One of my favorite Christmas-time programs is on Wednesday night, The Kennedy Center Honors. Walter Cronkite hosts and it is always a pleasure to hear his voice. They put a lot of thought into the event, choosing memorable performances and participants who hold great meaning for the honorees. It’s not really a show for the general public as much as it is a tribute for the recipient. Someone who worked at the post-production firm used by their television producers told me that they insist on the highest quality work, and I believe it. It’s a genuine class act, which you don’t see much of on TV these days. Sadly two of last year’s honorees just died, Victor Borge and Jason Robards.

Muchos kudos to Amazon for automatically upgrading my order to next day delivery for no extra charge when they couldn’t get it out the door in time for standard delivery to arrive by Christmas. Now I don’t have to create lame paper representations of “gifts that you would be receiving in physical form if I hadn’t stayed away from the mall.”

The makers of the Barbie PC and the Hot Wheels PC have filed for bankruptcy. Mattel is making it clear that they did not make the PCs, they just gave Patriot Computer a license to use the brands. But Mattel is offering $100 gift certificates for customers who paid for and did not receive a PC.

RIP Thomas G. Yohe, creator of “Schoolhouse Rock”. Edutainment at its best. (via CamWorld)

I think I’ll be better off not committing myself to posting daily for the next week. I’ve got travel and holiday things to deal with. But maybe I’ll be inconsistently consistent and pop in more than I expect. I hope the end to your year is happy and peaceful, and that 2001 brings you much joy and laughter.

The Cross Convergence pen gets a lot closer to what I was hoping for with the CueCat. It is a detached, normal sized pen, unlike that cumbersome cat with the chord. So it fits in much better with typical reading and shopping activities, plus any impulse barcode scans you may want to do. And you can write with it too! It is available on the website for $89.99 and seems to only have Windows software. I am hoping that, like the CueCat, someone will sponsor or subsidize this device so consumers can have it for free or cheaper. But it is probably a hefty loss-leader to justify in the current economic situation. Of course, it has that chicken or egg problem. If no one uses the scanners, the Digital Convergence codes are useless (however, bar codes can be stored too, and those often work just as well). I doubt many people are CueCatting, so they need more mobile devices like this one.

If you haven’t been in on The Ring movie hype (and this is J.R.R., not Wagner), you can catch up with this Boston Globe article. The first movie is due to open a year from now. “At least 400 fan sites are exclusively devoted to the production.” Whew, thatsa lotta HTML. Middle Earth is a world that lives in millions of individual imaginations, with each visualization completely different. A movie phenomenon like Star Wars existed solely in the head of one guy who then brought it to life on screen for us to stick into our imaginations, pretty much intact. But living up to the expectations of what all the readers have built into pictures in their heads from the written word of Tolkien is a monumental challenge.

Local Harvest is a public directory of small farms and farmer’s markets in the U.S. You can search for pick it yourself farms and specific produce. The site had a link to Gifts and Graces of the Land, a photo-essay on America’s current farmlife. It’s good to remember that the food you eat every day doesn’t just magically appear in the restaurant and the supermarket. (via Yahoo’s Weekly Picks)

My favorite Letterman Top Ten List (or at least it’s in my top ten of top tens) is the Top Ten Numbers From One To Ten. I remember my exact reactions while watching it. Dave announced the title. I thought “geez, this is going to be so lame!!” It was their first week on CBS so I was getting skeptical that they were already losing the magic touch. Then he started reading them. “Ten”. OK, ha ha, it’s the same number. “Nine!” Oh great…this is just going to be a countdown. Lame lame lame! Then “Six!” Hmmm… OK. And as he read the rest of the numbers, in a perhaps well thought out, but probably random, order, I started laughing. It was a sort of meta-funny, Jim’s Journal kind of humor. Which is classic Dave, of course.

An interesting look at another dot com failure, Inside the Cult of Kibu is by Lori Gottlieb, former vice president and editor-in-chief of the doomed girls’ site, and author of Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self. I had tried Kibu out and it seemed to have the promise of being fresh and different, though the business plan was transparent: collect data from girls for paying companies. The article portrays most of the company’s employees as being quite clueless. The part that really struck a chord with me was when she was labeled as “negative” and “not a team player” for raising important issues about the company’s goals. I’ve been there. I’ve now learned that if I need to put myself in that position, I’m already in the wrong environment. Next time (if there has to be one), I hope to catch myself before the mental burn-out happens. (via CamWorld)