Geek Habitat

I don’t have words for the still-unfolding catastrophe that is the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunamis of December 26, 2004. It’s all a little mind-numbing — the sheer size of the geographic area affected, the scope of the devastation, and the growing numbers of lives lost or missing.

CNN photo gallery (Devastating photos; viewer discretion advised.)

How We Can Help — compiled by Google
NOTE: The list isn’t conclusive. It’s missing Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), for example.

It’s my 31st birthday today! (Thank you, Noah!)

People who share my birthday:

• Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States (1856)
• Earl “Fatha” Hines, father of modern jazz piano (1905)
• Stan Lee, artist and writer — creator of Marvel Comics (1922)
• Denzel Washington, Academy Award-winning actor (1954)
• Elizabeth Jordan Carr, first “test tube baby” born in the U.S. (1981)

Significant events in history on this day:

• John C. Calhoun became the first U.S. vice president to resign from office, citing differences with President Andrew Jackson (1832)
• Iowa became the 29th state in the Union (1846)
• Chewing gum was patented by William Finley Semple (1869)
• San Francisco, California’s, first street cars entered service (1912)
• Leonard Bernstein’s musical, “On the Town”, opened in New York City featuring the hit song “New York, New York” (1944)
• Filming for the movie, “Doctor Zhivago”, began on location near Madrid, Spain. The movie received ten Oscar nominations and won five Academy Awards, including Best Original Score. (1964)
• President-elect George W. Bush selected Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. (2000)
  Previously, Rumsfeld had served as defense secretary under President Ford, Ford’s chief of staff, U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Nixon, and as an Illinois congressman.

What was at the top of the music charts when I was born (1973):

• The Most Beautiful Girl – Charlie Rich
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John
• Time in a Bottle – Jim Croce
• If We Make It Through December – Merle Haggard

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Addendum: My sincere condolences go out to the Moore family today, on the passing of John Moore after a long and painful fight with cancer.

As many Amazon.com shoppers know, this holiday season something went terribly wrong in Bezosland. On several occasions, Amazon.com seemed to be posessed by gremlins — people couldn’t login to their accounts, view or modify wishlists, or even perform searches on the website.

Now those of us who do 99% of our shopping online, much of it on Amazon.com, are getting Amazoned. The symptoms of getting Amazoned are painful and easy to spot:

• Did you receive more than one copy of an item you placed on your Amazon.com wishlist?
• Did you give a “duplicate” copy of an item to someone because you purchased it off their Amazon.com wishlist?
• Or did you hit the jackpot, and both give AND receive duplicate items thanks to Amazon.com’s wishlists?

If so, welcome to the infirmary!

Due to the massive glitches on Amazon.com, their website failed to accurately track and display wishlist items as they were purchased. As a result, among five computer savvy individuals in my immediate family, four of us got Amazoned.

For example, my Amazon.com wishlist as of today still shows NINE items as “Unpurchased” that were ordered as Christmas gifts directly from my wishlist. Despite no indications that someone desired more than one copy of an item, thanks to Amazon’s foul-ups, that is exactly the scenario that played out.

Couple that with some serious glitches in estimated delivery dates, and additional people got hosed by gifts expected to arrive on December 24 failed to arrive in time for the holiday. My Mom had to print up and hand out something like ten “Certificates of Anticipation” to us for items that failed to arrive in time, despite having placed the bulk of her orders on November 28th!

Christmas isn’t just about the gifts, to be certain. But this is not the Amazon.com I know. Is Amazon.com under new management or something?

QUESTION: What is the #1 cause for a geek to feel old?

ANSWER: Realizing your eldest website turns TEN years old in the coming year!

… I guess even websites have to grow up sometime.

It’s 1 AM on Christmas Day, and we’re getting up at 7 AM… Ack! It was worth it spending time with the kids and immediate family on Justin’s side and then heading home to open our gifts to each other. (Realizing, yet again, that Justin spent way too much on me. I mean, W-A-Y too much!) And topping off the evening watching the Evanescence video Justin got for me and realizing we’re both in love with her voice and, well, her. If you’re gonna be a goth chick, please follow Amy Lee’s example, kids! {grin}

So, I have a slew of photos to share from tonight’s gift exchange with Justin’s family and from the {cough} snow pellets that fell briefly on San Antonio today, but all this will have to wait until later. It’s time for this chick to get some sleep!

May all your days be berry and might! Er…. ‘night, gang!

Overheard around the Christmas tree of a web developer and web designer (c’est moi) who’s married to a usability specialist (Justin) in a Fortune 500 company: