The Omnigeek

We have long envisioned Santa Claus as a jolly fat man in a red suit with elves and magical reindeer spending their lives making wooden trains and so on.

Well that was the old Santa who made toys for your parents. Today, kids want toys from Mattel and Hasbro. They are un-happy with generic dolls and jack-in-the-box’s. Elves don’t make Transformers or stitch Barbie’s latest fashions.

Santa realizing this to be the case several years ago, seeing his stock of trains, wagons, and nut cracker’s build up in his warehouse decided to reorganize. Santa now runs a large toy distribution system and it works like this.

You, the child take your parents to special viewing centers where you can see what toys Santa has available this year. These viewing centers are known as Toys ‘R Us, Walmart and so on. Santa allows your parents to have Christmas year round by selecting toys right away for you. But for Christmas, which is the special time, your parents can request what you want and send that information to Santa.

You used to have to write a letter to Santa letting him know what you want, but now, you can just tell your parents or show them. Santa, who now lives in a large office in Fargo, North Dakota. Its disguised, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. Look for a building with a big “Citicorp” sign. He uses a special card that he gives to each parent. They can use that card and let Santa know the right house, kid, and items that he is to deliver on Christmas night.

Your parents can use this special card while in the viewing centers to tell Santa what you need, or then can use their computer to tell Santa your holiday wishes.

Once your parents use the card to enter the information into Santa’s computers, the order goes to the Elves in North Dakota. They processes the orders and send them on to Elves located regionally. Because the world is so large and the toys no longer come from Santa’s workshop, the local elves handle bringing the toys to your house. They however can’t be seen while delivering the toys, so the sleighs have been disguised as are the elves. They use a brown truck and dress in brown clothes to help hide themselves better.

Santa also employees sub-Santa’s to work at the malls in case you want to get your wish list directly to Santa and not go through your parents. This local Santa will send your Christmas needs to Santa to be entered into the system.

Everything runs seamlessly with this system and you stand a good chance at getting your Darth Vadar talking mask this holiday season instead of a pretty red wooden nut cracker.

There is a growing movement on the Internet. That movement is to bring to an end an era. That era is known as Internet Explorer 6. For those who don’t know what Internet Explorer 6 is, its called a Web Browser or a program that you use to visit web pages like this. Surprisingly many people don’t know what a web browser is, they just know you click on the Blue E to get on the Internet. This program is more commonly known as IE6

“Why is this a problem?” you ask.

IE6 is nine years old. In computer terms this is ancient. It is buggy, prone to hackers and others who want to do ill-will to your computer.

Internet standards have evolved considerably and there are many new features that web developers could use to make your Internet experience much better. Today’s browsers are hundreds of times faster when working with sites like Facebook and YouTube. And IE6 is filled with quirks that take web developers considerably longer to work around.

With the new features available to web developers, we can produce some extraordinary experiences for you. Making them work in IE6 seriously limits our ability to make your Internet time the best that it can be. For the betterment of the Internet we need everyone who can upgrade do so. Several major sites have announced that they will no longer be supporting IE6.

IE6 users represent around 20% of web users, so most people have upgraded. However for this blog, around 50% of you are still using IE6.

We know that there are several reasons why you cannot upgrade to a more modern browser. Perhaps your computer is running an operating system older than Windows 2000. Perhaps you are accessing this site from a computer at work where your IT department has it locked down. Those reasons are hard to deal with. The other reasons you might not is you fear change or you feel you lack the skill to install new software.

In the latter case, Microsoft certainly has not built Windows as a platform to make that easy. Its full of technical mumbo-jumbo and scary, multiple step processes that are indeed frightening. For your benefit, you should not let these two reasons from keeping you from a better Internet.

Firefox 3.5

Firefox is a very fast, reliable, stable browser and its the most flexible and expandable.

Apple Safari

Safari is the fastest and most standard browser available, though it has fewer add-ons compared to Firefox

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is based on the same engine as Apple Safari, so it is very fast and has good standards support, but its the newest player and isn’t as expandable.

