Post-Thanksgiving Wrapup

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Heh…I guess after three days, I should really move my ‘happy Thanksgiving’ post down the page a touch, eh?

Thanksgiving was quite nice. I had both Wednesday and Thursday off, and Prairie’s dad Lon came down on Wednesday afternoon to spend Thanksgiving with us. I got to take him shopping to help him pick up an iPod Nano, and then we watched Star Wars Episode II in the evening.

Thursday was spent entirely at home, relaxing and puttering around. Prairie cooked up an incredibly good dinner (in the words of Arlo Guthrie, “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat”):

A Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat...

Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes covered in marshmallows, gravy, rolls, jello salad, cranberry jelly, and pecan tartlets and pumpkin pie for dessert. Yum!

Unfortunately, eventually all that ended, and Friday rolled around. Black Friday, to be precise. There are definite pros and cons to having a mall-based retail job…and wow, but that day was insane. I had a split shift: 7am-11am, off for six hours, and then back from 5pm-10:30pm. Uff-da. Busy all day long (there were actually people waiting at the store gate when we opened at 7am) — and unfortunately, I just didn’t seem to be getting the right customers, as I ended up having the least sales of any of the sales staff that day. “ Ah, well…I know I’m not a born salesman, I just do the best I can while I’m there.

More long days Saturday and today, but I’ve got Monday off to rest. Quite looking forward to that, too…

Buying a camera?

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Oh, by the way…

On the off chance that any of my Seattle-area readers are considering or planning on buying a camera this holiday season, I’d love you forever if you came by the Kit’s Cameras store in the Northgate Mall while I’m working. I can’t do anything like dropping prices or some such thing, but not only will I do my best to get you set up, it’d make my sales numbers look that much better. ;)

Top 20 Geek Novels

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The Guardian UK ran a survey voting for the top 20 geek novels written since 1932, and in ‘net meme tradition, here’s the list with those I’ve read in bold.

  1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
  2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
  3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
  4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K Dick
  5. Neuromancer — William Gibson
  6. Dune — Frank Herbert
  7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
  8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov
  9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett
  10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland
  11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
  12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
  13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
  14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks
  15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
  16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick
  17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman
  18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson
  19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
  20. Trouble with Lichen — John Wyndham

13 out of 20…65%. Not bad, but I could do better. Time to add to the ever-growing reading list!

Bush targets Al-Jazeera for bombing

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The man is certifiably batshit insane.

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.”

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Al-Jazeera’s HQ is in the business district of Qatar’s capital, Doha.

Its single-storey buildings would have made an easy target for bombers. As it is sited away from residential areas, and more than 10 miles from the US’s desert base in Qatar, there would have been no danger of “collateral damage”.

Dozens of al-Jazeera staff at the HQ are not, as many believe, Islamic fanatics. Instead, most are respected and highly trained technicians and journalists.

To have wiped them out would have been equivalent to bombing the BBC in London and the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War itself.

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors.

Feeds are tagged too

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It’s a good thing I subscribe to my own RSS feeds — the ‘full content’ feed and the ‘full content with comments’ feed have both been updated to include the new tag support. Sorry about the mass-refresh in your RSS readers if you get hit with it.

Folksonomy tag support added

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One of the things I’ve wanted to add to my site for quite a while now has finally been added: tagging, along the lines of del.icio.us or Flickr. Admittedly, I still have a ways to go in getting all my old entries correctly tagged, but that will come with time. For now, they’re showing up in a few places.

  1. On the main page of the site, the tag listings below each post that previously pointed to Technorati search pages for the individual tag now do tag searches internal to this website.

  2. Also on the main page of the site, there is now a ‘This Week’s Tags’ box just below the Table of Contents. This is a quick list of just those tags that have been used on posts within the past seven days…a handy overview of what I’ve been babbling about over the past week.

  3. On individual entry pages, the tag line below the post now searches internally (just as on the front page). There are also now quick links to search on individual tags on del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr.

  4. The main archives page now features a tag cloud listing tags used within the past month (31 days, actually). The tag cloud is also size-weighted by the frequency of each tag’s use.

  5. Lastly, I tweaked the tag search results to be a little more useable — rather than a simple listing of links to each result, I’ve added the entry excerpt for each result to give a little more context than just the headline.

All this is thanks to the excellent Movable Type plugin Tags.app.

As with everything I fiddle with around here, questions, comments and words of wisdom are always appreciated (whether or not they’re heeded is another thing entirely, of course…).