On the Shores of the Black Horse River

• Dave Barry's must-read 2006 Year in Review is out.
  
• The history behind the Apple Clover symbol, from TUAW
  
• A German tourist wanted to go to Syndey, Australia, but he booked his trip to Sidney instead - Sidney, Montana. He assumed you could get to Australia via the US from Germany, but got worried when he landed in Billings.
  
• Watch out! If you use Google Mail and Firefox, someone might be able to steal your contact list. IE was untested.
  
• To add a classy touch, a story whose headline says it all: "Brussels sprouts cause turtle fart alarm" (via Dave Barry)
  

Catching up on a couple of tech toy sites, I found Clocky, a clock on wheels. When you hit the snooze bar, it rolls off the table it's on and repositions itself somewhere random in the room, so you have to find it before you can hit snooze again. Cool. Another cool thing is this site where you can create your own skin for any device - cellphone, iPod, PDA, what have you - with Tego.

Doing a little overdue workover on the sidebar... the blogrolls are explicitly called "blogroll" now and are driven by BlogRolling.com, and I have added in a couple of new widgets. The "Message me" widget is from Meebo, and lets you IM me. Let's see if I rue that decision... but for now it makes me feel l33t.

Check out the DREAD, a small arms (Humvee-mountable) weapon that looks like an alien landing device. It is capable of engaging multiple enemies simultaneously in 360 degrees, has no muzzle flash and (theoretically) no jamming parts, and no recoil. The DREAD is "capable of cranking out 120,000 rounds per minute of .308 and .50 caliber round metal balls at 8000 feet per second (ft/s). To give you some perspective, the M-16 rifle delivers its ammunition at 3200 ft/s, and can shoot a mere 900 rounds per minute". The amount of kinetic energy delivered on impact would be terrific, and the only good defenses I can imagine would be inordinately thick armoring or some kind of strong magnetic field generation (via: Gizmodo).

I think the departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense may be stretching it a bit with The Epic of Gilgamesh: Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management, where Gilgamesh comes back from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and his friend comes back with Gulf War Syndrome (via Boing Boing).

We'll be trying out the First Night in Leesburg celebration this year... I've been there before, and it is a fun family-friendly celebration. Happy New Year everyone!

AOL and Loudoun Schools have the Christmas Countdown up again this year.  It's always nice to see.

More shakeups at work.  I guess this will mean more re-orgs.  At least some folks have a good sense of humor about everything that has been going on.

For all who are interested, I have started using an interesting new service called GiftTag to manage my Christmas list.  You can see my list at http://gifttagging.com/nmj3e.  This service is neat because tere is a plugin for Firefox 2 that adds "GiftTag this item" as an entry in the right-click context menu when looking at a page.  I do wish there was a way to sort of prioritize things, but it's still pretty cool.

I really don't think I am ready for this... "10 is the new 15 as kids grow up faster"

Powerbook explodes... soon they won't let you carry laptops on planes.

After a long pause... here is a fun link. Which NetHack monster are you? I am an avid fan of the game NetHack, and I registered as a Trapper.

• I like Waldo's Virginia political blog aggregator better than mine.
  
• Check out the amazing inflatible flash drive
  
• I'm generally not one for stupid Bush-bashing, and the "Bush is a moron" meme was tiresome even when it was new, but the George W. Bush Speechwriter amuses me for some reason.
  
• I've taken note of interesting in-county news over at Leesburg Talk.
  

Want to see something cool? Check out the lab Microsoft uses for testing Mac compatibility

Check out The Baby Name Wizard from iVillage. It's a very cool little widget that shows graphically the popularity of names over the decades. I found that I had to click on the area where you type names in order to get it to accept a name. For example, it's fascinating to put the names in of people you know, and see which ones were specifically popular in the time they were born (Heather, and Trevor).