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.