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.