Good morning y'all!  Hope this finds you well and recovering nicely from a great Thanksgiving dinner.  I must tell you Shirley and the girls outdid themselves last night, we had a marvelous meal, very traditional with turkey and stuffing and bread pudding (!) and vegetables and so on...  accompanied by a nice Jumilla.  And finished off with pumpkin pie, apple pie, and cheesecake, a la mode.  Just typing these words makes me feel full all over again.

Cyclelog (pre-dinner of course!): Rockstore, 28 miles, *again*.  Wow 15 days in a row and still not getting easier.  We'll see what today brings.  You might think I would be getting sick of this ride and you might be right.

Today is my annual brush with death as I put up Christmas lights.  Fortunately it is a beautiful day, not raining and not windy, both factors which have made previous years more interesting.  I will be inspired by Carson Williams' amazing "Wizards of Winter" display from 2005, YouTube at right.  I plan to take it slow and easy :)

I keep accumulating links about the Obamaniacs, but I'm in a good mood so I'm not going to share them.  I will say, it is becoming increasingly obvious to many (as it was to me all along) that John Bolton was right. 

Okay, this is funny.  It defies summarization but you must click through.  You will thank me.  [ and I will thank Daring Fireball for pointing it out ] 

Tim Bray makes a great observation about using his Android smartphone: "A huge amount of most people’s workload is manageable given anything with a decent email client and browser.  For now, I can’t really use the phone for anything creative: Writing, or coding, or photography. I wonder when and if that might change?"  Other than sending email, which is arguably a creative act, you can't originate content on a smartphone.  Okay, you can take pictures, crummy ones, which you have to edit later on a PC to make them halfway presentable.  But can I post to my blog?  Not yet.  And coding is clearly out of the question.  For now.  But like Tim, I have no doubt this will change... 

The Matrix in Lego.  In HD no less.  Unbelievable.  Watch it now.  [ via Kottke ] 

The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed this morning, boom boom.  We've become so used to this; the amazing fact that we can launch a spaceplane, have it dock with a space station for eleven days, and then return to Earth safely raises hardly an eyebrow anymore.  It costs a lot, but it works.  Check out these amazing pictures taken while the Shuttle was docked on the ISS and astronauts worked on the outside.  Scenes from a movie.  My favorite is the one showing both the Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz docked side-by-side.  How cool is that?