As the years go by I get more and more blasé about celebrating New Year’s Eve. I’m not quite at the point where I need to whip out the walker, but staying up to midnight just to so I can shout “Woo! Goodnight!” doesn’t have the appeal it used to.

New Year’s Eve 2007/8

While I don’t have to worry about the sleep deprivation or hangover there still is post-party fallout to deal with: going into work and facing the inevitable “so... what did you do for New Year’s Eve?”

Well, I, for one, am not going to worry this year. I’m going to party my socks off.

At least, as far as you know.

Lay the ground work

You can’t just roll into a night of non-partying unprepared, you will have to get your act together first.

1. Make sure everyone knows you’re serious about tonight

With all the twittering, facebooking, texting, etc. going on these days, you can’t just show up to your fake party unannounced. First thing you need to do is publicize how excited you are about the upcoming festivities. Make sure it’s suitably vague but extraordinarily enthusiastic. I recommend the use of caps and exclamation points.

“I’m SOOOO stoked for tonight!!!!!”

2. Do a little alibi building

These days people don’t just expect you to have fun, they expect you to prove it. Any party animal worth their salt leaves a wake of twitpics, facebook albums and confetti where ever they go. To get ready, take your camera, wait until it’s dark out, then step outside and take a picture of yourself. Most party pictures are the same: bright flash and dark background.  Smile like you’re having fun and you can pass off the dark background as just about anywhere. Plus, the dark background allows you to stick yourself into other party pics as needed.

Party like you mean it

People now expect you to be partying, and you have photos to back it up with some good times. The key is to keep your fans in the loop throughout the evening. Since watching Golden Girls then nodding off at 8:30 isn’t going to cut it, you’ll need to get some fun ready before you turn in. Fortunately you won’t need to stay up late, you’ll just need to have your computer do the partying for you. Set up a bunch of “parking sucks!”, “awesome fireworks!” and “i’m soo drbunk” e-mails and then have your e-mail client or a web service like time cave trickle out the evidence over the course of the night.

Having a little bit of “real fun” couldn’t hurt either. Satellite, cable TV and even the interwebs give you a great opportunity to still ring in the new year, just celebrate with your fellow humans a few time zones to your east. Here on the west coast I was free to count down the new year’s ball drop in Times Square with my buddy Ryan Seacrest. Just don’t forget, this is also an opportunity for some more party evidence: turn up the volume on your TV and get a little video of you counting down, cheering and singing “Old Ironsides” (or whatever that once-a-year song is). Just be sure to keep the video tight on you, show just the ceiling or the TV behind you. If you don’t have a partner-in-crime to smooch, just fumble the camera to your chest like you’re getting unexpected hugs. Either that or you can kiss your cats.

Seal the deal

What’s a good time without a bit of lasting pain? When you get up on January first be sure to complain to all your virtual friends. Depending on how hard you “partied” you can make a post about anything from how tired you are to your splitting headache to how you woke up next to a tranny.

One request: if you do plan on waking up next to a tranny, please friend me first. I really want to see the reactions.

Next time you’re shopping for a new smart phone and the salesperson at the counter tries to sell you brand X... ask them to pull their own phone out and show you what they use every day.

When I was doing a little Christmas shopping this weekend I couldn’t help but giggle when I saw the Google “Android Specialist” checking his e-mail on a Blackberry.

In retrospect I should have stopped and quizzed him. Perhaps I’ll go back this weekend to throw stones at him and brand him an heretic.

My favorite Muppets were always the Swedish Chef, Beaker, Animal and the yip yip aliens. Three outa four ain’t bad.

Up & Up is Target’s new generic brand. I find, however, I can’t stop looking at the logo upside down as Down & Down.

Does that make me a pessimist?

It takes a very cute kitten to make me write like a teenage girl.

When weather, traffic or other conditions delay my packages it’s all good and well. The shipping companies can’t be penalized when a package gets delayed due to outside influences.

If my package were to arrive early, however, that’d be great. FedEx, though, has decided that it’s too early to deliver my package. Turns out that if a shipper pays for three-day shipping it doesn’t mean that a package will be delivered in three-days-or-less, it means three days. We wouldn’t want anyone to get two-day shipping for the price of three now, would we?

Taking off my cynical, the man’s out to get me hat for just a moment, I could imagine there’s a perfectly reasonable, logistical business decision for this move. If you have too many packages to handle on a given day (perhaps we’re getting into holiday shipping season) it may be a good idea to hold back packages that won’t be late.

It really comes down to this: it’s MY package and I want it! GIMME! FedEx must realize that, other than my wife, I’m the most important thing in their world. Apparently the memo hasn’t circulated yet.

Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.

There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away... even future mails to the thread.

Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.

It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).

But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.

Tonight I watched three hours of television, and two hours of it were in reverse.  It seems more and more TV writers are using the flashback episode as crutch.

By flashback episode I mean those episodes where at the start of the show you come in at the end of the action.  So, after ten minutes of "look, here's how the show ends!" you have to sit through 30 minutes of review explaining how you ended up where you started.

Here's my request to TV writers out there: either learn how to develop tension through foreshadowing and character development or go back to film school.