Went to a couple of malls last night to finish up the Christmas shopping, I’m amazed at how many people AREN’T shopping. We first went up to the Mall of NH in Manchester, I had no problem at all parking near the Macy’s entrance and getting right into the store. Once there, it was like a mildly busy Saturday at any mall. Sure, there were people walking around and picking up goodies, but not nearly as many as I would have expected the week before Christmas.

Next we went down to the Rockingham Mall, same thing. I parked even closer to the Macy’s entrance. I figured that this mall (being the better of the two) would be packed inside. Nope. It was just like the previous, no problem walking around, no getting stuck behind slow ppl or slowing down others in a hurry. Amazing.

I guess I’m just surprised, I remember working for the Bombay Co. and this time of year being a flipping madhouse. There wasn’t a minute to take a break, eat, drink, escape from the customers (be they nice or flaming jackholes) or do anything but sell, sell, sell. I was actually chatting with bored sales people in some stores. Just amazing.

So is it an economic thing or (as is my preference) are we doing more and more with our computers (rhetorical).

Well, we’ve got the tree, the lights are up and the house is decorated. We’ve even gone out and made our Christmas cards which I’ll hopefully have time to get in the mail this week. It looks as though things are coming together a little earlier than normal this year… Though now that I think of it, we’ve yet to start shopping…

This year (like last) our tree came from the K of C in Plaistow NH. We’ve found two GREAT trees there and the place itself is a lot of fun. It’s up on top of a pseudo mountain and they drive you both up and down on ATVs. Pretty cool. This year we took down a 20 foot tree and had to cut it a bit to get the part we wanted. It’s cool that they don’t mind doing that (actually, it works to their benefit, not many ppl really want a 20′ tree). My favorite part is that they do the cutting, no dull bow saw, just flag em’ down and they come a runnin’ with a chain saw. The prices can’t be beat, they sell ANY tree, size matters not, for $40.00. I tend to tip as all the proceeds go to a food pantry. The site is maintained by a cool ass guy (wish I knew his name) who actually loses money as the tree replenishment is out of his pocket. I assume that he pays the folks who’re cutting the trees and driving us dolts around out of tree sales, but I don’t know for sure. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good place to get a tree. Sadly, we’ll have to go some place else next year, they don’t have many more 13 footers that appealed to us. We’ll go back in a couple of years and see what they’ve got.

I started a Christmas wiki this year to track all of the stuff we need to get done and what people like (I never remember). I LOVE my wiki, and I’m happily making notes and laying things out so I can always look back and see what works and what doesn’t (like vodka tonics, those DON’T work on Christmas, and even less the following morning). Just so much to keep in mind

So, for those of you that are interested, here’s a low res shot of the tree before we got it placed and decorated. The ladders give it such a warm Christmas feeling, no?

If you want to see it done up proper, you’ll have to be there on Christmas

So I’m probably late to the party, but I need to mention Google Trends. You can get more info about it here. In a nutshell, it’s a view of what is currently a hot search term relative to the total number of Google searches over time.

Take a look at my iGoogle page with one of today’s trends (center[ish] of the image):

Being that today is Cyber Monday, I suppose the results are apt. I’ve been watching it creep from Warm around 8:00 this morning, up to to Spicy, all the way to the current status of On Fire. I find it fascinating to see what people are hunting down. Yet another distraction to keep me from getting things done I suppose

Clicking on the results gets you more information, things like related searches, when the search on this particular term peaked and location information. Seems the news that Trent Lott is retiring next month most interests people in DC and NY.

Another worthy widget for your iGoogle page.

And here comes another Christmas . For those of you visiting to get the holiday list, you should be here.

If you stopped by, found that list and then backed up to see just what happens here, you’ll be bored soon. Keep reading to see what I mean.

Back when I started managing my own Wordpress (WP) install, I was (and by was, I mean will always be) paranoid about letting just anyone with a ‘puter at my /wp-admin dir.

• /wp-admin is where you go in WP to control the blog. It’s where you write to and post from, as well as perform administrative tasks.

I felt it prudent, so I took a few steps to protect the place. Firstly, I renamed the default admin account to something else. A task made fairly easy using your web host’s tools (phpmyadmin). Doing this will make it more difficult for fools to to make their way into the blog’s control panel. I also set up one helluvagood pass phrase for myself. Once that was done I took steps to limit just how many computers can hit that directory. This was done with a .htaccess file. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Htaccess for info on what else you can do with htaccess and some tutorials.

My file looks something like this:

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “MattSnell”
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 192.168.1.100
allow from 192.168.1.101
</LIMIT>

What it does is deny access to ALL IP addresses (order deny,allow and deny from all) and then selectively allows ONLY those in the allow from list.

Since I have two public IP addresses that almost never change, I just specify them in the allow list and upload the file to my /wp-admin directory using scp or ftp. If my IP address ever changes, I won’t be able to edit or otherwise admin the blog until I go in and update the file. No biggie, only takes a moment.

So there you have it, change the default admin username, set a good pass and limit how many IP addresses can access the control panel. Feeling better already