My friends over at the uhm.. the designer guys blog (designerguys.ca is released for registration Saturday @ 4pm hint hint) have Christmas beards going on, and are now starting to weigh in with updates, now 10 days into the event. Robert seems to be in the lead, as we’re still waiting for updates from the other contestants. As soon as they’re posted, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the up to the minute contests updates.

Only at ChrisTaggart.com - "your source for sporks."

Update - designerguys.ca is no longer available. 

Leave it to a fellow Canadian to come up with this. A free VPN P2P Secure Tunneling system. It’s awesome.

Hamachi

and Listen to the Podcast with Steve Gibson and some dude from TechTV  .. and watch for the word that Steve makes up.. "problematical?!"

The funniest Penny-Arcade I’ve read in a while. Anything with He-Man gets my approval.

Just saw this on digg. Too funny. Although what’s actually really really creepy is that some of the Santas look like serial killers. Maybe I have high standards, but even if "it’s Santa" I don’t think I’d let my kids near some of these guys. Just a little FYI I was scared like crazy of mall Santas and people pretending to be Santa. I used to cry, scream, and I think I kicked one or jumped on Santa’s foot once. I don’t know at what age I realized it wasn’t actually Santa, but it was pretty early on. I remember this one Santa at "Santa’s Village" who went on to lecture me on me costing my dad money or something to bring me to Santa’s village and then not visit Santa. I think I was 8 or something, but I was pissed. Who the hell did Santa think he was, try to guilt trip an 8 year old kid?

Another thing - I was a pretty determined kid (and sneaky - so I thought), so when I put my mind to something I generally accomplished it. So one year, Tracy and I had planned to stay up until Santa came, and she fell asleep - but for some reason I wasn’t tired and couldn’t sleep at all. So then before my parents went to bed, heard the shuffling of bags and looked down from upstairs to see them putting gifts out. I told Tracy that it was really mom & dad, and I think Shannon - who was like 5 or 6 somehow found out too. I ruined Christmas for both of them.

Have any Santa stories of your own? Leave ‘em in the comments. Oh, and here’s the link:

SCARED OF SANTA GALLERY: Tis the season to be scared witless

Remember that annoying Office Assistant, "Clippy", that shipped with Office ‘97 and into Office 2000 before he was canned with the release of Office XP? Well it seems he was so disgruntled after being layed off at Microsoft, he’s decided to start working with the Open Source community promoting firefox. I was browsing in IE this morning and came across this:

His addictive game still seems to be up on the Microsoft Taiwan site too. If that weren’t enough, it looks like he’s gone mad and just comments on anything you’re doing - related or not if you install this program.