My Dad is a kid at heart. A big, six foot, three inch kid. At Christmas time it just gets worse, and my family loves him for it. When we were kids, my siblings and I would be awakened by our father by 5:30am at the latest. He'd be shouting "Ho Ho Ho!" walking up and down the hallways, making sure that everyone knew that he was awake and wanted to get to the festivities. He hasn't changed a bit in the last 40 years. I typically stay at Mom and Dad's place on Christmas eve, like I'll be doing again this year. My brother and my sisters arrive on Christmas morning, since they live close by. But even though we're all adults now, my Dad makes sure we get the same treatment we got as children. He'll wake me up with his bellowing "Ho Ho Ho!" after making sure that he's got some coffee apologetically brewing. After making fun of how hilariously groggy I look at 5:30 in the morning, he proceeds to call everyone in the family that hasn't arrived yet - which is pretty much everyone, since no one in my family sets their alarm on Christmas morning. Thanks to Dad, they don't need to. Everyone gets the familiar "Ho Ho Ho!" followed by something like "Santa Claus came and brought you presents, now get your butt out of bed and get over here!"

My sister Sherry will arrive first, usually still in her pajamas. She's 47 now, so I'm not sure what the pajamas are about, but to each their own. Then my brother Joe shows up, and he's already wide awake because he has the same "get up early" illness that our Dad has. The last of the siblings to show up is my other sister Terry, because she has to grab a cup of Starbucks on the way. As soon as we're situated, our Dad, who is usually adorned with a Santa Claus hat, hands out the Christmas stockings. My parents watch us empty our stockings, and refuse to touch theirs until we're all done. My family was poor growing up, so we used to use my Dad's socks as stockings. It's amazing how much those things can stretch when you really try. You'd be able to tell that you got an apple, a banana and some candy in your stocking just by looking at the outside of it. Now that they're well-off, we get actual Christmas stockings, but I kind of miss those mis-shapen socks.

Now it's time to hand out gifts. My Dad does the honors, of course. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. My Dad does not like anything mundane. Even the tags on Christmas gifts have to be different. They can't say "To Bill from Dad" or anything so simple as that. No, he prefers to label them "To Billy Bob Boy From Sandy Claws" and things like that. Oh- that's another thing. Everyone in my family gets a nickname. No one but my Dad actually uses these names, and that's probably for the best, as not all of them are complimentary. Ask my sister Sherry, also known as "The Nose."

About ten years ago, my sisters decided that they couldn't afford to get everyone a gift, so we should just draw names from a hat and just buy for whoever we drew. My parents don't participate in that. They want to be free to purchase a wholly unnecessary number of gifts for everyone in the family, and spoil them as rotten as they always have. We tell them that buying each person one gift would be just fine, but they actually look offended and hurt by the very idea, so we let it go.

My Mom has always been the head of our family - the person who steered the family ship in whatever direction it needed to go. But on Christmas, she knows my Dad is going to revert to being a five year old again, so she just lets it happen. I think it's one of the things that she loves about him, even though she usually just rolls her eyes and says "Steven Douglas!" whenever he gets carried away.

For many reasons, I'm looking forward to this Christmas more than I have others in the past. Tradition is a good thing, and my family holds on tight to this one.

Merry Christmas, folks! 

Ooops. Just noticed that Tom Muck has passed the baton over to me. I really haven't got that much to share since I was only a Team Macromedia Member for a short time, but I have received a few goodies over the past couple years:

• 2 long-sleeved shirts (one of which I traded with Angela Buraglia due to size concerns)
• A great box of chocolates. I don't remember the brand, but man, they were good.
• 1 flash drive. It's come in handy a couple of times.
• 1 T-shirt
• A Brand New Car! OK, that's a dirty lie, but it was fun to say it.

My favorite was actually the chocolate. I cannot emphasize enough just how good those were. I would have paid more attention to the brand and bought myself some, until my wife told me how expensive they were after checking online. Free chocolates are much better than paid-for chocolates.

The most unusual would be one of the long-sleeved shirts. They sent me one that was the perfect size, and another that I would've popped the buttons on had I actually tried to button it.

Five people I'm passing the baton (but they'll have to read this blog to know they've been passed to)

Laurie Casolino

Chris Flick

Linda Rathgeber-Stewart

Jim Babbage

Heidi Bautista

Hopefully I haven't select anyone who has already been passed the baton...

In response to Stephanie Sullivan's hit-and-run... um, I mean Musical Baton, here are my answers to the Magical Musical Baton questions.

Total Volume:
5.48 gigs. No filler. Just a bunch of great music.

