Thanksgiving weekend

On Thursday we had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at our house. In addition to Susan and myself, my brother Randy and a friend of his attended. After eating turkey and dressing, we played a dominoes game called Mexican Train that’s perfect for holidays since it can takes hours to complete. In the evening Susan and I drove to my sister Vicki’s house where we visited other relatives including my parents and my sister Kelly’s family.

Susan and I spent the rest of the weekend on our own. We’ve been playing more games in our spare time lately. We’ve read a lot of articles lately suggesting they’re helpful in keeping our brains going. It also seems to be a good way to de-stress after work. Let’s see, we’re playing Scrabble, Mancala, and a variety of card games. One game I’d really like to start playing is Go.

We ventured out to a few Black Friday sales but tried to avoid any places that looked too busy. We picked up a pre-lit Christmas tree for the office that we set up and decorated Saturday night.

I also squeezed in some time to work on mod_virgule for the first time in nearly a year. I picked up where I left off in early 2008 with the rewrite of the HTML parser. I now have the libxml2-based parser working quite well. It needs a little more work to purge some remaining XSS holes. It already looks a lot safer than mod_virgule’s built-in parser.

National Novel Writing Month

It seems like everyone I know is writing novels this month as part of the National Novel Writing Month event. The idea is that you write a 50,000 word first draft during November. You have to start from scratch on or after the first and you have to upload the finished work by Nov 30. Last year they had over 100,000 participants and more than 15,000 finished their novel on time. According to their FAQ, quite a few of these novels make it through further drafts, get published, and at least one made the number one spot on the NY Times best seller list.

REMEMBER TO VOTE TODAY!

If you’re in the US, this is the last day to vote. I voted last week during the early voting period. We’ve got two good choices this year and either one is so much better than what we’ve had for the last eight years, that there will be cause to celebrate tomorrow. This is the end of an administration that has overseen the curtailment or destruction of many of our civil rights, they started an unnecessary war that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people, they’re imprisoning and torturing people without due process, they’ve pushed the economies of the US and much of the rest of the world into a major recession. It will probably take decades for the US and the world to repair the damage done by the Bush administration but the first step toward recovery is today’s vote. So be happy. If you’re in the Dallas, TX area and want to celebrate, I’d suggest the NO-MO-BUSH! Post-Election Party and Hoedown at the AllGood Cafe in Deep Ellum from 8pm to 11pm on Wednesday, Nov 5.