave for Christmas or celebrate with their families (pretty cool side note – the kitchen lost our order, and our food was delayed over an hour, so our bill was free). Or maybe it’s because I got my first present.

At dinner last night, Kimmi got me to open my present from her and Tom – a Crystal Edition XBOX! Hahaha I am now the proud owner of an XBOX. I played a little bit of Fable and Crimson Skies (the two included games) last night when we got home, and I have been playing Fable all morning so far. This is not looking good for my productivity!

Anyway, time for some work…watch for some BlogosphereRadio episodes later today!

I know not everyone is done exams yet, and this is kind of short notice, but we’re planning a dinner tomorrow night at Earls on Calgary Trail. If you want in, please RSVP as soon as you can, or just show up I guess! We are planning to meet at 6 PM, nothing fancy, just a group dinner before the holidays. Hope to see you there!

I certainly would have guessed wrong. Via Engadget, here is the list of the 100 oldest dot com domain names. Notably absent is Microsoft.com. Also, it’s pretty interesting to see how short most of the registrations were!