Last CD Bought

Eric Clapton's "From the Cradle." Yes, I know it came out a few years back, but I don't by CDs very often. Actually, my last musical purchase was a record (yes vinyl- you remember those big, black, flexible things?) by Sweet that I found in a flea market in Memphis.

Song Playing Right Now

Elvis Costello's "Beyond Belief." It's a good bet that you'll hear Elvis playing a couple times a week in my office. OK, maybe more than a couple times a week, but who's counting?

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

That's awfully personal, and I'll thank you to butt out of my affairs. Alright, I'll bite.

• Oliver's Army - Elvis Costello
• Down to the River to Pray - O Brother soundtrack (no religious reasons. I just dig the harmony)
• The Way - Fastball (My buddy Tony's in the band. Gotta support my homies)
• Melody Lee - The Damned
• Hellhound on my Trail - Robert Johnson

Five People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton

• Angela Buraglia
• Dan Short
• Tom Muck
• Danilo Celic
• Adrian Senior

If you haven't seen Part One of this mess, see below, or follow this link.

So, you read that the Sherrif's office called me... or did they? [Cue lightening and pipe organ effects] I checked my phone for that incoming number, and called it back. The phone number was a disconnected number. That's odd enough, right? But I googled the phone number and found out that number used to belong to my congressman. OK, that's wierd too, right? Just to make it even more odd, I have a PO box that used to belong to... the same congressman. Sweet Raisin Danish! This is all one big coincidence, I'm sure, but then again, my PO box is listed in WhoIs, and maybe she googled it and connected it to this congressman...?

So I called the Sherrif's department that this deputy said he was from. They never heard of him, and there is no record of anyone in their office calling me. Holy ice-cream sombrero! So my wife calls our cellular carrier to find out if someone can fake a number like that. They said yes, it can absolutely be done. It's caller-ID spoofing, and it certainly appears that it may have happened to me.

Oh- I talked to one of this lady's other victims today. This guy has been going through a king-size mound of manure with this person for about three years now. He basically told me that she gives crazy people a bad name, and that she is capable of anything. She called all of his clients and told them that he was sexually harrassing her and/or he has done unspeakable things that they "need to be aware of." He gets his day in court with her- finally - on the 18th of this month. I'll be interested to find out the results of that one.

I won't post what actions I'm taking against her here, since she may be an avid blog reader (many psycopaths are, although I have it on good authority that just as many regular folks are prone to reading blogs as well).

So, if you ever find your text on someone else's website, be forewarned that if they were crazy enough to steal your text, they could be crazy enough to do a whole lot of other things as well. Freaks... can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. No, wait. I could live without this one.

Someone emailed me today to inform me that one page of my website was being copied word for word on another website. I checked it out, and not only was my website being copied, but none of the pages on this other website were original. Every single page was taken from somewhere else.

Naturally I emailed the website through their Contact form and let them know that I would like them to take down the offending page. Here's where it starts to get interesting: I received an email back:

"I have sent this to our lawyer for response. I am also going to call the police regarding your harassment."

Not quite the response I was expecting. Really, I expected either no response (I mean, it's Saturday night and all) or someone saying "Oh, sorry. Didn't think you'd notice." A minute later, I get this email from the same individual (heretofore known as "freak"), which has been sent to my ISP and to me, as well as my domain registrar and Google for some reason only a psychoanalyst could even begin to understand:

"I am writing to you in hope that you will be able to talk to your 'member' and prevent criminal and civil charges.

It is not clear to me or to anybody else here what possesses someone as such individual to write something like below. Forms are common on the web, and his form is neither unique nor 'copyright protected'. Further more we see this as attempt to extract money as it would be to write to all the domains and claim .com or .ca domains rights and suggest to them to 'I'd start dismantling if I were you.'.

From what I see, this person is possibly attempting money extraction which started over the last weekend and we have involved the police on this matter. As soon as the criminal investigation is done and the players charged we will start a civil process.
Please note as a provider you are responsible for e-mails and extortion attempts if you are notified about the illegal behaviour about your subscribers.

We hope that this last cease and desist will be able to pacify crazy and belligerent as the poor individual from the bottom. I wish that he gets some counselling and certainly hope he has enough money as this behaviour does and will have severe consequences."

