Not the Stile Nacht I grew up with for sure.

Christmas Eve in Lindenwold, NJ brings not a sweet evening of magic and mystery of my youth but instead, the drunken shouts of a wild posse of Hispanic's.

Buddies and room-mates, they are playing cards on their back porch, cursing, shouting into the night and to each other.  Loud music. Two doors down from my world, they create a rather bizarre backdrop for this usually somber, magical and beautiful evening.

Did you ever notice that when you drop something accidentally, it always seems to fall to some hard to reach spot? I've been noticing this, and it seems it always falls to the center of the most difficult-to-reach place! This must be true - Quantum Mechanics says so. Well - sort of.

The web is exploding the stock photography market. While the per-image price is very low, there is, over time, the possibility of making good money through volume sales. Photographers are flocking to these sites by the tens of thousands. These services are a veritable sponge for the tsunami of digital images flooding the net.

In browsing the plethora of photo galleries and forums I'm always amazed at the proud declaration made by many about their latest creation: "NO Photoshop or any post-processing!" or "Right out of the camera!"

I live with an alien. A small black furry creature with four legs and a constantly wagging tail. You guessed it - a little dog! A Cairn Terrier to be extact.

It has been a number of years - maybe since around 1984 or so. I've been noticing the loss of the word "For". It is now spoken "Fur".

Sad.

I've heard very competent radio personalities, who normally speak and pronounce words very cleanly and very correctly say "Fur" for "For".

"For" is gone. Listen around you - I'll bet you can count on one foot, the number of times in a day when you hear "For" spoken as "For".

There is an old powerplant or steamplant bulding in Philadelphia. You can see it, just to the right of the new Amtrack building as you exit the city on Vine street heading out to the Schuykill Expressway, going West to King of Prussia.

I've seen old buildings like this converted into nifty office, store and business spaces. This one has an enormous smokestack - maybe 150 feet tall, or more. Very grand and impressive. It would be a shame if it were simply knocked down...

So what is it with this big-time newspaper putting such a tiny bar-code on their paper? When you go in to the supermarket to get a quick paper and a coffee, the bar-code is so damn small the scanner can't see it! Then the hapless check-out person (moi) has to scramble for the hand-scanner to find the tiny code, delaying the customer and backing the line up even more.

Come on guys - spend a little ink and page real-estate and put a serious bar-code down there!

 I've written business software systems for small companies for almost 20 years. Being self-taught with no degree, I've ended up VERY unemployable in the so called "IT" field. So being in survival mode, I've been in and out of various retail establishments as a worker-bee. The software systems that some of these companies use is a total embarrassment!