I think the funniest part of this is that Gov. Patterson ordering “$50 worth of circus tickets” - ?!

Fred Armisen is so spot-on with this impersonation, it reminds me of the all-time top rated digital short:

StationStops.com Officially Launched on December 5, 2007.
Happy First Birthday!

Over the past year, we have had over 430 posts, 530 comments, and over a quarter of a million unique visitors to the site.

Along the way, we also added Metro-North Schedule pages, and even launched our own iPhone application - StationStops for iPhone, which now has hundreds of users whom rate it 4 stars on the iTunes App Store (iTunes link)!

Here are some of the top-trafficked stories for 2008:

The top FOUR stories of the year were all in anticipation of the iPhone 3G Launch Date.

Next up was my guide for Optimizing Verizon FiOs Connections - still one of the top stories!

Thanks to a link from an ESPN columnist, the story on the new luxury suites on the Singapore Airlines A380 got a lot of traffic.

Our product reviews and comparisons were very popular this year, including our comparison of the new netbooks, including the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Asus Eee PC. The Canon SD870is and massive 4-part Dell XPS M1330 review were next.

Speculation about the upcoming Kindle 2.0 ‘kindled’ a lot of reader interest in 2008, as well as my $.02 on the ongoing battle of which video game console is best.

As for our favorite story, that is undoubtedly our HD video production showing Metro-North riders the inside of the new M8 Railcar prototype. It was our most on-topic and exclusive story, and I personally was proud that I got my ass out of bed at 6 AM to drive to New Haven.

M8 Metro-North New Haven Line Railcar Tour - StationStops.com from StationStops Admin on Vimeo.

We were surprised at the amount of press we received for our first year - including links from Forbes and The New York Times, as well as being a part of the Fairfield County Bloggers cover story in The Stamford Advocate, and GearDiary and Stamford Advocate Blogger Chris Preovolos’s appreciation of StationStops for iPhone.

I also want to give a shout-out to some of my fellow bloggers whom have made this last year a much less lonely experience - my pals at Trainjotting, StamfordTalk, Always Home and Uncool, Ben over at SecondAvenueSagas and Conductor Bobby at Derailed. And Manager Mom, we miss your blog, but wish you all the best!

My favorite readers deserve a mention also - Beth, Mom, Karen, Lizzy and Ludmilla!

And last but certainly not least - thanks to all of our visitors for a great first year!

It only takes a second… to watch this insurance safety video and laugh your butt off.

Yesterday I roughed up jCrew.com for being down for HOURS on Cyber Monday, considered to be an important start to the online shopping season.

Well, another major player has blundered as well - its only Dec. 2, but Amazon lists their Kindle E-Book reader as not shipping for 11-13 WEEKS. That’s not just ‘after Christmas’ - that’s the end of February.

What is it with the Kindle? I don’t personally know a single soul that owns one, yet Amazon insists its selling like hotcakes and it has had availability issues like this since it was launched over a year ago. Amazon has not released sales figures for the Kindle.

The Kindle is such an outstanding gift for the reader on your Christmas List - to not have enough on hand for Christmas is just so bizarre to me. How does that happen?

Despite brick and mortar retailers seeing a relatively flat start to the Holiday selling season, online retailers are seeing a growth in online holiday sales of about 2% over last year, although that is considered a slowdown based on the online shopping’s traditional year-over-year growth.

As I mentioned in this year’s Holiday Gift Guide, I have committed to shopping early and well this holiday season for once in my life. Yesterday, I knocked off about 70% off my list - by shopping entirely online.

As someone who has been responsible for ‘getting up’ large commercial sites that have gone down (and usually bringing them down in the first place), I have to feel for the guy who is responsible for JCrew.com. Its one of the most tense firedrills in the IT world.

In 2008, there isn’t much excuse for a major retailer’s website going down on CyberMonday. Especially when that retailer just announced a 29% drop in Q3 sales last week.

Egads.
That’s a VERY expensive downtime.

The only way to escape shame for this is if it were some sort of high-end attack.

No one is going to give you a pass on heavy traffic - that’s job #1.

BTW, when you make your ‘we’re down’ page a static HTML, then people can’t reload to check if its back up

I dare you to:

Draw My Thing!

This is the most addictive online game I have seen in a LONG time.

Just jump on the site, no registration or signup required, and start playing this Pictionary-type game with random other people on the internet.

However, you will want to signup almost immediately so you can accumulate your score and play against your own friends.