Lee Nau

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, a day most people spend gathering around a table with friends and family. I’ve never really been one for Thanksgiving festivities. When friends find out that I had planned to stay home and watch movies today, they invariably express concern and imagine me sobbing convulsively into my pillow. Thanks for your concern, but I’m good.

Many of the traditional trappings of Thanksgiving are mostly non-vegetarian foods (like turkey, stuffing, gravy). Those that are vegetarian are foods that I don’t really like (or really hate)—pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce. Whenever I’d go visit family for Thanksgiving, I’d eat a few sticks of celery, a roll or two, a little bit of cheese, and some olives.

I’m glad I have friends that love this holiday and enjoy the traditional trappings. If I declined your invitation, I’m still grateful that we’re friends, but I’m going to have falafel and watch some movies. Many of my friends are young and have “family” style gatherings for friends whose families live in places far away. Even at those gatherings at which the host/hostess prepared vegetarian options, I hate feeling like that annoying vegetarian guy.

I’ve never, in the 18 years I’ve been continuously vegetarian, gone to any gathering in which I allowed other people to guilt me or pressure me into trying something that falls outside of my diet. My family accepted it a long time ago and most of my friends know that my refusal isn’t about them.

For those of you who see this holiday as something special, other than a free four-day weekend, I wish you the very best in your celebrations. I hope your turkey and wine are delicious and that your gatherings are full of wonderful amazing people.

I’ll celebrate by working through these Netflix envelopes and having some movies to recommend or discourage. Sounds like a great day off to me.

The other day, Chanpori Rith started on 43 Folders with a really insightful post about The Seven Deadly Sins of Instant Messaging. One of the things that grabbed me was the following section from the fifth of the seven sins:

According to the Pareto principle, you spend 80 percent of your chat time with 20 percent of your buddies. Identify the buddies you don’t chat with anymore and delete them.

Recognizing this fact, I’ve spent some time going through email accounts and my instant messaging software. There’s something strangely cathartic about deleting contacts I chatted with on two occasions six years ago. I still have a gaggle of people in my list that I rarely, if ever, talk to, but about 50 accounts are gone now. None of these accounts belong to anyone I’ve typed a word to in the last year.

As a clutter bug, this is a first good step. Next, I’m going through thousands of email messages in several mail clients, a plethora of RSS items flagged in NetNewsWire or starred in Google Reader, and a ridiculous pile of bookmarked items in the six browsers on my computer.

If you’re a pack rat, building the habit of deletion can whet your appetite for disposing of physical stuff. Getting rid of crap I don’t use is part of my five year plan.

Is it part of yours?

I’ve been using Flock as one of my primary browsers for a while, but noticed a tendency of the software to crash at inopportune moments, particularly when I had a significant number of tabs open. Getting dumped with 25 tabs open (which are all awaiting tagging) is never fun.

I had high hopes for the new Flock 1.0, which I downloaded last week. I was looking forward to an increase in speed and an increase in stability. Unfortunately, it seems that the improvements to the browser are strictly cosmetic and/or social networking enhancements.

Without a basic level of stability, none of the extra social networking junk matters even a little bit. This afternoon, closing a tab containing Yahoo Mail crashed Flock about six times in a row. It very rarely closes without crashing. If I close the browser, it crashes. If I close a tab, it crashes. If I use the keyboard to command-number to a specific tab, it crashes.

I’m dissatisfied enough with the new Flock, despite the extra sleek myworld page, that I’m finished messing with it. I’ll export things I’ve bookmarked in the browser, but I need software that works, is reasonably fast, and doesn’t crash 80 times a day.

Around the United States, people gathered at polling stations (or at their absentee ballots) to vote for various ballot measures and municipal officers. I understand other states had state-wide referenda. Here in California, it was just a municipal election.

I live in Sunnyvale, California — the home of large technology companies and no downtown to speak of. The only thing on this ballot I cared about was a local measure to fund an expansion of the public library. Public libraries are important for communities, particularly in a time when there is a dwindling sense of community (especially in places that are as unhip as a bedroom community in the sprawl of corporate campus country). The Sunnyvale Public Library is a beautiful library full of works in lots of languages, a huge music section, and a large historical collection detailing the history of the Santa Clara Valley.

I really hope it passes. I’m always for increasing funding for public services and the public library in any town is a public resource that is educational for everyone. I’m frankly surprised when my friends tell me that they don’t use their library (and many don’t even know where their nearest one is). That’s virtually the first thing I look for when I move to a new town. It’s one of the last civic services that everyone can use for their entire lives.

The rest of the ballot in my community consisted of picking four city council members and a bunch of language changes in the city charter. Reading the text of these was an exercise in self-disciplined concentration. They were incredibly boring.

Update: Residents of Sunnyvale are selfish pricks. Measure B failed. It required a 2/3 majority, but 40% of the voters thumbed it down. Assholes.