Archive: December 25, 2008

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Christmas!

Thursday,  12/25/08  02:00 PM

Woo hoo!  Christmas!  I hope you are having a peaceful and wonderful day with those you love...

So around here it has not all been peaceful and wonderful.  Last night our Christmas Eve was interrupted when Shirley's Mom passed out at the dinner table and had to be rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance.  Turns out she was "just" dehydrated (don't be fooled that can be serious!) but it made for a rather dramatic evening as we celebrated Christmas at midnight in the ER at Tarzana Hospital.  She was able to come home and is now fine, whew.

And so we slept in, and Santa arrived on schedule and made his deliveries, and we exchanged gifts, and ate candy, and are now hanging out with the smell of Shirley's chili in the air, and the pleasant sound of pouring rain from outside...  I'm debating whether to ride, kind of leaning toward it, actually...  we'll see.  And I'm wearing a wonderful tee-shirt presented by my daughters:


Alexis, me, Jordan
(note "I'm blogging this" inscription, among others :)

This is football watching season; I have my Tivo armed and ready...  a tip for those of you looking to program your Tivo, after you've selected Sports, don't select Football, instead page down 10 times (yep 10 count 'em 10 pages) to Sports Event.  This will find only football games, as opposed to all the other football-related crap that you're not looking for....  {note to Tivo people, it would be really good if we could do both, select Football and Sports Events, so as to exclude things like Hockey games and poker tournaments (!)...}

Okay, well so much for blogging, I'm off to ride man against the elements; see you on the other side...

 

Thursday,  12/25/08  10:56 PM

Merry Christmas A nice quiet day of hanging out with my family and friends, and watching basketball (Lakers-Celtics of course, my first game of the season, violating my dictum to wait until after football, because, well, it was Lakers-Celtics :).  And I ate a lot of chili and chocolate, and drank some wonderful Tempranillo.

Oh, and my kids and I went and saw Yes Man.  I really liked it.  Yeah, I guess it was predictable, but entertaining nonetheless, and the underlying message was/is cool.  It is bad to be in a rut, and good to say "yes" to new things.  Definitely not Jim Carrey's worst :) 

Are you sitting down?  Are you holding any sharp objects?  No?  Because I am trying to use Twitter.  So far I've found a bunch of people to follow, but the twits are inane.  I come into this with the preconception that the signal to noise would be really low, and so far I haven't seen anything to change my opinion.  But I'm trying it...  (saying "yes" to a new thing :)  stay tuned :)  

The Gates who stole Searchmas...  a Silicon Valley Christmas Tale.  I love it.  (Also the illustrations are excellent.) 

Thirty unforgettable Christmas ads.  They are excellent.  The inventiveness of some of these ads is amazing; it shows that the gamut between good and bad is so wide in advertising. 

Jeff Atwood is pressing the software turbo button.  Now he's talking, I totally agree with this.  (This is a bit different for Jeff, he was last seen arguing that fast hardware makes fast software unnecessary, and that productivity is more important than performance.  It's all relative...) 

Global warming?  Check out "Santa" Klaus.  "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."  Here's what I think: global warming is real, and it is a problem, but it isn't as real or as much of a problem as some would have you believe.  Everything in moderation... 

I want one for Christmas...  the 2009 McLaren SLR.  "Featuring a supercharged, 5,439cc V8 engine developing 650bhp. It accelerates from 0-62mph in less than 3.5 seconds and has a top speed of 217mph."  Whoa.  Looks pretty, too :) 

The Christmas APOD...  wow.  Make sure you discover your browsers F11 "maximize" on this one...

 

 
 

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