Clearly someone is a few clowns short of a circus, and it ain't me. Form? Who's talking about a form? I replied and posted a link to their page and to my page, illustrating, with a calm that I didn't realize I had, that these were identical pages - the only difference being that my page has original content whereas theirs does not. Here's the reply back, again sent to my ISP as well:

For your info...sending me e-mails is sending it directly to the Toronto's Police Dpt. Go ahead. THe law here and in San Diego is when you are told to stop, you have to otherwise, ...well you will find out...knock..knock...I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, my sickly friend"

I take issue with that, as I am clearly not this person's friend. In any case, the local Sherrif's department calls me. They say they received a call from a woman, who shall remain nameless, no matter how much I would loooove to spread her name around, who said I was calling her and trying to extort money from her. We have now passed the wierd stage and gone into full-blown "Huh?" The deputy tells me that I can't go around doing this type of thing. I tell the deputy my side of the story and how I've never called the woman and I just want my text taken off of her web page. The deputy and I even go online together so I can show him what I'm talking about. He says he's not really a computer guy, and couldn't take one person's story over the other. I ask him if he won't take sides, can he at least admit that the woman who called him is a complete loon and freak of nature? He said he couldn't. Apparently they have some policy about that. Hmph.

That's the story so far. I've heard of this kind of thing happening to other folks, but had never experienced it firsthand. I'm apparently dealing with a table-turning, psychotic thief. You know what bothers me the most? She can't even spell certifiable correctly, and you know she's had that diagnosis before, so it should be easy.

In preparation for a move to a new house, my wife and I are busily going through 12 years of "stuff" in order to weed out the good stuff from the bad (or "this is coming with us" vs "this will look nice in the trash"). We're almost done now, but we've been at it for a week. When you move you have to think about when to change the electricity/cable/phone over to the new place, and here's where our dilemma comes in.

We'll have power up until Sunday sometime, but the new place will have power before that. No problem there. We don't use a "land line", so we don't have to worry about the phone either. BUT, we have cable tv, and our internet is through our cable provider as well. I don't know about your computer, but mine starts having withdrawls as soon as the cable modem is unplugged. I can actually hear it saying "Mooooodemmmmm..... Mooooodemmmmmm...". Being the compassionate computer owner that I am, I cannot stand by and watch my PC suffer.

I'm told that I can have service running at both places simultaneously so that I can have a non-interrupted connection to the internet. Great, but it will cost me extra. Is it worth it? Probably, but then I tell myself that I really can go one night without cable. I can. Really. It would be foolish to pay for service at both homes just to check my email for one night. What would you do? I know what I'm doing. I'll be paying a larger cable bill this month. Dang.

It seems that the web design business is seasonal. At least it is in my neck of the woods I don't know about you, but traditionally, I get a lot of work coming in beginning around September of every year, lasting through January or February, and then after that it's spotty until the same time next September. Am I the only one? It's just odd... I mean it's great, because the holidays are coming up and that means some extra money to spend, but it sure would be nice to even out the feast or famine routine and make it last year 'round.

There is no explanation for this phenomenon that I've been able to find. If I knew what caused it to happen, I'd make it happen all the time. Maybe it's because companies want to ring in the new year with a new or revised website, or perhaps summer is ending and folks realize it's time to get back to work, and that means new web dev projects. I dunno, but it's confounding.

As Kasey Kasem likes to say: Ponderous, man...

I don't know about you, but I am not going to be installing SP2 on any of my computers until I hear about other people's experience first. Yeah, call me a coward if you must, but I just don't want to be the guy who helps fix MS' bugs by identifying them the hard way. Have any of you installed it, and if so, what has been your experience?

So I finally found a few minutes to create my first blog entry and... I'm stumped. It's funny, because sometimes when you're busy working on a client's site you think of what else you could be doing. When you're doing the dishes, you think of things you'd rather be doing. Much of my time is spent thinking of things that I could be doing if I wasn't busy doing whatever it is I'm presently doing. Sheesh.

Ah- here's an interesting thing - to me, anyway - that happened today. At my day job, my department upgraded our computers from G3's to G5's. They decided to raffle off the G3's and I ended up with one. I decided long ago that I was a PC guy, not a Mac guy. I've always bought PC's for home use. I won't touch on any of the political reasons for that decision as that's a huge debate I'm not prepared to defend myself on. But you know what? I picked up that Mac, and it was just so darned cute I couldn't put it down. It was like a stray dog that had no home and looked up at me as if to say "Hey, I'm not so bad. I'll be loyal and never show you my Sad Mac face..."

So now I'm the proud owner of a Mac. I'll probably only use it to test my sites on Mac-specific browsers, but it's good to know it's there if I decide to change affiliations all of a sudden. There's no room for it in the office, so I'll probably throw a wireless PCI card in it and put it in the dining room.

It's amazing what I consider proper fodder for a blog.