The Host of Christmas Future?

Yuletime

Virtual advent calendars will start proliferating this Saturday. In its ninth incarnation Electric December will feature films by British teenagers. For childlike zen there's Is it Christmas? For temporal gift giving Watchismo has just posted its Christmas gift guide, with watches from $100 to $100,000.

Electric December

Is it Christmas?

Watchismo Holiday Watch Gift Guide

Honest Jim's at the FBI's Hogan's Alley

Junior Gpersons

Amazon.com under toys and games has the Elenco K-35 Telephone Bug Kit so your kids can help Santa bug your telephone calls this year. To help mold your kids to their impending career with the New World Order, (USA).gov offers a number of options. The CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA have kids' pages for future spies and counterterrorists. For junior "jackbooted thugs" (i.e. anti-militia tykes), there's an ATF kids page; and for budding "let the good times roll"ers there's a FEMA for KIDS page. In the private sector, Blackwater Worldwide doesn't have a kids' page yet, but they do have Stuffed Bears at the BlackWater ProShop for holiday giving.

Elenco K-35 Telephone Bug Kit

CIA Kids' Page

FBI Kids' Page

NSA CryptoKids'

DIA Kids

ATF Kid's Page

FEMA for KIDS

Buy a Stuffed Bear Brown at BlackWater ProShop

The Mozilla mascot

Looking for no-cost software alternatives?

IBM recently released of a test version of the Lotus Symphony productivity suite. It's a free word processing - spreadsheet - presentation based on Sun's OpenOffice program. Both can read and save in Microsoft Office file formats. For a web-browser and e-mail there's Firefox and Thunderbird from Mozilla. Netscape Navigator was born from Mosaic, the first popular web browser. The code name and mascot for Netscape was Mozilla. AOL bought Netscape and Mozilla spun off as a non-profit. Mozilla also has SeaMonkey which is a combination of Firefox and Thunderbird with a newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editor. For anti-virus software try AVG Free Advisor and for anti-spyware try Ad-Aware. A photoshop alternative is The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). For simpler graphic manipulation and viewing try IrfanView.

IBM Lotus Symphony

OpenOffice

Mozilla Firefox & Thunderbird

The SeaMonkey Project

AVG Free Advisor

Ad-Aware

GIMP

IrfanView

Chad courting the elusive Clarissa

Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager

Darth Vader's (implied) brother seeks dominion over the Empire Market. A Blame Society Productions creation for Channel 101 last year, Chad was canceled after two episodes, but went on YouTube and other net venues. Including the final season one eighth episode Chad has had more than twenty million viewings. Chad has been translated into at least five languages and has spawned a merchandise line. The Empire Market is in fact the Willy Street Co-op in Madison, Wisconsin and Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, appears in episodes six and eight. A second season is promised.

Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager