And now for something completely different.  You know writing about visas, air fares, traffic on EDSA and ways to get a $1.04 USD taxi ride for $1.02 USD by arguing with the driver for 20 minutes is really fun … but it gets boring at times.

So here’s a restricted post.  You are not allowed to read farther unless you have children looking forward to Christmas or believe in Santa.  If you don’t believe, click on to something else now or this site will bake the cookies in your computer and then send little illegal immigrant elves to force their way inside to eat them and leave a lot of crumbs on your rug.

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NORAD began tracking Santa’s flight in 1955 when children started calling into a military phone number on Christmas Eve to find out where Santa was. Ten years ago, NORAD launched the website, which has evolved each year. A continuing partnership with Google started in 2006 – read about it on the Google blog. Last year, NORAD started using Google Analytics to record traffic stats for the website. They were very pleasantly surprised – the numbers were an early Christmas gift.
Preparation and Planning
The website rolls out in two phases. Phase one went live on December 1st, and lasts until Christmas eve; it features the history of the Santa Tracker, a countdown to take-off, updates from Santa’s Village, and holiday-themed games – a new one released each day – which can be found under the Kids Countdown area – pictured here:
Phase two, on Christmas Eve, will display a map showing Santa’s launch from the North Pole at 4:00a.m. MST and will track him in Google Map and Google Earth imagery, live and in real time, as he makes his trek around the world! ….

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Aside from the timeliness of the season I decided to post this today because I worked for NORAD (yes, inside Cheyenne Mountain, I have apiece of it here on my desk in the Philippines) for many years and I watched this program grow from something decidedly ho hum to something very nice for ‘true believers’ put on by a group of military folks, civilian government employees and contractors who will be working Christmas Eve and every other ‘eve’ as part of their dedication to duty … so kids can have Christmases.

For my non-US readers this isn’t just flag raising … NORAD is one off only two Combined Commands … it belongs to Canada as well as the US (yes the Maple Leaf ensign flies officially in Colorado) and also has members of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force assigned along with members of every other US military service.

Merry Christmas, fellows and gals of the Mountain and to all my readers too.  I haven’t logged visitors from 200 counties yet but then it isn’t quite Christmas yet, is it?

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