Internet Explorer 8

IE8 is the latest browser from Microsoft. It is much better than IE6 with standards support and is quite fast.

Note: Installing IE8 will replace your IE6 installation. Installing the other browsers will just add their functionality to your system.

Leave a comment below about what browser you use and why? Also take the poll in the sidebar!

A tale of an earth worm’s journey.

My daily lunch-time walk is an opportunity to clear my mind and try to think about nothing, a great chance for my eyes to see something other than multi-colored square pixels 18″ away and see things they do.

And on a quiet office park drive, things don’t change on a large scale.  Its the same curves, the same concrete, the same buildings and trees every day.  But things do change on micro level.  For instance, there are various flora along the way that drop things onto the street, things like broken twigs and berries.  A few wild animals like to leave their “sign”.  My encounter with nature requires that I look down a lot.

In the past, I’ve observed a very angry brown recluse spider who was contemplating biting me through my shoes.  Why he had such hate for me I will never know.  I’ve found several other things that make me think and ask questions like “Why is there a tube of toothpaste laying in the edge of this hedge row?” I even wonder if others notice and think about these things.

Today, I observed earth worms.

A recent rain had brought out several worms out of the ground to end up on the sidewalk where they eventually dried out and became crunchy morsels for the dive-bombing blue-jays.  Today the sidewalk was dry.  The wind was fairly brisk.  Yet a live earth worm, a red worm to be specific in fishin’ terms, was making a trek from its grassy home on the left side of the sidewalk to someplace else, perhaps to the right side.  It was clear that with the wind and the dry concrete and its angle of attack that it would not make it.  The worm was drying out quickly. It was already struggling and it was barely 8 inches away from the grass it departed from.

So I came to moral dilemma.  Do I relocate it?

How would I like for some giant creature from another universe reached down and picked me up and relocated me to another planet?  Yes, its just a worm, but who am I to decide what is right or wrong for this worm?  I wouldn’t want someone making that decision for me.  I’m not God.  I may claim omniscience, but I certainly do not claim to be all-powerful or allpresent.  I have no right to decide what’s right or wrong for this worm.

Those Star Trek fans will remember this as the major plot to Star Trek:Insurrection, a feature movie from 1998 (I’m sure its been the plots to other movies as well, but being a geek, Star Trek brings us most of our life lessons).

It was going to die.  Its life would no doubt be extinguished if I didn’t act.  The worm had no way of knowing what conditions lay ahead for it. Its a simple worm.  Its for the most part brainless, eyeless, slimy, spineless “worm”.  What should I do?  Why should I act?  So should I pick him up and move him?

I’ve gladly terminated the lives of hundreds of red worms and night crawlers in the past; feeding them to large mouth bass and blue gill: all for sport and occasional food without thinking about it And I will again with out thinking about it.

Why should this one be different?  I could scoop up some dirt, give it a nice home until I get a chance to go fishing again at which time I would decide when he died at my pleasure.  But why should I care if it died?  Its just more goo on the sidewalk that I have to avoid on my walk.

But today, the worm’s long and winding road was its to choose.  The sky was gray.  There was the possibility for more rain in which case, the worm might survive.  Sprinklers could kick on and give it the nourishment it needed to complete its journey, so if I interfered I could prevent it from reaching its goal.

I knew not its destination.  Any attempt for me to relocate the worm would interfere with its destiny; a destiny that I had no business interfering with.  When fishing, the worm’s destiny is as bait.  I wasn’t fishing today.

I let the worm go on its own journey.  I don’t know if it made it or not or if it will be something I have to avoid on my next walk.  It did rain later, so I can hope the worm made it to where it was heading.  Maybe it will grow to be a great lure for a crappie or a large mouth bass some day or it will have offspring that will continue to work the soil so our grass can grow scrubbing the air so we can breath.

So the dilemma: save its life so it could benefit us down the road, or not play God and let nature take its course.  I’ll never know if my decision was right or wrong:  Inaction verses action.

But it was its journey, not mine to dictate, so with that thought, I can live with my choice today.

However, I need to go fishing.