My mother complains every year that christmas has lost its true meaning. It's buried in the brightlights and the capitalism.

Last night I drove past a house where the christmas lights had been arranged into the name 'Jesus' and I thought that this was a particularly clever idea.

I went home and did the same thing, arranging my christmas lights so they said, simply 'Leon'. With a name like Jesus, i figure that guy must have been Spanish. A creative lot, your spaniards: look at Gaudi.

This is the beauty of Christmas: a time to just forget about all the world's problems and focus on yourself for once.

Ahhh. Hope that makes mum happy.

And if you haven't yet seen that "amazing christmas lights display set to music" that's doing the rounds, here's a link to it and another.

Someone over at microsoft's script central is in a festive mood, using puns in the titles of all the articles.

Did you know it takes fifteen muscles to laugh, but it only takes three muscles to groan?

MSH is an interesting thing... but if you haven't had time to read about it, don't worry. You are not inadequate.

found via the Daily Grind. (If you are a programmer, and you are on the internet every day, and you don't read the daily grind every day ... then maybe you are inadequate after all ;-) )

TimeSnapper now supports multiple monitors!

Atli and I have released the new version (1.6) which also has a bunch of other funky new features.

Multi Monitors was by far the most requested feature, and Atli was already working on it before we released the first version.

There's a groovy new TimeBar control, that lets you see your entire day's activity at a glance.

And a handy archiving feature to help you keep TimeSnapper under control.

The next wave of features are already in development, as the project rollicks along. If you have any suggestions, flames or ideas, drop by the TimeSnapper Google Group and tell us your thoughts.

Okay you sick bast*rd, microsoft, why are you trying to make me buy things?

The audacity of this one just floored me.

A "Shop for music online" button turned up inside windows explorer, where I was expecting to find the "Make a new folder" button.

On closer inspection, the tenuous excuse microsoft have for showing me this button: One of the subfolders contains a three kilobyte file called "ping.wav".

Ah, anyway: I see the future now...

Microsoft will eventually give away their operating system for free.

Absolutely free. Gratis. Not one dime. Oh -- just two small "features" you can't disable:

1. Digital rights management that stops all tinkering with the OS
2. Contextual ads absolutely everywhere.

Clippy will be a laughable and funny guy compared with the monsters of contextual intrusion that MS will release in this forthcoming monster.

WHo am I kidding? I'd still use it. And you probably would too. Maybe I should start tinkering with ReactOS.

So here's my contextual ad:

Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that helps you monitor the way you really work. You will be shocked.

How long should it take to give an overview of your product? Some people say five seconds, some people say twenty seconds.

DataObjects.NET have revolutionated the elevator pitch: they're going to give you an overview in just two to fours hours!

Here's the content from their Overview page:

Uh, yeh guys. I want to spend 4 hours reading through an animated (god help me!) powerpoint presentation.... infact, thanks to NADD, i lost interest before i even got to the word PowerPoint. Next product!

Intellisense is most useful when you know what the member name "starts" with. But what about when you know that the term contains a term... but you're not sure what the actual word is. The Intellisearch search box will cure that: enter a search term and it will highlight any terms that include that sequence of characters.

And I don't want you monkeys to go jumpin up and down saying 'Oh you should check out ReSharper' or leaping to conclusions saying 'CodeRush already does that!' because I don't think they do.

(okay, coderush has this navigation feature that is similar, but never mind that, sparky)

And as for that damn resharper, as brilliant as it is (and yes it's very brilliant) it's just far too sloooowwww on big projects. We've purchased it here but now we mostly turned it off. (One resilient developer continues to persevere with it.

Advertainment! Do you need to monitor your own computer use?

Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that takes screenshots of everything you do, all week long, and plays them back like a movie. It's light on memory and cheap on hard drive space. It's free for personal use and makes timesheets a snap. New version with multi monitor support arrives soon!

I use the Janus GridEx Grid control every day. And they have thousands and thousands of properties. You get lost looking through them.

What I'd like to see is a little textbox at the top of the "Control Designer" form (the form that lists these thousands of properties). Whatever you type in this text box is searched for and highlighted amongst the property names and values.

Aww i can't explain this good. Check out the screen shot I mocked up:

Damn this would save me some time. And everyone else who works with complex property pages.

(by the way, i think 'Findability precedes Usability' is a quote from Peter Morville. I am certain that it is available as a bumper sticker from Confusability [a usability blog])

Advertainment! Do you need to spy on someone monitor your own computer use? Check out TimeSnapper, a cool new tool we've built that takes screenshots of everything you do, all week long, and plays them back like a movie. It's light on memory and cheap on hard drive space. It's free for personal use and makes timesheets a snap.

For the first time in a long time, I've had a quick squiz of my amazon referrals. And I was met with just a few little surprises.

Someone, somehow, bought a 'thing' called Playboy - Women of Starbucks [NSFW] after reading the 'geek.

Now if I can believe amazon then this is a piece of film media which features barrista-ladies in mininal, or, more frequently, entirely absent, clothing, who are linked by a common place of employment: the afore-mentioned bucker of stars.

Now I am certain that i didn't recommend this particular work of cinema. If you know me at all then you know of my disdain for bad coffee. (apart from the beloved Nescafe Granulated FoodService Blend of course).

I've also been perusing the refunds that have happened at Amazon via the old secret geekiness.

Someone, somehow, thanks to this very site, bought a paperback called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later returned it. Sorry dude, but we could've guessed from the name that it weren't worth the shippin'.

But the real shock belongs to the only other return:

Someone *returned* a copy of Joel on Software!

What a fool! I'd expect people to donate extra money just to indicate that this book was worth triple the postage and quadruple the cover price. And then some.

That's a pretty strong protest from me. You know that i hand-write all my html. And you'll notice that i surrounded the word 'returned' (above) with not only asterisks, but an <em> and a <strong> tag as well. Thus you can tell that this is true, Raw emotion speaking to you. The sort that hemingway and shakespeare only shared on a particularly warm day.

JOS is a brilliant book -- i constantly find my self spouting opinions as if they are my own; only to find they either come from JOS or from The Best Software Writing I. The guy in the next cubicle said, just today, "Do you mind if i take this home?" meaning, Joel on Software, "it's good isn't it?"

In other news: leaked information about yet another new thing from Google: it appears that they too will be leaping into the adult content market.

I suppose that with their unfathomable statistics about what people are really surfing for, they have a better idea about where the next internet boom is going to be than any number of etech conferences.

Expect to hear more about this in the next week or two. Very hush, hush for now.

• Remote control coffee machine
• RSS feed for my fridge
• Barcode scanner next to the kitchen-bin, so that as i go to throw out an empty food container i can scan the label and automatically create a PRO (Pantry Replenishment Order)
• Self-emptying dishwasher. Empties itself into adjacent cupboard. Not as hard as it sounds.

Come on lifehackers, get building.

in other news: 25 years since John Lennon died. r.i.p. old buddy.

Here's a more recent question on a similar topic. Where were you when you first heard Bob Dylan died? For me it's a moment I'll never forget.