Well, the year 2007 has definitely been an interesting one. There have been plenty of great things that happened this year, and lots of bad things that happened this year, so my overall outlook on this year is pretty much a neutral one. I also did much more blogging during the year 2007 than I have before, with almost 270 posts spanning January-December. But now, as it is New Year’s Eve, December 31st, it’s time for me to close out the year 2007 with my Year in Review.
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Tags: 2007, Awards, blog, events, Personal, Podcasts, review, year

Well, most of you will probably be doing Christmas dinner or things like that with your families, but for those of you in need of something to do tonight, you can catch me live as one of the guests on System Showdown, one of the shows on the Tech Podcast Network. Their show description describes me as an Apple Enthusiast, so they may be surprised that I’m a little bit more of a curmudgeon when it comes to Apple. Either way, I’ll be talking about PreviewCast and phpBB Weekly and some other tech stuff as well. They stream live via Ustream, which you can watch via the link I provided.

The show begins tonight (December 25th) at 8:00-9:30 PM EST (5:00-6:30 PM PST). My guest appearance will be during the second half hour. A link to the podcasted edition will be provided as soon as they make it available.

Tags: appearance, Apple, guest, holiday, live, Mac, phpBB Weekly, Podcasts, PreviewCast, System Showdown, Tech Podcast Network, Ustream

Politically Correct Santa
by Harvey Ehrlich

‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck…
How to live in a world that’s politically correct?
His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”,
“Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves.

And labor conditions at the north pole
Were alleged by the union to stifle the soul.
Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety,
Released to the wilds by the Humane Society.
And equal employment had made it quite clear
That Santa had better not use just reindeer.
So Dancer and Donner, Comet and Cupid,
Were replaced with 4 pigs, and you know that looked stupid!

The runners had been removed from his sleigh;
The ruts were termed dangerous by the E.P.A.
And people had started to call for the cops
When they heard sled noises on their roof-tops.
Second-hand smoke from his pipe had his workers quite frightened.
His fur trimmed red suit was called “Unenlightened.”

And to show you the strangeness of life’s ebbs and flows,
Rudolf was suing over unauthorized use of his nose
And had gone on Geraldo, in front of the nation,
Demanding millions in over-due compensation.

So, half of the reindeer were gone; and his wife,
Who suddenly said she’d enough of this life,
Joined a self-help group, packed, and left in a whiz,
Demanding from now on her title was Ms.

And as for the gifts, why, he’d ne’er had a notion
That making a choice could cause so much commotion.
Nothing of leather, nothing of fur,
Which meant nothing for him. And nothing for her.

Nothing that might be construed to pollute.
Nothing to aim. Nothing to shoot.
Nothing that clamored or made lots of noise.
Nothing for just girls. Or just for the boys.

Nothing that claimed to be gender specific.
Nothing that’s warlike or non-pacific.
No candy or sweets…they were bad for the tooth.
Nothing that seemed to embellish a truth.

And fairy tales, while not yet forbidden,
Were like Ken and Barbie, better off hidden.
For they raised the hackles of those psychological
Who claimed the only good gift was one ecological.

No baseball, no football…someone could get hurt;
Besides, playing sports exposed kids to dirt.
Dolls were said to be sexist, and should be passe;
And Nintendo would rot your entire brain away.

So Santa just stood there, disheveled, perplexed;
He just could not figure out what to do next.
He tried to be merry, tried to be gay,
But you’ve got to be careful with that word today.

His sack was quite empty, limp to the ground;
Nothing fully acceptable was to be found.
Something special was needed, a gift that he might
Give to all without angering the left or the right.

A gift that would satisfy, with no indecision,
Each group of people, every religion;
Every ethnicity, every hue,
Everyone, everywhere…even you.

So here is that gift, it’s price beyond worth…
“May you and your loved ones enjoy peace on earth.”

Despite all of the craziness that has grown to surround the holiday, may you have a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.

Tags: Christmas, holiday, message, peace, poem, politically correct, quote, Santa

Courtesy of the genius invention of timezones, Santa has already begun his 25-hour journey around the globe, and Norad Tracks Santa has always been the best place to track Santa as he goes on his travels. However, this year, they have a Santa Tracker add-on for Google Earth, which lets you track Santa’s sleigh as he moves city to city. It’s a really cool use for Google Earth and will probably keep me mesmerized on there for hours.

