Buy American? President Obama bought French game Just Dance 3 for Christmas

According to a tweet from French multinational computer gaming company Ubisoft, United States President Obama obtained their game Just Dance 3 as a family Christmas present. So much for Buy American! What's that about Do what I say, but not what I do....

The Ubisoft tweet also caught the attention of the venerable Forbes with this headline
"President Barack Obama Endorses Ubisoft's Just Dance 3 Videogame For Christmas". Forbes missed the obvious Buy American contradiction.

My wintry piece of music "Winter Breaks" uploaded to SoundCloud

Lovingly built with synthesized sounds and music loops, I hope you'll enjoy my wintry piece of music over the holiday season. It's called "Winter Breaks" and you can listen to it in its entirety through my SoundCloud account.

Mystery Christmas smoke plume in Washington State

Took a Christmas walk with family along Willows Beach in Oak Bay and spotted a smoke plume in what I believe was Washington State. Here's a highly magnified view of the mystery plume. I've assumed it was from a fire rather than an industrial site such as a pulp mill.

Checked Google News but didn't find anything about it.

December 26, 2009 Update: Checked Google Earth and plotted a path. The line extends through Whidbey Island, Camano Island, Stanwood and possibly Everett, Washington State. There is a waterfront mill operation and an adjacent U.S. naval station  at Everett, so more than likely the smoke plume originated from one of those two sites.



Here is a screen shot of "Mill Town" at Everett, Washington, from Google Maps Street View showing the mill with a thin plume of smoke.

Has this ever happened to you, stringing holiday lights the wrong way?

Has this ever happened to you? Stringing your holiday lights the wrong way? Yes, I did that on the weekend while stringing our Christmas lights. So I though, there has to be a male-male adapter out there so you can fix this without having the relay the entire string. I even sketched out my idea. I went to a local hardware store and was told no, that people would fry themselves if such a thing were available. Hmmm, so I checked The Google and sure enough Georgianna Reid of Kansas City, MO, USA, filed a United States patent in 2005 for just such a device. And the first sentence of the summary as found on FreePatentsOnline states "A double male electrical connector is provided to connect the female end of a string of Christmas lights with the female end of an extension cord suitable for plugging into a wall outlet." Her design, unlike my preliminary sketch, which obviously won't go anywhere, includes a safety feature so that "the apparatus includes a jacket receiving the connector for axially slidable use so that both male plugs cannot both be simultaneously exposed," which would leave the inevitable people-frying mentioned by my local hardware representative.

Slower Than Light Speed at the Truck Light Parade

Here is one of seven photographs on my Flickr site taken at the Truck Light Parade on December 5 from a vantage point along Oak Bay Avenue opposite Municipal Hall. I chose these images because visually they are the more arresting to me. The Truck Light Parade is an annual event organized by the Island Equipment Owners Association of British Columbia, Canada.