So I actually went shopping this morning, and it was the first time I’ve really been caught up in a holiday rush like that. Everything I could find said that Best Buy was going to open at ten, so I set my alarm for 9:30 and decided to go to the one on 59 to get a 75GB Western Digital hard drive and 256MB stick of memory for $50 (after rebate of course). On the way over on the radio I heard them say essentially that all of the sale items from Best Buy and Walmart and Circuit City were long gone. I felt my heart sink even more as I pulled into the parking lot and saw it packed, obviously it had been open for a while. Cursing my lack of experience in this matter, I decided to head in anyway. I made my way through the throngs to the back where the computer things were. A few words to a frazzled employee later and he led me to another area, where they had several of exactly what I needed. The friendly sales lady remarked they had plenty and I didn’t need to get up so early next time. I was suddenly conscious of my just-rolled-out-of-bed look, but appreciative at her ability to keep a sense of humor in such a busy situation. Then it got interesting.

Where it took mere moments to get the hard drive and memory, checking out was another manner. They had the store roped off so half of the store was actually a checkout line. It was probably only about a twenty minute wait, so I’m not one to complain judging by some of the shopping war stories I’ve heard. Still, it was not what I was accustomed to. Overall I’m very happy with the deal, even though the memory is the wrong kind for my machine, the hard drive alone is a steal for that price, and I’m going to sell the memory to a friend. Now I’m tempted to head out to Circuit City, where they’ve been advertising $10 CDs, every CD in the store! I thought Best Buy was doing that but it wasn’t till I had painstakingly picked out some jazz ones for presents when someone told me it was only the advertised ones that were cheap, all the rest were list. I think CDs are overpriced anyway.

That was quite possibly the best Thanksgiving ever. I ate, probably enough to feed a small village, but not too much to make me uncomfortable. The day started at my Grandmother’s house with aunts and uncles. Because of several people being out of town, I got to sit at the “adult” table this year, rather than be delegated to the kitchen. The food was wonderful, thanks in part to my uncle Colin who is a wonderful cook. There was green beans with fried onions on top, corn with chile peppers and paprika, great dressing, very sweet potatoes, and of course the turkey. I must have gone back three or four times, but I forgot to plan for desert so I wasn’t able to try any of it . . . then. Rene was supposed to join us but couldn’t get a ride down, but once I got a chance to I picked him up and the plan was to head back down and we would fix him something at my grandmother’s house.

Well I ended up held up at Rene’s, because it turns out they were about start their Thanksgiving meal, which I actually thought they were doing later in the evening. So we decided to stay for the food to get started and I enjoyed my second meal of the day, barely an hour later. It was really good, and interesting because the style of food was very different. So we ate, and then vegged for a little bit. Then it was back down to my Grandma’s house, because my dad was still there and I had the car. My dad was fine watching the Washington/Dallas game and I managed to find room for some deserts, a strawberry angel food thing and chocolate rum cake, of course with cold milk. After that we played frisbee for a bit in the park across the street.

The plan was then to head back up to Rene’s to watch some movies, but first we picked up Kyle. Then we headed to Joe’s and chilled there for a bit, probably at least a half hour. He had family in from Michigan and his house was really packed. They were just about to start dinner so he didn’t come along, and then we left and picked up Josh. We decided we wanted to see Swordfish, which Rene hadn’t seen before, so we headed back to Kyle’s to pick it up. While there I had some wonderful pumpkin pie, and then we headed up to Rene’s. The movie was good, and Rachel joined us toward the end.

After that I had my final meal of the night, a very traditional mashed potatoes, turkey, roll, and rice from their leftovers. The turkey was a little dry but I found that with a little mayonnaise it was quite good. Everyone was so tired we decided to end the night with the movie Antitrust, which I like and hadn’t seen in a while, despite owning it. I ended up home around 3:45, ready for rest.

I am so full I don’t think I can stand up. Yum.

My Mom sent this to me, and even though technically it is now Thanksgiving, I haven’t gone to bed yet so it’s not yet.

’Twas the night of Thanksgiving, I just couldn’t sleep
I tried counting backwards, I tried counting sheep.

The leftovers beckoned, the dark meat and white
But I fought the temptation with all of my might.

Tossing and turning with anticipation
The thought of a snack became infatuation.

So, I raced to the kitchen, flung open the door
and gazed at the fridge, full of goodies galore.

I gobbled up turkey and buttered potatoes, Pickles and carrots, beans
and tomatoes.

I felt myself swelling so plump and so round, ’til all of a
sudden, I rose off the ground.

I crashed through the ceiling, floating into the sky
with a mouthful of pudding and a handful of pie.

I managed to yell as I soared past the trees . . .
Happy eating to all; pass the cranberries, please.

May your stuffing be tasty, may your turkey be plump, May your potatoes
and gravy have nary a lump.

May your yams be delicious, may your pies take the prize,
May your thanksgiving dinner stay off your thighs!

