There are moments in life, at least in my life, that qualify as surreal. This is such a moment. I am writing this column in my room at the Westin Tokyo Hotel, which is less than 100 meters from the Sapporo Beer Museum. A few minutes ago I walked through the hotel lobby, which was decorated for Christmas and filled with little Japanese schoolgirls playing Christmas songs by ringing bells. Christmas is everywhere here, but it feels like the Carnival celebration in San Francisco: It's a chance to dress up and pretend to be something you are not. Not that America has any particular dibs on the birth of Christ, who as I last recall, was neither a Methodist nor a member of the National Rifle Association.

Having survived the lobby and the little girls with their bells, I now have running in the background another surreal experience. It's my favorite Japanese TV show -- Iron Chef.

Iron Chef is a hugely popular Japanese variety/cooking show of sorts. Known here as "Ryori no Tetsujin" (cooking iron man), you can occasionally find it on obscure cable channels in the U.S. The appeal of the show lies in its campy production style that harnesses all of MC Kaga Takeshi's dramatic and flamboyant knack for presentation (once described as "Liberace on speed"). It's incredibly wacky and lots of fun. Iron Chef is Monday Night Football meets Julia Child.

The show centers around a battle between two prominent chefs, one being an iron chef (who represents the finest of a specific cuisine) and the other a challenger from some rival culinary faction. The two chefs are presented with a mystery ingredient, which tonight is pineapple. After seeing their theme ingredient, they have one hour to whip up a multi-course menu that utilizes this ingredient, a veritable extravaganza of pineapple, which seems this evening to be working to the disadvantage of the challenger, a Cajun cook. Blackened pineapple doesn't work for me.

The Monday Night Football aspect of the show comes from the commentators, who discuss the dishes being made during the hour. There are usually three or four commentators in the box and a sidelines reporter interviewing the chefs in the kitchen stadium. There are instant replays of cool culinary maneuvers and even statistics for the last five battles the iron chefs have fought. Why PBS hasn't leapt on this program theme, I'll never know. Finally, a group of judges tastes the dishes and offers commentary before a vote is cast. The loser is disgraced on national television. It is a riot.

Now back to Christmas. This has been a good year for me and I have a lot to be thankful for. While most of my thanks is directed straight at you, my readers, I have isolated a handful of companies and people to especially thank. These are outfits that have made your life and mine better just by their existence. They are among the many companies that help keep Microsoft and Intel on their toes.

First there is Steve Jobs and Apple, who have given me 10 years of column material with no relief in sight. Here's hoping Apple sees 1999.

Second, I salute Integrated Device Technology, whose Centaur Technology division is responsible for the new Winchip C-6, the cheapest Pentium-compatible processor in the world. This is the chip that will make $500 PCs a reality. It was designed by a team in Austin, Texas, led by Glenn Henry. Thirty engineers designed a Pentium-compatible processor in less than a year.

Wait a minute! Isn't a Pentium-class chip supposed to take several hundred engineers three years to design? Not when the team is led by Henry, who has been talking about this particular design for years and years. He worked at MIPs and they wouldn't let him build it. Before that he worked at Dell and they wouldn't let him build it. Before that he worked at IBM and they wouldn't let him build it. Now it's finished, and look who was right all along! The Winchip C-6 is small, simple and fast. It's what the world needs more of. Imagine if IBM had built this thing five years ago. They could have.

Third on my list of heroes is Caldera. These refugees from Novell sell several products, including a very nice version of Linux (OpenLinux), what used to be the Netware Lite peer-to-peer network operating system, OpenDOS (formerly DR-DOS and Novell DOS 7), and a Web browser called Webspyder 32. There are two things that make Caldera heroic. First, they have preserved DOS for those who still want it. There is no more MS-DOS unless you buy a copy of Windows 96 and disable the GUI part, so all we command line jockeys have left is IBM DOS and OpenDOS. The second reason Caldera is heroic is for the way they distribute and market their products. They are interested in corporate and site licenses -- volume sales -- so nearly all of Caldera's products are available for individual downloads FOR FREE. Want a copy of the latest DOS? It's free! Not only is it free, but it is a full 32-bit version that includes preemptive multitasking. OpenDOS is MS-DOS on steroids. Throw in Webspyder 32, a 32-bit web browser specifically intended for OpenDOS computers, and you have the fastest, most powerful, most memory-efficient Internet computer around. Or use OpenLinux with the new WABI 2.2 front-end (another free download) and run most Windows applications faster than Windows WITHOUT Windows. I love these folks!

Finally, I am thankful for Brother and Geoworks for building the GeoBook. In the late 1980s, the company now known as Geoworks had the audacity to ship a direct competitor to Windows. Geoworks was then the name of the product and it was better than Windows, offering several powerful integrated applications. Geoworks ran faster on an 8086 than did Windows on an 80286. Geoworks somehow pasted real multitasking on top of single-tasking DOS (this is not unheard of: MachTen is a multitasking Unix that runs on top of the single-tasking MacOS).

Geoworks was so good that of course, it had to die. Now, after several years of hiding-out in pen computers and pocket organizers, Geoworks is back as the operating system inside the El Cheapo Brother Geobook, a $699 notebook that does all most people really need a notebook to do. Only don't call it a computer, because it's a "notebook style computing device." I guess not calling it a PC might keep Microsoft from sending death squads. Whatever they call it, I am buying one for my Mom.

Merry Christmas, Mom.

Sayonara.