In the spirit of Ralph Lauren paint at Home Depot, P. Diddy has announced "Sean John Wheels" a partnership to develop "Sean John" branded rims.  Luxist reports the wheels will run from $700 to $3000 per wheel.  Nice.

My mom was cleaning out her house and found some of my old Topps Empire Strikes Back cards along with a few Return of the Jedi, A-Team and ET cards as well and mailed them out to me.  For the fun of it I searched for one of the captions on the card and found that StarWars.com has them all scanned and indexed.  These are dated July 1980 so I was five years old when my mom started buying them for me.  I love the internet.

Here are a few of them:

http://cargobay.starwars.com/webapps/cargobay/item-detail/8536/7029
http://cargobay.starwars.com/webapps/cargobay/item-detail/8547/7040
http://cargobay.starwars.com/webapps/cargobay/item-detail/8572/7065
http://cargobay.starwars.com/webapps/cargobay/item-detail/8789/7227

This month's Wired magazine day is dope, dohhh-p!  The February issue contains some of my contributions to Terry Tang and David Goldenberg's piece on tech company perks.  See page 34, the big Microsoft block.  I mentioned earlier that Terry had found my Microsoft blog and contacted me to find out some of the cool "perks" of working at MS.  I gave him a few like these:

• Xboxes in alcoves
• Office movie day
• Foosball
• Ping-pong

Here are some of the others that I think are sweet, but didn't make the cut:

• MS Summer Basketball League
• Seeing BillG / SteveB in the elevator
• The Visiting Speakers Series -- seeing Ray Kurzweil, Esther Dyson, Jane Goodall, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Adams, Benoit Mandlebrot, Dave Winer, Red Whittaker speak
• Being able to submit ideas to be considered for Bill Gates' "Think Week"

We heard "blog" was word of the year, but how was this chosen and what were some of the other choices?  Find out on Slate in Linguists Gone Wild! -- Why "wardrobe malfunction" wasn't the Word of the Year. 

Some of the past WOTY choices are hilarious -- http://www.americandialect.org/woty.html

William Gibson has a picture of that ginormous boulder that fell on a road down near Malibu.  The footage on the news didn't really convey the sense of how freaking huge the thing is.

Tonight on the drive home, they mentioned on NPR that Marvel is releasing a Spider-Man comic for India, which I think is really cool.  If it's a success, in ten years every Indian kid will know the name -- Pavitr Prabhakar. 

Here's a summary:

Everybody knows the story of Spider-Man…but what if things had happened differently?  What if it wasn’t a New Yorker named Peter Parker, but an Indian teenager named Pavitr Prabhakar who was gifted with the abilities of the spider?  Witness the rebirth of a legend as young Pavitr learns hard lessons about power…and responsibility.

http://www.marvel.com/catalog/showcomic.htm?id=86

via Kurzweil:

ABC News calls bloggers People of the Year.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/story?id=372266&page=1

Google has released their list of most popular searches for 2004.  It's kind of an interesting snapshot of what the populace has looked for over the year.  Ask yourself what's tired and what's wired when it comes to something like popular cartoons -- Sponge Bob or Simpsons?  You might be surprised.

Google Zeitgeist

OMG, this has to be a joke because it's far too cool.  This site reports that Steven Spielberg will do a Transformers movie after War of the Worlds.  How cool is that (if true)?

Get your own castle for $9.3 mil.  Is it just me or does $9.3 for a CASTLE sound like a great buy?

http://www.luxist.com/entry/1264827615082351/

via William Gibson's weblog:

In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep.

Read more here:

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_12_01_archive.asp#110391590837685350

The ol' OPML file has been feeling pretty stale lately.  Lots of arguing by self-important nobodies that really left me feeling sick after reading the stuff.  To be honest it left me feeling pathetic that I subscribe to the stuff in the first place and thereby feed their ridiculous egos.  So, I went looking for some new feeds and ended up having a read through ol' Wil Wheaton's blog (yes, that one).  Actually, I had avoided his for some time expecting him to just be milking that TNG thing.  But, I checked it out and did have a laugh at this post where Wil described what it was like to play Ghost Recon 2 for the first time after he had recorded the dialog of one of the characters.  It must be surreal to hear your voiced character giving orders one minute, and the next to hear your character has been shot and killed.  Maybe Steven will get to experience that kind of thing one day at Liquid.

K gave me an early birthday present today and it is dope.  A big one for the big 3-0.  Awesome.  Check it out.

I finally found time to set up an initial front page for the BabyPhotoBlog.com domain to tell about the photoblog web application I'd built for William when he was born.  We're accepting new baby photoblogs now so if you're interested (or know someone who might be interested) get in touch with us through the site. 

I was ping'd by Wired at work for a piece they're doing on tech companies.  That was exciting, that being the first time I've been approached by the media, and Wired's a great mag.  They'd apparently found me through my Microsoft blog.  Without spoiling the details, I'll just say to look for it in their February issue.

Now I am on vacation for 17 days so that means time with Kristen and William and some sleep too. 

Some guy modified an iBook to make his own tablet.  Very neat.

http://www.macmod.com/content/view/166/2/