Discussion turns to books and coffee as I reminisce about my 35th birthday, a geeky Christmas, and the surprising fusion of my Xbox 360 with a spiffy new iPod. In Net News I look at Villain Talk, the podcast for evil geniuses, take a bite out of a gingerbread TIE fighter and find out what geeky women at the She's Such a Geek blog.

Finally, I review one of my latest reading conquests, Vernor Vinge's space opera A Fire Upon the Deep.

For my birthday this year I headed out to Barnes & Noble with my son Lucas for an afternoon of browsing books and drinking coffee. Lucas, being about 5 months old at the time, was enthusiastic about the outing, as only a baby can be, smiling, gurgling and generally looking forward to flirting with every woman he could see at the bookstore.

I arrived with short list of books I was hoping to find, including The Star Faction by Ken MacLeod, The Stars Are Also Fire by Poul Anderson and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. Mainstream bookstores being what they are, and the Long Tail being what it is, I was unable to find any of these books on the shelf. I was forced to fall back on my secondary choices, and left the store with Ken MacLeod's novel of alien first contact Learning the World, William Gibson and Bruce Sterlings' steampunk novel The Difference Engine and Terry Goodkind's objectivist fantasy Wizard's First Rule.

A very merry (and hopefully, very geeky as well) Christmas to everyone! Right now the Newquist clan is basking in the occassionally turbulent afterglow of the holidays, gifts strewn across the living room and library like some sort of Toyland apocalypse. Jordan and I are escaping it for a few hours to hang out with fellow geek and long-time friend Dave and his daughter, but we'll be back by night fall to continue with the unpacking, assembling and organizing.

Drivl gives a rundown of how coding works in the real world, as opposed to how Hollywood thinks coding works. Gems include "Code does not move", "Code is not three dimensional", "Code does not make blip noises as it appears on the screen" and "Most code is not inherently cross platform" (which means that Apple laptops shouldn't be used to take out alien motherships, and Dells shouldn't be able to connect to myriad Gou'ald and Ancient devices.

We now know what the name of the seventh (and presumably final) Harry Potter book will be: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was announced by Scholastic on Dec. 21; no release date for the book was given.

I've been slowly working my way through LEGO Star Wars II and spent a chunk of yesterday battling through the Empire Strikes Back chapters when I found that a new character had been added to my list of freestyle choices: Han Solo, Frozen in Carbonite. He is, as you'd imagine, a big slab. He jumps around. He bends a little (exactly how carbonite bends, I'm not sure). He is, in a word, useless, yet the freestyle mode forces you to take him rather than something more useful like, say, a Jedi.

For years, people have been asking me for pictures of the Geek Tree, and for years, I've been promising to find a way to take them. This year, I finally did. Check out the Geek Tree in all its glowing glory in this Flickr photo set.

I experimented with a couple of different approuches, but ultimately I hit upon taking the photos with my Sony Cybershot DSC-L1 digital camera on "auto" mode with multi-point focus enabled and the flash turned off.

The December 2006/January 2007 edition of Geek Gazette is available for download [pdf]. The latest edition of the PDF ezine offers holiday tips for geeks, year's end "top ten" lists, thoughts on what makes a good role-player, podcast recommendations, and a geek gift wish list.

That'd be enough for any normal edition, but it goes on with quick reviews of the superhero RPG Mutants & Masterminds, the geek film Clerks 2 and the D&D source book Magic of Eberron, a comic book round up, geek TV, and a hefty convention calendar. In short, if you've been feeling less than geeky lately, this should fix you up nicely.

I have my geek tree ... this German geek has a gingerbread TIE fighter. Inspired by Darth Vadar's advanced TIE fighter from A New Hope, this thing features over-sized wings laced with white icing, I can only assume that the brown stuff holding it together is some sort of super-strength molasses. The question is, will this give rise to an entire gingerbread Empire, complete with star destroyers, death stars, and shuttles for little gingerbread rebels to steal so they can sneak on to a gumdrop moon? Only time will tell.

Years ago, Macs and Windows machines had a hard time reading the same floppy discs; now you can run Windows on a Mac, from within Mac OS X itself! This tutorial on Lifehacker explains how to make application windows within Windows XP run seemlessly inside OS X.