Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Beautiful Kwanzaa and a Great New Year!

Too all my readers, freinds, family and well the whole darn planet, may love stay with you all!

We are eagerly awaiting tonights arrival of Santa Claus, and Santa if you are reading this, we have some fresh, warm chocolate chip cookies and a nice cold glass of 2% milk for you. Please remember the Ben 10 Laboratory that Lil' Z has been asking for all year. You should have gotten his email, snail mail letter, and should recall his Windows Live Messenger chat, wasn't it?

I'm traveling the next week to visit my dear mother, who recently moved to South Carolina. It's been years since I've been to the South, and I'm betting it hasn't changed too much. So this will most likely be my last blog post of 2006, unless I find WiFi at Ohare Airport.

If you are a fan of hand crafted electric guitars, I'd suggest you stop over and visit John Page Guitars. John is a true artist, and his medium is wood, and John likes to refer to his creations as "functional art". After helping create the prestige and glamour that is the Fender Custom Shop, he has branched out on his own, building very attractive furniture (at http://www.p-one-c.com/), and once again creating custom electric guitars. From the gallery on John's site, it would appear that the first model is sort of a Telecaster/Les Paul hybrid, featuring a chambered swamp ash body. Currently, these guitars will be extremely limited ("only accepting 12 orders"), and as I mentioned hand built from the ground up, so I'd suggest getting your order in ASAP.

Well, after many long nights, I think I've finally reached the point with the graphic design of this web site, that I'll be able to tolerate for longer than a month. I've seen several really cool looking web sites lately, so I felt that my site should have a little more "pop and pizazz"! I'd love to hear any feedback, as I've tried a new CSS tricks that may be causing some funkiness in some older browsers.

The trick in particular is this:

/* CSS */
/*
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url( '../img/red_grad_strip_bk.png' );
background-repeat:repeat;
*/

This image that is being used is a transparent 1x1 .PNG file, with the opacity set to 50%. I tried different with different levels of opacity, but this seemed to work the best, especially in nested <div> scenarios. Obviously, this will only work in browsers that support PNG files (IE7/FF2). I'm not so sure that this could possibly be done with transparent GIF files, so I didn't even try. Next, that fancy Web 2.x "rounded corners" trick.

To help celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Fender Custom Shop (1987-2007), Fender has released a new Adobe Flash based web site featuring all of their "Custom Shop" instruments. Scanning the entire site, as I am a Fender fanatic, I must say the sight looks great, and it's nice to see Fender add a small web part that shows which limited editions are going to be "retired" soon. There are also several image galleries, proudly displaying the fantastic work of the Fender's elite Master Builders, who also have profile pages, though it seems there has been a bit of attrition.

“The Custom Shop was created to push the envelope for Fender,” said Mike Eldred, Custom Shop marketing manager. “We build dreams—we take your dream and transform it into a guitar.”

Nothing a little Henry Rollins to gear you up for the coming new year and the challenges that it will bring. | Henry Rollins: Freedom is under attack | http://21361.com/ |

Famed Microsoft Windows Programming author, Charles Petzold, has released a great new book entitled ".NET Book Zero", for C/C++ programmers that may be new to the world of the Microsoft .NET programming framework. With some great samples and several years of insight, this is a must have for .NET programmers, new and old. Visit Charles' webite to get a copy in Adobe PDF format, along with the sample codes from the book. | http://www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet/ |

Are you a 3D artist using an Autodesk product such as "AutoCAD", "3DS MAX" or even "Maya"? Well then, Autodesk would love to know about your website or blog, as they reach out to the 3D community they have helped create. You can click this link ( or  http://myfeedback.autodesk.com/Surveynet/TakeSurvey.aspx?SurveyID=92MJm57 ) to add your self to the list. While you are on the AutoDesk site, and are interested in 3D rendering and artistery, you might check out all of the great trial software they have also.

The electricity has been restored, and all is good again. Oh Yeah, and this is sort of my second anniversary of "Blogging". I hesitate to mention it, as I've had my own web site of some shape and fashion, for well of 10 years now. But I digress...On with the Holiday season! Drink! Eat! Sleep! Much love to all! (and I do mean all people on planet earth)