Entertainment

• The Jolly Green Giant has passed away.
  And yet another marker of our childhood falls by the wayside...
• "Muppet Idol" - coming soon
  Forget about this, they need to hold an American Idol to get a writer for the Muppets that is actually *funny*, like they had in the original show.

Speaking of Funny

• Strong Bad Babysits The Cheat
  "Adventures of Lolo?? You'd better still have the receipt!!"

WTF

• NJ Private High School Bans Blogging

Books

• Amazon.com: Books: Cartoon History of the Universe 1 (Cartoon History of the Universe)
  Wow. This series looks amazing!
  
• Amazon.com: Books: Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever
  Central concept: if we can just survive for 50 years longer, technology will have progressed to the point that we can keep ourselves alive indefinitely...
  
• Amazon.com: Books: This Perfect Day: A Novel
  From Amazon, guaranteed to be TechEmbassy's new favorite book: "It is the tale of a lad named Chip, in a future world in which the great socialist dream has finally been realized. Preferring one person to another is a sign of social maladjustment. "Fight" is a dirty word; "f**k" is just the usual term for an activity no more important than sleeping or urination. Everyone is told what to do by "Uni," the great computer that organizes society and keeps track of everyone's location via electronic bracelet. (And one of the dirtiest, most maladjusted and antisocial expressions anyone can utter is "Fight Uni.")".
• Amazon.com: Books: The Build Master : Microsoft's Software Configuration Management Best Practices (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology)
  I need this book, and not just because of the cover! Perhaps yet another Christmas gift...

Misc

• Ian Rowland: The Mindreader, The Mind Motivator. Mr Angry and Mrs Calm
  Really neat optical illusion. 
• Straight Dope Staff Report: Why do we say "God bless you" after a sneeze? 
• Hide My Ass! Free Anonymous Browsing.
  Poor choice of name for an awesome service - bypass those pesky proxies!

Productivity

• Getting To Done: Roll Your Own Business - Lifehacker
• Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford | 43 Folders
  More on the debate as to whether distractions in the office bolster or destroy productivity.  I feel that the truth, as in many cases, is somewhere inbetween.

Well, at least *I* find them exciting

• Mathematical Background
  Mathematical review for the uber-geeky among us who want to go back over set theory, lambda calculus, and the like. 
• Reach for A*: Efficient Point-to-Point Shortest Path Algorithms 
• UNIX top 10 commands
  
• ACN - Top Twelve Unix Commands
  

Development

• John Papa : Resharper vs CodeRush and Refactor Pro - Round 1
  Interesting comparison of various refactoring tools. At some point I'll have to try these out myself - I used CodeRush for a while but felt it kind of got in my way a little too much (maybe I wasn't used to the shortcuts?) 
• Atlas Class Browser
  
• Steve Eichert's Blog - It looks Agile, It sounds Agile, but Is it really Agile?
  
• Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer : Qualities of a Good Unit Test
  Every developer who unit tests - and if you don't, why not? - should be reading this. 
• Peter's Gekko : Building an Excel sheet in C# the easy way
  
• Reliable Software - Michael Stiefel
  Discussion of risk-oriented software.
  
• Nerdherding for Beginners
  Love this blog...definitely material I seek out more and more often. Great for developer leads!
  

So much free information, so little time...

• Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005
  I'm sure I've posted this before, but the PDC slides and presentations are now all freely available!
• Slides and Code from CodeCamp
  Quite the nice set of presentations and code. I wish everyone would do this!
  
• WPF Hands-On Labs
  More labs for the Windows Presentation Foundation.  Maybe sometime in 2008 I'll have the time to take a look at these?