In the wee hours of the morning, an easter egg from Microsoft reared its ugly head, and every 30GB Zune on the planet (probably) stopped working. The culprit? A date driver that can’t handle leap years. See, this is the first time the 30GB Zune has had to face the spectre of a leap year — it’s a device from the pre-leap year dark ages of 2006.

The fora have been waaaaay active, with Zune v. iPod jihadists going about their typical sniping, with Microsoft being very, very, very quiet on a solution to the issue until about 45mins ago when they said they’d identified the problem, and that it would resolve itself at midnight GMT tonight — sorta like a New Year’s present from the dudes at Redmond. They’ve even committed to a firmware update prior to the next leap year… in 2012. I assume it won’t take them quite that long.

I’m enjoying poking fun at this just as much as anyone else, but it could’ve been anyone’s devices suffering this fate, and I would be just as amused. Like several folks noted today, thank heaven it wasn’t something in aircraft or satellites or something far more insidious that was affected by this little glitch of testing. It is entertaining though to watch from the sidelines as folks go through Hannah Montana withdrawals all over the net, threatening lawsuits, allegiance changes, sailing their Zunes into the streets on high arc trajectories… At the end of the day, it is just music, but I certainly get the point of the rabid fans who want their tunes. I even saw one poster bemoaning the fact that he would have to go home tonight listening to CDs. Imagine the humiliation!

I guess this will become a cautionary tale of things are tested, and why you don’t just test the happy paths — you test all the paths. Today… The Day The Zunes Stood Still. Y2K9. Insert your own pun here.

I wish for each of you the best of Christmas wishes, and all the joy the season brings. We’re having fun spending time on The Mountain with the family, and waiting for the last us to get up here this morning so we can open gifts.

For those of you who like my twisted sense of humor, here’s a little gift….

This was shot during one of our vacations as we passed through Santa Claus, IN. Truly, truly twisted!

Last night, the AppleStork came, and dropped off the latest addition to the Deauxmayne… a new 8GB iPhone. As Becky has pointed out, I now have one of each current iPod model. That wasn’t a plan, but it is interesting that it has happened.

I like the device — of course, it’s not that far different than the iPod Touch. It’s a little narrower and thicker, and has a more substantial feel in your hand than does the Touch. One funny I noticed is that the touchscreen “feels” different. I would’ve assumed the same glass was on both, but somehow, the glass on the Touch feels slicker. When I first drug my finger across the iPhone screen, I thought it was “sticky” by comparison to the Touch’s screen. Weird, huh?

The phone seems to work pretty well as compared to my HTC Mogul. For me though, the impressive piece is the internet access. It is so much nicer than the experience on Windows Mobile 6 on the Mogul. That’s not HTC’s fault; that’s Microsoft’s. What an amazing difference working through Safari instead of IE! And since I’m all Apple at home, the integration with my Macs is sweet, and the interface concepts are familiar.

Phydeaux is a happy camper!

Like he sometimes does, Braddog has been leading us down some interesting paths, and this time, we followed the coffee-stained road.

Jay’s been telling us about single-serve coffee machines, one of which, a Keurig, he now owns. Now, I like coffee in the mornings, and I love my Cuisinart coffeemaker, but the Cuisinart is really designed for making more coffee than I need in the morning. This new beasty uses pre-measured little sealed cups of coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and honestly, it makes a pretty fair cuppa joe.

I haven’t gotten through very many of the sample k-cups (as the little pre-measured dealies are called), but so far, I’ve enjoyed the Green Mountain Extra Bold. It reminds my quite a bit of the Jamaican coffee I like so well. In fact, should I once again get some JamaBeans, Keurig makes a special little reusable cup so you can roll your own, using your favorite coffee or tea.

Leave it to us to gadgetize our coffee!!!!

I’ve been fighting a weird little problem with my iPod Touch. I’ve noticed that some Genius-generated playlists have a quirk about them that prevented the correct artist and album cover to be displayed in coverflow for some tracks. Tip the thing over to the track view, and presto, chango, suddenly the art is right, as is the artist.

After doing a bunch of searching, I didn’t find anything that matched my symptoms. And then I noticed something… all the tracks involved in this had the same album title: Greatest Hits. Having all those tracks labelled like that created a giant album on the Touch that had myriad artist’s GH tracks all attached to the same album, and that seems to have been the root cause of the problem.

Now, I’ve added something to the album title for my GH discs so they will now be distinct from each other, and that appears to have solved the problem. Weird, weird, weird….

There’s been a LOT of hue and cry concerning Nikon’s new body… Kinda makes me feel good to shoot Canon!

A colleague sent along this article, noting the official demise of Polaroid film. This month will be the last production month of this glorious film.

It truly is the end of an era. I have hundreds of old Polaroids shot by my parents and grandparents, and still love the look of them. To be fair though, I’m not as big a fan of the 1980′s vintage Polaroid prints — they all seem to be a bit fuzzy, and didn’t have the whole “peel off” processing of their ancestors. And man, nothing smelled quite like a Polaroid print. (Yes, I was one of those kids that also loved the smell of ditto reproduction, too.)

I love digital, but it’s real hard to hand a digital print to someone straight out of the camera – you have to carry a photo printer with you, and that’s just not practical a lot of times. A lot of the allure of Polaroid prints was that instant “shoot and share” that digital just can’t deliver.

One day, not too far off, I think there’ll be a whole generation for whom the word “film” will either evoke a comment about how old that is, or will only be associated with motion pictures. That’s a sad day comin’.

Back in September, I mentioned that I voted with my wallet, preferring an iPod Touch over an yellow iPod Nano. Well, the pressure of Black Friday sales weighed heavily on my shoulders, and come that fateful Friday, I ordered an 8GB yellow Nano.

And yes, I did get it engraved with the phrase from Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. Check out the not-so-great photos below.

I’m very impressed with the little thing. It’s tiny. Despite that, it has a decent sized screen, although I don’t know if I’d wanna watch video on it (something I haven’t tried yet). And it weighs next-to-nothing, while sporting a glass screen and an aluminum body. It’s really a thing of beauty.

So why did I need a third iPod? Aside from being a sucker for the “on sale” high sign from Apple, I decided that having a device with some resilliancy would be good for yard work, hiking, etc. My Touch is a fine device, but it’s a bit bulky for some environments, and I’m a little concerned about breaking its screen in the great out of doors.

I guess we’ve answered the question, “How many iPod does it take to cover all my activities?” “One, a-two-who, three. Three.” (With apologies to the Tootsie Pop folks.)