Thanksgiving 2011

It was a busy four-day weekend just past.

Thanksgiving gave me turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, corn, rolls and pumpkin pie. I ate with Madre, my two sisters, my niece and her man (who came later).

Friday saw me finish cutting down one of the two trunks of that maple tree in front of my house. That trunk then was cut down to fit five yard bags for disposal. (The town will not haul away tree branches unless they were blown down by wind.) Then came the tree goop that sealed the stump of the trunk to protect the remaining tree (which I have decided to spare). Then I mowed my lawn and mulched any leaves remaining thereon. For these tasks I borrowed Madre's lawn mower and a small electric chain saw Padre had hidden in the garage. I must have been enthusiastic with the chain saw, because my right elbow still aches from a ligament strained from overuse.

Saturday I set up my XMas tree at the front window. Now that Thanksgiving is over, it is now the XMas season.

Sunday saw me, at the request of my sister the editor, fiddle with both Madre's router and her new XMas present, in order that the present can communicate with the router wirelessly. This was necessary because I set up the router to allow only certain devices access to the router's wireless. You need to be careful with wireless networks; owners of such networks have been arrested for other people's use of them for viewing boy porn. Madre was not supposed to know about her present, but my sister the teacher would not keep her big mouth shut. That, and Amazon thanked her for registering her, um, XMas present.

I do not think much of the present itself. It's okay if you are in the habit of reading best-sellers. But I am not. Such a device is useless to me. For the crap that it displays — and to me best-sellers are crap (Jane Lane calls them a cure for brain fever) — the present is very pricey. You are better off reading PDFs on an iPod Touch; at least the iPod does a whole lot more.

For my sister the editor, also, I checked out six books by Richard Peck, an author of a lot of fiction for young adults. I did not have my ID card (I have since found it in the depths of my valet basket), so I used my driver's license to check them out.

My server went down Sunday when I tried to upgrade it to Fedora 16. Either there is something wrong with Fedora 16 itself, or with its downloaded version. Either way I have had to reinstall and update Fedora 15 on Monday.

It is just as well that I have gotten Madre's new computer assembled when I did. Hard disks will be rare and expensive for the foreseeable future, as the Big Hard Disk Factory in Thailand will be flooded for months … maybe years. At least that is what Cringely believes. I cannot believe why (outside of pure myopia) a corporation would build its most vital factory on a flood plain. Anyway, this means the end of the desktop computer among the general public, which is fixated with the tablet and the smartphone. For the rest of us, solid state disks are coming into their own.

and now, a political tirade

Joe Lieberman is a courage-challenged old fellow who makes the Senate look like a booming market for Depend™ undergarments. The constant striping away of our freedoms in the name of security, just because someone did something once, is nothing more than cowardice. And yet nobody calls Lieberman out for his shameful behavior. We can hope that Google will resist the calls of that coward to not add a Turn it off, it scares me button to Blogger sites — although given Google's recent record, it is likely to happen anyway.