Well I’m back home for the holidays, and of course, the combination of being back at my parent’s place and the time of year does cause self-reflection. Fortunately, I won’t bore my readers with too much of this.

I bought a new colour photo printer for my dad, and while this is not much in itself, there’s actually some significance here for me. At Christmas of 1984, dad introduced me to my first “real” computer system by bringing home an Apple ][c and an Apple Imagewriter printer. I remember spending the entire night printing off banners, signs and posters in my room with Brøderbund’s “The Print Shop” (wow, I didn’t even know they still sell it). I must have kept my family up all night with the noisy schreech of the dot-matrix printer.

However, last night it was dad’s turn. After setting up the printer, he spent hours printing out photos of the kids and grandkids, performing some basic photo editing/cropping, downloading photos from his digital camera and learning the features of the new hardware. Dad is now 75 years old, and he’s learned most of this “stuff” in the last couple of years.

Having access to that Apple ][c was certainly important in my life as it gave me the opportunity to acquire some basic programming, hardware and software skills … such skills that would help lead me into my future career. And now, dad is getting his chance to use technology. After years of being ‘too busy’ with his business and in providing for our family, it’s finally his time to play.

And I thought I would leave you with a couple of other links:
– The SNL Christmas song … one of my favs.
– This rather funny music video/slideshow (by Jonathan Coulton) which takes it inspiration from photos in the Flickr Creative Commons.

Happy Holidays everyone. All the best to each of you and your families over this wonderful season!