[Update, 10:21pm PST…it doesn’t look like auroral activity is likely this far south, and it’s somewhat foggy outside anyway.]

Flu shots?

Al’s on a crusade to encourage all of us to go get
our flu shots. I became a believer two years ago, when Diane got a flu shot and I didn’t; sure enough, I spent a miserable week or so down with the flu, and she wasn’t affected at all. I’m just waiting for the vaccine to be available at work; they’ve postponed the immunization campaign to let high-risk people get it first.

It’s so easy to find useless information department

Jeffrey asked me when Rex Morgan, M. D. started, and thanks to the Web and Google, it took me less than a minute to answer his question (if I hadn’t had to wake up the computer, it would’ve been even faster). I’m still amazed how much trivia is available on the Web.

But once a year, the Havurah (group of friends) to which we belong flies in the face of this feature; instead, we add a day to our Thanksgiving celebration. That day, of course, is today, and so we’ll be working on our leftover supply, while playing games and chatting. It’s a far better way to celebrate than fighting the crowds at the mall!

Then later this evening, we’ll go to shul for brief Shabbat services followed by a musical evening with the New Orleans Klezmer AllStars, who will be playing at Klezmer Mania tomorrow at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. Apparently, there’s a family connection between one of the AllStars and a member of Shir Hadash, so we get a free concert.

…for friends and family, near and far.

…for good health.

…that I enjoy my work.

…that people find what I write interesting enough to visit here more
than once.

…that the Web is a two-way street, so I can read your interesting
writing.

…I don’t have a bet on the election.

…that I’m not travelling over the holiday.

…that I don’t have to put up Christmas lights!

Gopher was a turkey

Today, Al points out the Gopher Manifesto, which calls for people to move away from the advertisement- and graphic-laden Web and back to the pure text simplicity of Gopher.

I remember Gopher; Gopher was very good to me, in fact. When I decided I needed to learn C programming on OS/2, I thought that a Gopher client for OS/2 would be an interesting project. That was probably the best single career decision I ever made, since it put me on the leading edge of the Internet community inside IBM, and that’s been an excellent place to be.

But the Web flattened Gopher — and it wasn’t just because of ads and eye candy. The Gopher Manifesto itself shows the basic problem with Gopher — namely, you can’t link from one Gopher document to another; only menus can have links. So the Gopher Manifesto has a long list of other pages to visit — but they’re not live links; instead, you have to manually enter them into your browser (or use cut and paste), and that, my friends, is too much work.

Gopher had some other problems (the University of Minnesota got greedy, for one thing), but basically, once people saw the value of hyperlinking within documents, it was doomed.

Urp!

We just finished Thanksgiving dinner; it was a simple affair, with turkey (the carving lessons on Tuesday helped), squash, carrots, rice, bread, stuffing, Coke salad, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and made-on-the-spot whipped cream. This year, I used the pecan pie recipe from the Karo Syrup label (some years, I go with a recipe from one of the Joy of Cooking editions I have), and it came out pretty well; the Nancy’s frozen pie crust was far better than the ones I’ve used in the past, though the crust is not the main attraction in pecan pie.

After eating, we watched some edited videos of Thanksgiving 1992 (boy, the kids looked small then!), and played a few rounds of Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond. And now it’s time to finish the cleanup and put the garbage out for tomorrow’s pickup.

Dave strikes again!

I can always tell when Scripting News links to me in the text of Dave’s log — my Site Meter referrals report is suddenly filled with visitors from Scripting News.

Last night, I went to the Shir Hadash Men’s Club meeting. The main topic was a demonstration of the right way to carve a turkey (Diane’s comment when she saw that in the temple e-mail: “At last, a useful program at Men’s Club!”), but after that, we had an informal seminar in applied probability. I almost left the seminar with a failing grade, but the last hand made up for the rest of the evening, and I finished with a 13% profit on my admission fee — or to put it differently, I won a full forty cents. If only the stock market were as kind!

Food Safety Department

The pecan pie is done; I think I want to refrigerate it overnight, but I’m not sure — I usually make it on Thanksgiving proper, but this year, we planned ahead for a change, and now I don’t know what to do!

So I asked the oracle for advice. Actually, I asked Google (using the new Google Toolbar that Joel recommended today) this question: What pies should be refrigerated? Google replied with pointers to dozens of pages, including the USDA and the Ohio State University Food Safety pages, and the consensus was clear: refrigerate pies containing eggs. And I did. I’ve had food poisoning once; I don’t want to repeat the experience.

Half a clue, half a clue, half a clue onward!

I got a response of sorts to my letter to Hilton Hotels complaining about being awakened at 7:15am on a Sunday to take a “customer satisfaction survey”. The response came from the survey firm, not Hilton:

Dear Mr. Singer:

We are very sorry for the inconvenience of our call at 7am on a Sunday
morning. Unfortunately, the call to you was supposed to be dialed at
9:15am and was instead programmed for dialing at 9:15am Central Time.
It is never our intent to wake someone up to conduct a customer
satisfaction study … especially not at 7am! We have followed up with
the interviewer who miscoded the call time and informed him of the
ramifications of the error.

Again, we sincerely apologize for this. Because of this issue, we will
remove you from any future dialing on the Hilton customer satisfaction
study.

Sincerely,

Gwen Amador
M/A/R/C Research
Account Manager
949.719.1004

c: Linda Immer
Hilton Hotels Corporation

I wonder if I’ll also get a response from Hilton. Probably not; that would require someone at Hilton being awake. But I’ll wait a few days to give them a chance before answering this letter. Politely, of course.

Congratulations on homeownership, Garrett. Your wallet will never be the same.

And it’s great to see that Kaycee is doing better — it doesn’t look like she’s on the keyboard in person yet, but that can’t be far away.

Things I Learned Today

I’ve been a moderately happy IE user since moving to Win98; today, Joel‘s
review of Netscape 6 taught me two very useful IE features — features which are especially useful to reduce my mousing and keying:

• Hit Alt-D to jump to the
  “Address” line with the whole address pre-selected (makes it easy to type a new URI).

• Hit Ctrl-Enter to enclose whatever you’ve typed on the “Address” line between
  "http&58;//www&46;"; and
  “.com” (so
  “cnn” becomes
  “http://www.cnn.com“), avoiding any conflict with locally-defined names.

Thanks, Joel!

And I also learned that Manila is very eager to turn things which look like URIs into links — I tried many tricks to avoid having it make “http://www.” into a link and finally gave up. Sorry for any confusion. And thanks to Al and Andrea for hacking at the problem — I never would have considered putting a backslash inside the “http://www.” string, which was the trick — I guess that breaks it up enough to get Manila to stop special-casing it.

I can stop watching CNN….

I subscribed my pager to their President-Elect alert, which will send out a one-time e-mail when the next president has been determined. So I guess I can expect my pager to go off at noon EST on 20 January.