Now that the long awaited 4-day weekend has come and gone, at the blink of an eye I might add, it’s time to patiently await the arrival of Christmas and more importantly prepare for the onslaught of holiday shoppers, cranky drivers and bell ringers. Every year around this time I ready myself for the craziness of the holidays and yet it never really matters because I become caught up in the holiday fever as well.

This year however, my wife and I have already decided that the majority of our shopping will take place online. We figure by taking this strategy we’ll avoid most of the holiday craze when people are caught in a zombie-like trance to pillage and plunder local Targets, K-Marts and KB Toys for the latest and greatest toy gadget for their children. Luckily, for the time being, my daughter is still young enough where she isn’t entranced by toys but considering her first birthday is next month it won’t be long until she’s tugging at our pant legs and staring up at us with those stinging puppy dog eyes.

I’m reminded of John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas (renamed Christmas with the Kranks for the Hollywood adaptation), a satirical view of the holidays. The main characters, Luther and Nora Krank, decide that they’ll skip Christmas after sending their daughter off to Peru for Peace Corps. Luther tallies up the previous years expenses for Christmas and estimates they can save in the thousands if they take a 10-day cruise instead of celebrating the aforementioned holiday. Of course chaos erupts and the rest of the book is perfect material for the typical Hollywood Christmas comedy, including a madcap sequence with a plastic snowman and the embarassment of settling with a scrappy looking tree.

It just goes to show that no matter how hard you try to ignore, strategize or avoid Christmas it’s never going to disappear. You simply cannot wipe Christmas from your calendar. It’s the proverbial monkey on your back, but in this case he’s wearing a santa cap with a 30 pound sack of presents slung over his shoulder.

If I’m not coding a web site, I’m reading a book. Reading puts me in a tranquil state of mind and for those few moments my imagination takes over, taking me somewhere I’ve never been and putting me in the shoes of a complete stranger. Ever since I was 4 years old I’ve never been reluctant to pick up a book that maybe I didn’t fully understand.

With book in hand, I could just scan the pages for words I recognized and maybe piece together the story. Also, ever since I enrolled in Children’s Literature in college it has sparked in me a new interest in reading children’s books, which at times feel more energetic than a run of the mill adult novel.

Nowadays, I’ve been known to read around 4 or 5 books at a time. For some people this might seem like overkill, but for me, I can easily divide my attention to each story and every one of these books vary in genre. That said, I’m currently reading:

• The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer (author of the bestselling Artemis Fowl series)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
• Braindroppings by George Carlin and
• Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

What are you reading?

I’ve been an avid reader of the online comic, Melonpool. The comic follows the adventures of “two aliens, a telepathic dog and a 220-lb. hamster” and the interactions of the characters are as hilarious as they are intriguing.

When I stumbled upon Melonpool 5 years ago it was the result of a random Yahoo! search. Typing feveriously (65 WPM and chicken peckin’) at my keyboard I came up with something along the lines of “aliens and hampsters.” Why I linked these two together I’ll never know, but lo and behold the first link on the list was Melonpool. I sat there for a couple minutes wondering what a Melonpool was and decided it would be best to investigate the matter by clicking the link.

Upon entering the site I noticed a blue background with a white swirl and a handful of cartoon characters starring back at me. Immediatedly I read through the archives and was hooked from there on. I entered my email into the form and every Sunday received the comic strip in my Inbox. Believe me, I couldn’t wait to see what was in store for Mayberry Melonpool and the gang. Which brings me to what the comic is about; pop culture. You would think Steve Troop (the creator of Melonpool) would have gone with the cliche plot where aliens land on Earth and destroy everything in their path, including that lone flower. Rather, Troop decides to write the storylines around the subject of the aliens’ interest with Earth’s culture.

Mayberry (the Captain) is a Star Trek fan because in space they receive our television/satellite signals many light years after the series has gone off the air. To the alien, he’s impressed by the characters and ultimately gets to meet his heroes in a Time Travel plot that is immensely hard to explain without reading the archives. Which brings me to the key to this successful comic, the interactions of its characters and their curiousity of pop culture. Troop even elaborates on the fact that his comic was viewed by an executive at NBC and coincidentally the popular television show, Third Rock from the Sun, sprung into the lineup.

I had the opportunity to interview Steve Troop in 1999 for a college course I was taking. The course, Introduction to Mass Media, called for a paper that described a “media figure” and their “successful ventures”. The twist to this paper was that you had to interview the media mogul (in person) and write a 5-page paper about the interview. I chose Steve Troop for the same reasons his strip is successful among its fans; for the money.

I recieved an A+ on the paper and was indeed richer, but not with the great greenback. The wealth came from what I found out about a young boy’s dream in San Diego, California. To simply draw cartoons. Indeed, I was richer with the notion that he is in fact living his dreams come true.

Sure, there might not be the success of newspaper syndication (a goal Troop has envisioned for years) but the real success lies in the fans that support the comic strip through its compilation books and the community within the Melonpool message boards. At the moment, there are 5 books and contained within each book are several personal notations and reflections from Troop while creating each strip, something he created while in college, and other extras that you won’t see on the web site.

Do yourself a favor today and go read Melonpool. Enjoy the 1,000+ strips contained within the archive and grow with the characters.

If you’d rather read the strips offline, buy a book.

Pat yourself on the back because you’ll be supporting the continuation of a wonderful comic strip.

My copy of Dan Cederholm’s Web Standard Solutions is on its way according to Amazon.com and should (if all goes well) arrive in a couple days. I ordered it yesterday, after convincing the company I work for that it would make a worthwhile addition to my web development & graphic design library.

Currently I’ve thumbed through and broke the spine on the following books in my collection:

• HTML with XHTML and CSS (5th Ed.) by Elizabeth Castro
• XML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro
• Photoshop 7 Killer Tips by Scott Kelby and Felix Nelson
• Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby
• Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS by Eric Meyer
• Designing CSS Web Pages by Christopher Schmitt
• Cascading Style Sheets by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello and Matt Patterson
• Design-it-Yourself: Logos, Letterheads, and Business Cards by Chuck Green

I highly recommend these books as not only wonderful reference guides, but well-written and concise resources that will ultimately spark your creativity.