I hope everyone has a wonderful and happy thanksgiving.

Last night was great fun as a lot of the seniors who are in town for the holiday, and many who are in town anyway, met up at Diedrich’s an later Katz’s. It was really enjoyable seeing so many people who I often talk to online but haven’t seen for too long. The “Winter holidays” sometimes politically uncorrectly categorized as “Christmas” coming up should be even better. If you’re interested the pictures are now up.

Speaking of pictures, have been flooded with emails, calls, and just general in-person complaining concerning the updates to the photolog, or rather the lack thereof. The team here at Photomatt.net was experiencing some technical diffulculties, but things are under control now and I’ve caught up with a couple of the days I had missed before. We apologize for the lapse in updates. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of programming, okay, not really, but if you want a taste of how fast the new server is, browse over to mullenweg.com and click around. Isn’t that snappy? Also you may not have noticed, but the front page of this site used to take as much as two seconds to process, and now it is delivered to your browser less than half a second from request time. Other less heavy pages, like any of the jazz quotes the load time is neglibible. That just goes to show that the front page stands for quite a bit of optimization though, and I’m going to work on that a bit this weekend. Okay, that’s it!

Speaking of . . .

Well I think it’s appropriate that Winter has finally deemed to visit Houston, after flirting for so long. Monday was hot and I dressed in kind, apparently so much so that Alex remarked to me that “Summer is over!” However the next day when I headed out in my shorts and short sleeve shirt, I was blasted at the door by cold cold air. Even colder than was in my house, which is saying a lot. Today is similarly cold an it’s forcing me to dig out all my cold-weather clothes that haven’t seen the light of day since early January last year, when it got hot again. I absolutely love cold weather and the month we have it here is usually my favorite part of the year. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a sucker for Christmas music too.

The other day as I topped out the first hill getting on to the freeway my car died, and I managed to roll to the shoulder to await a tow back home. My car is in the good hands of the mechanic right now, so hopefully I’ll be back in the Mattmobile any day now.

Well today has certainly been mixed. To make a long story short: new server, Bauer Business college stuff, meeting with Chris, Human Situation discussion class—good; 120gb hard drive biting the dust—bad. I’ll be recovering for a few days, and I’ve resolved to double whatever I replace it with in a RAID setup to have backups of everything important all the time. If you haven’t, backup now. Don’t let this have to happen to you to realize that you can’t put a price tag on your data.

This is Your Computer on Brains — “ASCI Purple will be the size of 197 refrigerator-size boxes covering 8,900 square feet (about the size of two basketball courts) and will weigh 197 tons. The average brain is 56 cubic inches and weighs 3.3 pounds.”

Well today I turned in my third and final paper for my Human Situation class, and it’s the one I put the most thought and effort into. My first paper for the class dealt with an economic analysis of the first books of the Bible, and I was happy with the way it turned out. The second paper was a last-minute affair that was forgettable, and after it I decided that I would put all future papers on the site in order to force me to work harder on everything. Now that the “next paper” is done, I’m happy with it how it turned out in the end, but I’m not sure if I want to post it here. Would anyone even read it? It’s not terribly long, but still much longer than the average Joe-intenet’s online attention span. Anyway the subject of this paper was an expansion to Plato’s Theory of Forms to account for naturally occuring groups. Exciting stuff ;). We’ll see what the teacher thinks by the end of the week . . .

I just checked the thermostat and it is currently 66 degrees inside my house. The dangers of living with a warm-blooded matriarch.

So speaking of companies struggling for relevancy, Altavista has redesigned. I hesitate to call it that though, because it’s actually become uglier than I could have imagined. They have no excuse, and I shudder to think how much money that may have been spent on what is quite possible the most aesthetically unattractive “major” site I’ve seen. It’s like they’re trying to do simple, but fail badly. Warning: Altavista link NSWE.

Update: This article at Wired talks about the design, but I think it gives Altavista way too much credit for it’s current efforts. They used to be my favorite search engine too, but that doesn’t mean they were that good at it. They were simply the best there was at the time. I remember routinely going 8-10 pages into results to find what I needed. They tout a more frequently updated index as one of their improvements, but the fact of the matter that the index doesn’t really matter, it’s putting the “good stuff” on top, on the first page, which Google does very well. Don’t buy the hype.

I am very happy about my schedule for next semester. Get this:

• Earliest class at noon on Monday and Wednesday, 10 AM on Tuesday and Thursday
• Latest class ends at 4, well before traffic really gets going
• All of my classes are pretty close to each other physically, something I didn’t know about last semester
• I don’t have any gaps in my schedule, like the 4 hour one I have this semester
• Nothing on Fridays! Yes, that means three day weekends. All the time.
• I’m taking classes I’m more interested in, not just prerequisites

Next semester is going to be so sweet. 🙂

I’ve done a little tweaking to go ahead and chill the look up here a bit. I’ve decided to forgoe Fall entirely as we really don’t get that season here in Houston, it generally goes straight from hot to cold.

