Weekend Hospitality

My wife and I were married on Thanksgiving day, 24 years ago.  Since then, we have celebrated our anniversary with the traditional thanksgiving day meal.  If you search this blog, you can see past thanksgivings here , here and here .  For some time now, we have hosted huge thanksgiving events with more than 300 friends and guests.   This year, we have a change.   My sister's son is celebrating his Bar Mitzva this weekend and we are all invited.  Our thanksgiving party has been canceled for this year, but we will be celebrate a condensed version  next weekend with a smaller group of friends (20 or so). I am very excited to participate in this Bar Mitzva. My nephew is a bundle of energy and excitement.  He has grown significantly over the past few years from a very independent child to a real mench.  It is a pleasure to watch him grow up and blossom. From the thanksgiving point of view, I will miss our big gala event.  It was very muc...

For the past five years, I have been working on my Phd in Computer Science; Learning, teaching, research, project management, travel and writing.  I started on my way with a cool idea, only to have it summarily shot down by and expert in the field. Never trust an expert (me included). He was lost at sea on a solo overnight cruise.  I kept working and found that he was wrong.  Great, five years later, I finally submitted my thesis.  I have completed all of the requirements for the Phd and now I just have to wait while an anonymous set of judges reviews my work.  Basically, I'm done! Free at last, free at last. The mental overhead towards the end with deadlines, errors, and challenges was really hard.  Its over now and I can feel the freedom of thought returning to my curdled brain. I have a printed copy if you want to drop on by my house.  Otherwise, wait a few months and I'll publish a digital version. I can finally breath... and ... on to ...

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or those from which you've read an excerpt. Here are my results: 26 read, 1 partial. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen  2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee  6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger  19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Au...

Now this is probably a very strange comic for most of you, but for me, its a reminder of times past.  The background is that Donald Knuth, a professor of Computer Science at Stanford, has been writing a bible of computer science for the past twenty years.  He is so confident in his efforts that he will pay for each error that you uncover; $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because "256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar", and $0.32 for "valuable suggestions". I tried to submit one of these many years ago and although I was confident, Knuth explained the errors of my ways. Have a nice day, Elliot