Tags: Christmas, Google, Google Earth, holiday, NORAD, Santa, track

A big high-five to my home state of California. The announcement came today that the state is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, because the EPA is refusing to give California a waiver on federal emissions standards. California wants to make these environmental standards stricter in our state, and the federal government is refusing to allow them to do so.

This should be particularly important, given the recent significant oil spill which happened in the San Francisco Bay a month or two ago. I would say without a doubt that the majority of us Californians want stricter environmental standards.

Isn’t this ironic? Most waivers are usually applied for by folks who want to make the standards looser. Here, California wants to make them stricter, and are being denied permission. So, hats off to California for suing over this ridiculous denial, and the best of luck.

I never thought I’d say this, but way to go Arnie.

Tags: Bay Area, California, environment, EPA, lawsuit, oil, spill, standards

Hello everyone!

I am really excited to be able to announce that after being down for 18 days, Webmacster87.info is back online!

On December 4th, something happened to my cPanel username/password causing them to change. I’m not sure what happened to cause the change, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.

So why did it take 18 days for the site to come back up? Well, I had bombarded my web host for weeks with support requests, and never got a response. Yesterday, I finally got angry enough about it that I did a WHOIS on my host’s domain name, found a phone number, called them up, and found out that my host strangely still had my old Mac.com e-mail address on file–an e-mail address which expired five months ago. (Their policy–which is a good one–is to only accept support requests from the e-mail address which they have on file, for security reasons.) So, once the guy on the phone updated the e-mail address I had on file, my support request got a response, and my username and password got reset, and now the site is back online.

So, I guess I do kind of owe my web host, Kazix.com, an apology, because I had honestly started telling people that they had packed up shop and left town. That wasn’t the case at all–just a bit of a miscommunication, which caused the outage of the past 18 days.

Unfortunately, I had hoped to spend this month blogging throughout the month about the various apps and tools for decorating for the holidays as kind of a December 2007 blog series, but now that it’s three days until Christmas, those hopes seem to have gone out the window. So, I guess that’s something I’ll have to hold off on until 2008. However, with the holidays here, you can certainly expect some holiday blogging and the other increase in blogging that is possible when I’m out of school.

The point is, that while I won’t be trying to make up for the lost time, I will definitely be picking up where I left off, and this blog will definitely be getting active again.

Again, I’m very sorry for the outage and tried everything I could to get it out of the way ASAP. Thanks for continuing to stick around with Webmacster87.info!
–Douglas Bell

Tags: cPanel, December, Kazix, outage, password, status, webhost, Webmacster87.info

November on Webmacster87.info mostly focused on the Leopard Feature Presentation, which was my own way of reviewing the new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and since it takes time to write those articles, that was pretty much what I was doing on this blog for the month. However, there were a number of other things that happened elsewhere in my life, so let’s take a look at the past month on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: article, Best Of, Mac OS X Leopard, Personal, Webmacster87.info

As of today, it has now been a full five weeks since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook. It is no secret that I gave much more focus to Leopard than I gave to the iPhone during its late-June release, and that is because I am a Mac user and the first new OS X release in two and a half years is much more important to me. That’s why, during the week of the Leopard launch, I counted down to the Leopard release in my own way with my Tiger-to-Leopard series, which attempted to put the time difference between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. Then, for the 30 days of November, I wrote my Leopard Feature Presentation series, which selected one new feature per day from Mac OS X Leopard and reviewed it based on my experiences with that feature. Not only has it given me the chance to express my opinions about what I think of Leopard, doing the Leopard Feature Presentation has forced me to discover some of the other new features in Leopard that I might otherwise have overlooked.

So now that I have dedicated a full 45 (now 46) posts on my blog to covering Mac OS X Leopard, and have been using Leopard earnestly for the past 35 days, I will now make my final review of Mac OS X Leopard and do a final recap of the Leopard Feature Presentations during the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.
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Tags: Apple, features, innovations, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, operating system, recap, release, review