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Wii should be friends.

Now that the time for giving gifts has finally passed, I can share with you, good people of the internet, the Holiday Joy that was brought into my home this year via the magical Web site where you sell handmade things Etsy.com.

Marvel at the Mighty Cthulhuclaus Ornament!

He is the reason for the season! On cold, clear nights, when the stars are just right, children fall asleep with visions of merry elder gods dancing through their heads, hoping against hope that betentacled Cthulhuclaus, eyes sparkling, bedecked with festive red cap, will slither through their window and consume them utterly before going on to destroy the earth.

This fine seller was kind enough to make me a second ornament after the first one arrived with some minor tentacle damage. Three Cheers for Cthulhumas!

Second, you shall gaze your eyes upon something that Jenifer sent me an email on day. "Can you believe someone would make something so ridiculous?" Of course, I bought it. And it was the hit of the Christmas Party.

"Hi, I'm Georgina. I just love ladybugs. Also baked beans! I didn't used to like baked beans though. When I was a little Random Character Thing my mom tried to get me to eat them. I refused because I thought they were ugly and smelled bad. But then she told me that SNOW WHITE eats baked beans and from then on I have been in love with them. In fact, I call them 'Snow White' beans."

All hail LadyRayCello, maker of things!

Indeed, it was a very Etsy Christmas this year. I'm afraid that it might be even more so come this time next year, especially if the quality of the products continues to be so great. Great store, Etsy! Love it!

Click To Play

Here's a little Holiday video for you all. Merry Christmas!

We've been battling supercolds and prepping for Christmas Celebrations of all sorts. 'Twas discussed earlier amongst the Web414ers on Twitter: The True Nightmare Before Christmas is the state the house is left in while prepping for the holidays.

The recent upgrade/merge of Google reader/ Google talk has Google back in the anti-privacy spotlight.

You can smell it in the air: The technoratti are starting to turn on Google. It's been happening for a long time. The tinfoil hat crowd has long decried Google as a major threat to privacy and sneakiness. People have been hating on G-mail since before it was publicly available.  Fake Steve Jobs is calling out Google's bumbling PR tactics.

But here's the thing: Google offers great products in exchange for the ability to spy on us. There is no RSS reader that compares to Google Reader. Gmail's freedom with non-web access makes it the best free email on the market. Have you used Anaylitics? It's freaking incredible. In fact, one of Google's weakest products is it's search, but it remains the one of the best in the industry.  (For the 17 subjects they have indexed right now, I'm digging Mahalo, FYI. (And I couldn't be less of a fan of Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis-- But I digress.)

But watch. Like Microsoft before it, as the Tech Elite start to turn from Google, so too will the masses of angry 15-year-olds who make up the bulk of the mainstream internet. What happens then?

Do I have to point out how this is broken? Today It struck me as particularly broken, and given that today is Festivus, a day set aside for the airing of grievances, among other things.

I know that I am probably asking too much, but I wish that Amazon would spend less time telling me what else I should buy and instead create a teeny tiny script charged with noodling out that a "larger" image doesn't really exist. Don't show me the same image in a larger frame and pretend that it's larger. That just irritates me and confuses people who don't understand that Amazon isn't a store, it's an unintelligent collection of computer programs running in crystal box stuffed under Athena's bedroll.

Seriously, though. If I'm going to buy this incredibly awesome Kramerica Industries T-shirt, I need to know what the t-shirt says, and I'd like to get a good view of the artwork. The case for this Vandelay Industries shirt is even stronger, but at least the stupidity extends (and to be fair probably starts) at the source shop.

Clicking on the "See Larger Image" button should give you a higher resolution image, not just an embiggened version of the photo you've already seen. Here's a ridiculous brick-and-mortar analogy. Imagine asking for a clerk to get some jewelry out of the case so you can see it up closer, and the clerk dutifully hands you a 1/4 scale replica of the jewelry for you too look at.  It's not a question of bigness, it's a question of fidelity.

New offering on Craig's List. Enjoy!
I have lost my mind and will never again buy an inkjet printer or inkjet inks. But just because _I'm_ crazy, doesn't mean you have to suffer!
Take advantage of my mental instability and get yourself a new inkjet printer. This fine fine Epson Stylus Photo R200 worked well the last time it had ink in it and was attached to a Windows or Macintosh Computer. Linux? Not so much.
It needs ink, notably the second cyan and magenta cartridges.

The last time I printed with it the results were both stunning and lovely. This printer could be your new best friend.

This printer is sold as-is, and does not include a USB cable. It does, however, include a lovely CD-R printer tray that will let you print on certain CD-R Media that have ink-jetty goodness and have received the blessing of the Epson Militia. The price is negotiable! You can pick it up or pay for shipping! The power to make good choices rests with you, my friend!

The file manager in cPanel, which you should really not use because your web browser shouldn't be your code-editor, in my opinion, has a bad set of buttons.

Look at the Upload and Download Buttons.

The Upload Button has an arrow pointing down. The Download button has an arrow pointing down. (Or presumably, at the user.)

It's not the Download button that is broken. It makes sense if you think that the download button is grabbing a file from the *world* wide web and bringing it down the pipes to you.

But the upload button isn't broken either. It makes sense if you think that they upload button is taking a file and putting it in the folder that you're currently working in, (The name of which is right below the downward pointing arrow.)

But when you put the two buttons together, neither one really makes sense.

Suggested fix: Just like in literature, UI's shouldn't mix metaphor. Pick one or the other.

It's been a while since I pointed you guys to my Dad's Flickr Stream. This is a shot of Gaia climbing around in the back yard at the house I grew up in. When my sister was a little girl, she was climbing in a tree and fell out of it and broke the heck out of her arm. The people at the hospital kept trying to process the paperwork as a Workman's Comp claim until my Mom explained to them with that delightful pragmatic cynicism that she uses so well, "Yes. Yes. My 8-year-old daughter works for us part time as a lumberjack."

So, if you don't get enough pictures of my little girl in my Flickr stream (Kevron, I'm lookin' at you) you might also consider subscribing to my dad's, which has many more pictures of the girl, but also occasionally features pictures of home-grown fruits and vegetables in vaguely pornographic postures.

I have been, by and and large, disappointed with my Sansa e280. The update software is garbage and the integration with Windows Media player is marginal at best. Maybe someone here can help me with some issues:

1. There are certain songs that I cannot, for the life of me, get to register with the player. No matter what I do, the song only appears as Unknown artist, Unknown album. The only way to find the song is to track it down via its track name. I've checked the tags with third party tag-writing programs, as well as with windows and even with iTunes, but no matter where or how I put in the missing Data, the e280 will not recognize it.
2. Album art recognition is marginal at best.
3. I cannot get a playlist _into_ the machine. If I drag a playlist into the e280 via the sync tab in Windows Media Player, it synchs the songs, but not the playlist itself.
4. Podcast Support is completely absent, and unworkable mostly because of the issues I seem to have with creating playlists.
5. Only about half of the time do videos I want to add to the player actually convert. And then only a select few actually play.
Look, guys, I'm not expecting the Sansa to be an iPod. I don't care if it doesn't have the nicey-nice iPod features that come with integration (and being locked into) a proprietary software/synching mechanism, but this e280 is no iPod.

It can't even start to compete.