Hopefully, this will not be my last video for 2006.

Once the crowds cleared, we ventured forth to Scottsdale’s shopping palace, Fashion Square, to imbibe in some post-holiday cash flow maintenance. In keeping with an ongoing video theme here, we caught some musicians entertaining the passers-by at Nordstrom.

The home stretch of business travel for 2006 took me to Bellevue, Washington, where the buzz is about the problem with cranes (as in those used for construction purposes). As this story indicates, a Microsoft attorney was killed by a crane in November, and since then there have been other incidents where cranes went ablaze and caused other havoc. Outside my hotel window, cranes are operating day and night. As someone familiar with Bellevue, Washington, and have seen it grow over the past 20-something years, it makes me sad to see the city lose its charm and become one, large mess of urban sprawl.

A few weeks ago, the nice folks at Nokia provided me with a loaner of the remarkable N93  mobile phone. What makes the camera so special is that it has a built in MPEG-4 camera (not to mention a 3.2 megapixel still camera with a 3X optical zoom). I ordered a 1 GB minSD storage card from buy.com, and now I am off to the races. I am just starting to play with it and will eventually figure out how to send the videos to a Web site using the phone portion of the N93.

This clip is taken at Paradise Valley Mall and features the Salvation Army Christmas Angels program. We look forward to it every year, and today we stopped by the center of the mall to select our angels.

With that N93 in tow, I am not in need of any gifts this season