The Obligatory What I Did Over Thanksgiving Post

Ate.

Okay, okay... Thursday morning I cooked up a pair of pumpkin pies, a culinary first for me, using canned pumpkin. Given these were my first pies evar, they turned out pretty good. Tracy, Tom, and I went down to my sister Rae's place for dinner, meeting with Robin and Mom and Rae's kids. Dinner was good, though Tom was a bit distracted, since Daddy made the mistake of showing him the pinball machine in the basement before dinner (Rae and Bill bought a used ST:TNG pinball machine and a Ms. Pac Man arcade game for their rec room. They also recently installed a theater projection TV there too, which made playing We Love Katimari a... memorable... experience.). Tom didn't want to play anythign else, and got a bit upset when we finally took him away from it to go home.

The rest of the weekend was spent doign the usual household chores and being lazy. Tom had a bit of a cough so we kept him inside, except for a brief visit to Grandma's house on Sunday, where he fell in love with her Snow Village collection all over again. Saturday Tracy and her mom went out to shop. Other than that it was quiet. I'll put Xmas decorations next week...

Now I know who to blame for spyware

When our family friend James Douglas died, my dad gave me a bunch of his papers that he couldn't find any place for and thought I might find interesting. One of them was a small pamphlet (unclassified) published in 1970 from his days as an NSA mathematician, titled "Queing Models for Time-Shared Processors".

Quote:

Time-shared systems have been developed to provide optimum utilization of a processing facility, and while doing so provide concurrent processing for many users on a real-time basis. Both considerations are clearly related and can be expressed in economic terms. Providing amicable user machines (conversational systems, real-time systems) has its economic justifications in that by making the processor more readily availible, users can develop applications with a minimum of the wait time associated with the computer processing a program, when the user would be "idle" waiting for his program to return. (fourteen pages of incomprehensible mathematics follow.)

If I'm translating this right, basically Mr. Douglas had a hand in developing what we now know as computer multi-tasking. In other words, the typical home computer's ability to run background programs like a music player or just burning a disc, while the user does something else such as surf the Net or write a Word document.

Holy cr*p.

Oh, THAT'S what the plunger is for

Gacked from drewshi

BBC and Terry Nation's Estate Stop Dalek Porn Video.

Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/28/dalek_film/

God help me, I want to see this, just to view it's utter awfulness. This thing HAS to be on BitTorrent by now.