Merry Christmas everyone. I'm off to play with my Tablet.

Thanks to Joe Harris for giving me the ultimate Christmas present (one that even the world's richest people can't buy until at least February): an NEC Tablet. One thing: this thing might ruin your marriage. I haven't been able to put it down. I carry it outside. I take it to bed. I use it on the couch.

It is finally a computer that I can read on. Why? Cause I can hand it to my wife and say "look what RageBoy says today." This is very close to a laptop.

It's also very close to Alan Kay's "Dynabook" or that Apple book that John Scully showed us in videos in the late 1980s. Weird that it was Bill Gates that delivered it to us, not Steve Jobs. I think Apple and Steve Jobs are working on a Tablet of their own. It just makes so much sense. Especially when you consider that this thing is really just a Wacom tablet.

Did you just have an epiphany there? What else uses a Wacom tablet? Can you say "graphic artists?" Yes, that's right. Using Photoshop on a Tablet is a freaking dream. Instead of using a digitizing device off to the side of my keyboard, I draw and write right on the screen. This BLOWS AWAY any other "Wacom-based" system I've ever used.

If graphic designers figure this out, and get over their hate of Microsoft before Apple comes out with one of their own, Apple is toast in the graphic design business. After all, Photoshop and Illustrator are two of the things that keep many Mac fans on Macs.

Imagine you're an artist. What would you rather draw on? A Tablet, or an Apple Titanium? I know which one I'd rather use.

Oh, my Tablet has a Compact Flash slot. I can take my Compact Flash card out of my Nikon digital camera and plug it into my Tablet.

This is gonna change the world of artists and photographers.

I gotta buy stock in Wacom. They are gonna sell a ton of digitizers next year.

I was watching the SpongeBob Christmas Special last night and noticed that they had Americanized Christmas. They avoided all mention of where this particular holiday came from. Do all you Christians really know? Hey, you all should, you stole it from the Pagans. Oh, for even more Christmas trivia points, do you know who made Santa Claus fat? All Americans should know this, since it was the Coca Cola company. They made him fat in their advertisements and he's been fat ever since. Update: actually, here's the truth about Coca Cola and Santa. Google is God.

Here's more info about Coca Cola and Santa Claus from Google. Google is God.

Thanks to Scott for pointing me to this: a way to get a map from any address on a Web page. It works awesome and the Outlook tools that this company, Anagram, sells are equally awesome. They save a ton of time getting folks contact info out of signatures.

Hey, my Tablet experiences sound a whole lot like Aaron's Segway experiences. Fighting to be next. Forgetting what you've learned. Hey, I found a cool button this morning. I can work in portrait or landscape mode. Cool!

Mike McBride wonders whether I'm a corporate shill. Of course I am, if I am posting stuff about NEC (and anytime I write about NEC you should take my writings as such). But, yesterday, I was not writing about NEC's tablet per se. Just the Tablet experience. So, those were from my heart. I have owned previous tablets too. Remember the Clio? I've also owned a Palm and a couple of PocketPCs.

Mike seems to think that Tablets couldn't get smaller and that is the major advantage of PocketPCs today, he says. Why couldn't Tablets also get smaller? The Tablet OS is just software. As Moore's Law brings us more RAM and storage space into smaller devices, why do we need a shitty OS like Windows CE? (It really is shitty when compared to Windows XP, cause it doesn't run the software I want to run).

He also says that people don't want to write to communicate. Here I totally disagree and you're taking a very English-centric look at the world. I've been to China and Japan and I'm married to an Iranian woman. Have you ever tried to type in those languages? It's MUCH harder than simply writing. The Tablet is going to be huge.

Also, did you know that most Tablets (including NEC's) come with a keyboard? Obviously we're not FORCING anyone to write.

Mike, you really need to try one out for a few days before knocking it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job. Is it perfect? No. I couldn't get it to recognize my own name properly for the first 20 tries. Then I changed my handwriting to what it wanted to see and it works great now. My handwriting sucks, what can I say?

The Tablet is far more than a geek symbol, by the way. It's a laptop that can be used while standing up. For me, that's a huge increase in functionality and one that isn't going away anytime soon.

Oh, boy, have I stepped in it now. I said I could prove that God isn't what the bible describes. Well, honestly, I can't. I was never good at proofs. I guess that's why I didn't go beyond Calculus in college. That all said, Google is God and does provide answers to anything you are seeking. So, I visited Google, typed in "what's false about bible?" and out popped this. And then I found "what's wrong with the 10 commandments." Really interesting stuff no matter which side of the line you're on. George Carlin did a similar bit recently on HBO. I wonder if he found this page by doing the same search I did? He argued quite convincingly that you could get the 10 commandments down to one or two.

Anyway, I can't even prove that this morning's New York Times is correct or not. How do you expect me to prove anything (pro or con) about a book written 2000 years ago by old guys 50 years after the events happened?

One question: if the bible is so correct, why are there 1000 religions listed on Google and Yahoo?

Another point: the bible clearly has had a bigger influence on our society than any other single set of ideas. I'm in awe. I also study it for marketing ideas. Religions really are marketing machines with nothing behind them. When you go to church you don't walk out of there with a car, like you would if you went to a car dealership, or a hamburger, if you went to an In-N-Out. No, they are selling good feelings. Hell, for me, a bottle of good wine does the same thing and is far cheaper. But, it is something to be in awe of.