It’s a beautiful day in cyberspace. The SUN rises brilliantly – there’s not a cloud in the Skype. “Yahoo!” you exclaim as you sit under the Apple tree next your Adobe hut. Placing your legs into a Lotus position, you adjust the fine Red Hat given to you by the Apache chieftain, who was indeed something of an Oracle.

“Sony boy”, the chieftain once cautioned, “remember that at low tide the exposed seaweed can make it slippery on Xerox. You might slip and cut yourself on the Corel”.

Soon, a troop of Internet Explorers march by, apparently on some sort of Safari. They must have been successful so far, as a prize Firefox is slung on a pole carried by two explorers. As the troop comes to a fork in the road, Mr. Hewlett drives by in his Packard with his son in the passenger seat, who is a particularly Hotmail. Several of the girl explorers’ heads turn, but the leader is quick to say “don’t be MSN around with that SAP, girls, and stop getting all Google eyed”.

As the Packard careens down the road, Mr. Hewlett grumbles about the lack of parking in town. “There’s always someone in MySpace”, he laments.

“Don’t be so Sirius”, his son protests, as a Dell Shannon tune blares from the radio. “We’ll Zune be home”.

DOROTHY, WAKE UP!

OK, I admit it. I’m a little “figmo-ed” this week, what with the Thanksgiving holiday and all. So this week will be a little disjointed.

I’ve been putting the new wicked-small iPod shuffle through its paces recently. I must confess that my descriptions of the shuffle’s size (“about the size of a matchbook”) have been somewhat misleading. I put it up against a real matchbook this week, and it’s at least 20% SMALLER than a matchbook. My daughter dubbed the new shuffle “Gidget”, and we’ll be testing her battery life as the holidays progress. The iPod shuffle is an ideal stocking stuffer, holding 240 songs for $79.

And, if you don’t want to stock a stuffing with it, you can have some fun with your giftee by placing the shuffle in a small box within a series of progressively bigger boxes and watch them unpack it.

Or, you could really frustrate them and buy them a Zune – number 48 on the best-seller list on Amazon.com. Or, you could wait a few months and buy them half-price on eBay.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski