It’s time for our holiday hiatus. See you back here in the new year.
As a small holiday gift, we’re pleased to offer updated versions of some classic Christmas stories.
How the Grinch Pwned Christmas: The Grinch, determined to stop Christmas, hacks into Amazon’s servers and cancels all deliveries to Who-ville. The Whos celebrate anyway, gathering in a virtual circle and exchanging user-generated content. When the Grinch sees this, his heart grows two sizes and he priority-ships replacement gifts to Who-ville.
Rudolph the Net-Nosed Reindeer: Rudolph is shunned by his reindeer peers for having a goofy WiFi-enabled nose. But he becomes a hero one foggy Christmas Eve by using the nose to access Google Maps, helping Santa navigate to the homes of good children.
Gift of the eMagi: Poor husband and wife find perfect gifts for each other and bid aggressively for them on eBay. Unbeknownst to them, they’re bidding against each other for the same gift. Determined to express their love by paying whatever it takes to get the gift, they bid themselves into bankruptcy.
NSA Claus is Coming to Town: He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good or go to Gitmo.
The Little DRM-er Boy: A boy wants to share his recorded drum solo with Baby Jesus, but the file is tethered to a faraway computer. With the aid of three downloads from the East, he rips an MP3 and emails it the Mary and Joseph just in time for Christmas Night.
It’s a Wonderful Second Life: George Bailey believes that Second Life would have been better if he had never signed on at all. He jumps off a bridge … and floats slowly to the ground. Clarence Linden, George’s guardian avatar, restores the server backup from before George signed on, and watches with George while griefers run wild. George sees the error of his ways, and Clarence restores his account.
A Vista Carol: Ebenezer “Steve” Ballmer runs a coding shop in Merry Old Redmond. He forces programmer Bob Cratchit to work overtime on Christmas to meet the Vista ship date. At night, Ballmer is visited by three Ghost images: Windows Past, Windows Present, and Windows Future. [Fill in your own jokes here.] The next morning, Ballmer sends Bob home for Christmas, in exchange for a promise to keep his Blackberry on during dinner.
[Thanks to Alex Halderman and my family for help writing the stories.]
