At the end of each year, I sign onto my GoDaddy account and renew all my domains with one swing. In doing so, I had to make some decisions, since some of the domains are dogs. I have to really think back: What was I thinking when I signed up for this? One domain I had, but declined to renew: TIMFO.INFO. It must have been on sale. What else could I have been thinking?

Now, I had been planning on launching this blog since August, so I was trying to find the right domain. The obvious would have been MCGUINNESS.COM, but the guy who has owned it, after a financial advisor dropped it, wanted $10,000. I hate squatters; just another form of web parasite.

So we get MCGUINN.ES. Not the exact spelling, but I’m going to run with it.

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Sometimes you are just caught off-guard and where you will find genius. Today it was a at Macy’s Santaland(r) (I had to add the R since it seems so silly). We decided that we would take our little one to visit the “real” Santa, according the “Miracle on 34th Street.”

I was ready for standing in line for a couple of hours, but it was like a Christmas Miracle, and we were out in about 30 minutes. But there’s a secret, I’m not sure exactly, but there are more that one Santas in Santaland.

How? It’s not like a mall where Santa sits in the middle, the kigs line up, and we can all walk past. Here they bring the families through an enchanted forest type of setting that ends in a room filled with Christmas trees and helpers, we’ll call them elves, lead each family to a different cubby area hidden behind the trees. The family in front of us was taken off to the left, and then we were taken off to the right where we waited behind a family that was a good distance in front of us in line.

Anyway, the baby cried when she saw Santa, so the whole family ended up in the photo in order to maintain the peace, but I had to say that I had a pretty big smile after seeing how they handled the crowds with the multi-Santa solution. I have to look for places to put a similar plan in place.

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As I warned last week, I was out to upgrade my phone. I had been using a used Moto Q that I bought on ebay to replace a Blackberry that did not pass the bounce on cement test. It was also tied to a family plan that I needed to expand since I needed more minutes.

After much research, and plenty of soul searching, I went with the iPhone. Yes, I’m now one of those guys. The choice was based more on selecting the most popular platform for social networking apps than it was based on functionality and tools. Basically I wanted to use what the cool kids had.

I added all the standard apps: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, but one other I added was iBowl. So far I have thrown 6 strikes in 7 shots and quit. The only non-strike was an attempt to not throw one on purpose to make sure it was possible to not throw a strike. Either I have found my calling or this game is ridiculously easy. Though it should be noted that I was wearing bowling shoes at the time.

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I debated writing this because I don’t want to give away on of the great secrets of the NYC area, the Westchester airport. Planes actually leave here early – at least until today.

My flight to Buffalo connected through Philadelphia. There are many things to worry about on a 6:30 am flight in December to Buffalo, but clouds in Philadelphia were not on the list. The result was a late departure, a missed connection, a flight rescheduled two hours later, sensory overload of “Phillies World Series Champion” keepsakes in gift shops, pushed back meetings, pushed back return flight, and a very late return home that night.

The benefits: my wife surprised me by putting up the Charlie Brown Christmas tree that we got off the clearance floor last year, my daughter surprised me by not pulling it down, and my return flight went through Dulles so I had a chance to get Five Guys with an order of fries.

It also led to a new decision. I need to upgrade my phone.

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This is the first post just to make sure it works.

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