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One or more (they conspire and confuse) of the little house urchins got into my stuff one day this week and managed to attack my cycling trainer and lose the battery cover. Grrrrrr...

The fine folks over @ Bike Nashbar managed to locate the old part number of the trainer and then the old part number of the battery cover and order/ship me a new one. *Gratis*.

They have great deals and great customer support - how can you go wrong? Plus, you can shop via the Nashbar Amazon Store. What are you waiting for!

Microsoft is set to release their new Office 2007 for Mac later this month and if you didn't have the opportunity to take advantage of some of the decent discount programs offered at the end of the year, here is your best bet for an inexpensive way to get the full monty of Mactopia goodness.

Rather than go directly for the whole bundle of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition-- which includes support for Microsoft Exchange and an illustration program -- at a cost of almost $500.00 (USD), consider grabbing Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher instead. It will set you back around $130 (USD) and you will be eligible for a full upgrade [PDF] for just the cost of shipping.

If you bought an iPhone as an early adopter and still have store credit, you can also purchase Office 2004 at the Apple store and potentially get Microsoft's newest offering almost free.

While it is required software if you need full compatibility with its Microsoft's Windows counterpart and despise Rosetta (as I do), Numbers, Pages and Keynote are all great alternatives.

Hey folks... The last day of the year begins with an early roundup of some interesting bits from around the internets:

• If you think you're safer using your credit card at a restaurant than over the Internet, you're very, very wrong. You need to read this one.
• How exactly does 14,800 pounds of ground beef go missing? (Brings new meaning to "Where's the beef?")
• Maybe the DHS should stop oppressing the average folks and take a look inward instead.

When NPR decides to delve into the murky waters of security and technology, professionals should probably take some notice:

• Marketplace reported (wait a bit for the audio associated with that blurb to be posted) on the increased dangers of identity theft predicted for 2008.
• NPR's Morning Edition also covered identify theft and gave a brief nod to Netscape Navigator's demise.
• At the peak, Amazon was selling 17 Wii's per second this Christmas. That's quite a bit of Wii.

It's a gorgeous day out here and the posts may be few and far between for the rest of the day. Mary & I will be taking some time alone at Monsoon tonight and I'll be sure to post some comments on the cuisine.

One last note is that EVE Online looks amazing on a 46" Sony Bravia LCD HDTV. Booted Windows XP on the MacBook Pro and hooked it up with a DVI-to-HDMI cable, piped the stereo out to the receiver and worked the controls with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard (old school) and a Logitech wireless mouse. The Trinity expansion with the enhanced graphics make it look like you're watching a movie. Great fun!

Happy new year everyone!

Amazon announced their new SimpleDB service today, which makes storing and accessing structured data easy and inexpensive:

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

The usage-based costing model Amazon keeps promoting is definitely going to have an impact on how the industry views software (in this case, as a service). I realize they are trying to monetize this on their own, but if they developed an appliance-based solution for enterprises that scaled by adding low-cost boxes and incorporated the technologies behind their compute cloud, storage service and this new structured data hosting they would make many CIOs very happy campers.

My post on the Kindle over @ TAB.

Gruber agrees (and is a bit more emphatic about it in his Twitter posts).

You can pre-order your copy of Leopard from Amazon from here: