Elf yourself

Yesterday I was sent a link to elfyourself.com. The page is run by Office Max and I really have to give a tip of the hat to them. This may be one of the best holiday web applications I have ever seen. It’s a simple as uploading a few photos to the site and adjusting the picture to fit the precut face.

It’s really simple to put one of these things together and the step by step process guides you through the procedure. It only takes a few minutes and you are ready to wow the crowd.

Put the kids in, add some friends and check out the dancing style of the elves. Our crew from left to right is Managing Editor Patti Ewald, reporter Steve Szucs, me, and reporter Shawn Foucher. You can check out our dance moves to see if this is something you might want to try out.

$47.00 M&M's

Christmas is coming, Christmas is coming…
I thought today would be a good time to unveil the first of my Christmas present ideas. For the person who has everything, including a raging sweet tooth M&M is selling customized candies. The sweet treat features up to two lines of text and a selection of colors for you to choose from. There is a limit of two lines so you can’t really wax poetic but with a little creativity you can put together a gr8 message. If it sounds good so far, be aware that there is a catch they aren’t cheap and they are sold in minimum quantities.

The entry point is $47.96. That price delivers four 7 ounce bags of personalized candy. For the kind of person that isn’t afraid to really blow some cash (Patti Ewald) you can get the crystal candy jar with four bags of personalized M&M’s for a mere $189.99.

We are always looking for great Christmas ideas so please feel free to share your perfect or impractical gift ideas.

Pick your candidate

So the presidential election is heating up, and it’s reaching the point where you should start thinking about who you like. How do you do that with all the choices out there? Well, ABC News has a feature on its site that has you fill out a short questionnaire and it gives you the top three choices that most closely match your answers.

The Match-O-Matic takes you through questions on Iraq, immigration, health care and a few others about current events. Some of the answers are a bit limited, which left me scratching my head.

But it was still cool, and, much to my surprise, it looks like the Match-O-Matic says my top three candidates, in order, are Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo and John McCain. And here I was, running around thinking I’m a Democrat.

Red-faced, I have to admit Tom Tancredo is so far off my radar that I can’t ever recall even hearing his name. I had to Google him to find out if he was a Republican, Democrat, or gasp, a Libertarian.

Black Friday

I survived another Black Friday. Reporter Lisa Roberson and I were up way before dawn this morning to get words and pictures from the front lines. I guess I have reached an age where the idea of sitting outside in the cold for 24 hours to be the first to get anything doesn’t appeal to me.

Unless they are giving away something that would fix my receding hairline or the expanding waistline, I’m not gonna wait in line to get it. That being said, if the opportunity to take advantage of a sale comes up, I’m willing to take a peek. That, my friends, is how I came away from Black Friday nearly $800 lighter in the wallet.

During the run up to the biggest shopping day of the year, I did look at the fliers. I saw the computers that were selling well below retail. I saw those cool photo frames that rotate your digital photos every few minutes, and yes, I saw the LCD flatscreen televisions marked way down. As it turns out, the television is the one that got me.

But, as they say, if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. Now that I have that big new TV that just screams “Steal me!” sitting in the living room of my house, I have to buy better curtains. I also have to buy a stand for the TV, not just any stand mind you, it has to be “nice”. My idea of nice is a milk crate covered with a good towel. My wife has a much different idea. I don’t even want to know how much that is going to cost.

Every guy knows that “nice” isn’t cheap.

As a final note, this was yet another year that I didn’t see any of those much talked-about fights over the hot items. For those who ventured out before dawn, how did you do? Did you get a $400 laptop? Let me know.

Will you be my friend?

I am a huge fan of Google and the many spinoff projects the search engine monster maintains. There has been a lot of talk about Google and its plans for social networking. The basic idea is that you sign up, create a page about yourself and connect with friends, family and like minded people.

While these sites have been around for a while, and millions of people are already participating in networking sites, I just haven’t done it. To tell the truth, I have always thought that I am just too old to be hanging out with 5 million teenagers on MySpace. But, as a techie kind of guy, I can’t just sit here and ignore this ever expanding part of the net.

I may not stick around, but I sure am going to take a look.

So I started with Facebook, one of the leaders in social networking. I logged on, and I set up my Facebook page and was surprised by to find so many people on the site that I knew. A couple of them were teeny-bopper neighbors, so I skipped past them and reached out to a few friends from work and my buddy that I helped pull into blogging.

If you are interested taking a look at some of the options out, there check out this great Wikipedia page that has a list of 110 social networking sites. The beauty of the Internet is the variations on a subject. You can get into a general social situation -- with no real direction -- like MySpace.com (it only has 300 million members already) or aim for one of the more focused groups, such as the photo sharing site Flickr. Check them out and I hope to see you online.

Crackberry

My name is Bruce Bishop and I have an addiction. It’s not drugs, booze or anything else too exotic that I’m likely to admit in a public forum. But, I am addicted to, my Blackberry.

In fact devotees of this particular piece of heaven call their phones Crackberries.

That leads me to a very cool site I found while searching for the latest greatest phone around (the whispered-about Blackberry 9000 -- a Blackberry that has many of the cool functions found in the iPhone). It’s Crackberry.com This site has tons of forums dedicated to all things Blackberry -- loads of accessories and the solution for my biggest frustration, free, cool ring tones. Until now the best ring tone I had was the old- fashioned telephone ring and that’s nothing compared to what most people have.

Well that’s been fixed, Now my phone is just as cool sounding as my co-worker Shawn Foucher’s phone. He has this neat frog sound that croaks through the newsroom every time his phone rings.

So fellow Crackberry fiends, check in and let me know what programs you can’t do without, and if you have any info on the mythical Blackberry 9000, send it my way.