My blogroll is starting to collect dust, and the only excuse I can give for not updating it recently is because I’m in the process of making a pretty comprehensive links page that will hopefully take my gargatuan favorites menu down to a manageable size and have all the links I’ve been meaing to add lately. Watch this space!

Today has been incredibly busy and incredibly productive at the same time. Getting ready to head out, meeting Mike for some food then we’re hooking up with Christine, Elaine, and maybe others at Kaveh Kanes for some sweet sweet coffee. Of course it wouldn’t be a get-together without a digital camera, so hopefully tonight I’ll have some neat photos to put up. Speaking of pictures, there are quite a few up in the photolog, however I didn’t take them. I’m participating in a new “lend-a-camera” program for digitally underprivileged high school students ;). Anyway, enjoy the guest photographers, and if you’re looking for some comic relief you really have to watch this video. It has flying and dancing. I really need a red light or something on the camera to let me know when it’s recording.

I have made quite the discovery. I’ve been seeing Kristine post about naps quite a bit, so when I found myself with some free time earlier today I decided to try it.

Oh. My. Gosh.

The rest of the day I was refreshed and on the ball, it was like a whole other world. The air was fresher; the sky was bluer; the chocolate was sweeter. I realized that there has been a huge gap in my life of about fourteen or fifteen years where I took no naps, maybe even longer since I seem to remember messing around during naptime in kindergarten. This has got to change—no longer will I sleep only in a large block (actually usually a small block) at nighttime. If you haven’t tried this nap thing lately, you really should. Anyone else recently discover the joy of naps?

Ever have one of those days where you seem to catch all of the yellow lights?

It’s no secret to many people that Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the fathers of the web and was in fact my first inspiration once I got into web design. The busiest man in NY, has recently “launched” two major websites, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. Now to be completely honest, when I saw the Searchlight site, I was dismayed. Was this the same designer whose writing I have followed for years? Every other site he has done is unmistakably Zeldman, not so much in a particular aesthetic but in the attention to detail and functionality, both of which I think the Fox site lack. However the AIfIA site is absolutely gorgeous. Check it out for a wonderful example of cutting edge CSS design and a sublimely superb user experience.

UPDATE: Well thanks to some helpful comments I have noticed the serious mistake I made with confusing Zeldman’s endorsement of the site with his actually being behind it. My apologies to those who this mistake slighted and I hope they take this as an honest mistake which, in a way, is also a strong compliment. Time to give credit where it is due. Christina, author of a book I have heard about in different circles but haven’t gotten to yet, points out that Erin Malone is the designer behind the new AIfIA. In a roundabout way, one of the things I realized when writing this correction is I know very little about this “Information Architecture” thing everyone is talking about. Even my evaluation was relatively superficial because even while I looked at the underlying code behind the site, I didn’t really attempt to quantify what made the site so pleasant and usable, which I wrote of to the “Zeldman touch.” I see my ignorance on the subject (of IA) as an opportunity for growth, and to that end the AIfIA site has been a great resource so far, I guess a testament to its purpose. Also a little googling led me to, amoung other things, an interesting tutorial at Webmonkey. More on this as I learn. I’m also very inclined to check out the two books written by the two kind enough to point out my earlier mistake.

Well, now that it’s officially over, I must say that was a really excellent weekend that even the amazonian weather couldn’t dampen. It got started strong on Friday with a little car dancing, good food, a sarcastic ATM, and a trampoline.

Saturday got a late start, and it turned out the gig I was looking forward to got rained out. However I did get to meet some new people out in Spring Valley and had a wonderful homemade dinner. There are pictures too but someone *cough*Sarah*cough* absconded with my digital camera, so I’ll have to wait to see if any of them came out. Also got to help someone with their computer, which is always a good feeling. Sometimes I have bad streaks where people seem to come to me with the strangest problems that I really don’t have a clue how to take care of. Then I drove through the rain to hear “the group Mike sings with,” otherwise known as Lager Rhythms. The show was really technically excellent and entertaining, and I got to sit by Christine which was excellent because I got the feeling we both had been similarly exposed to Schoolhouse Rock, we were cracking up at the same times. Afterward I tagged along with Kathy, Elaine and Kenny, Hanna, Robert, and the blog-less Joe and Mandy to a neat place called Catbirds, where they had really excellent music. They were playing really classic jazz stuff, mostly stuff I had heard before but a few gems that were new to me, including one I know was Ella Fitzgerald but I forgot to ask the DJ what album it was off of. Our relatively large group was seated outside, which was fine for the cool weather but a little inconvenient once it started pouring again. I’d like to see them some more but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it out to the Renaissance Festival next weekend because of HPUG. However, if you are going to be in town though, be sure to check out the meeting at 1 PM next Saturday because we’re going to have almost every kind of Treo known to man and a ton of cool Bluetooth gadgets that Jason is bringing.

Where does that leave Sunday? Recovering. And it’s already almost four in the morning!