Thanksgiving dinner at Farooq & Eileen’s. Drew was there, along with a couple of friends of F&E’s who I didn’t know. Jenny was supposedly going to show, but wound up not making it. Quite the feast. Yams, two kinds of potatoes, a greenbean casserole, stuffing, and oh yeah, a big ol’ turkey. Everything was great. After dinner Farooq gave me this bizarre “candy” made with saltpeter, Tyrkisk Peber. Tastes sort of like black licorice, but kind of spicy. Very weird. Well, I’m glad I tried it. Then he gave me something similar, but much more potent, which I concluded was really intended for nuclear reactor cores. Yech.

Although we didn’t talk as much about the situation in Afghanistan as I thought we might, Farooq did make an interesting point: he contends that it is a lucky thing that there’s a military dictator running the show in Pakistan–if there were a political government, he believes they’d kowtow to the extremist mob and would not go along with the military action.

Then we watched some Space Ghost Coast to Coast, with special guest Tenacious D.

Jenny got a new Powerbook and I spent a few hours yesterday helping her move files over and set it up. It’s a damn nice machine. I’m impressed by the power brick, prosaic as that may seem–it’s clear that a lot of thought went into the design. The prongs fold out of the way for transport, and can pop off to be replaced by a special extension cord (in case you can’t squeeze the brick onto your outlet strip). It has little tabs that fold out for wrapping up the cord. It’s a small rounded square, sleek and white, like an iBook.

Migrating the files from one machine to the other wasn’t as simple as it should have been, because the old machine kept locking up during the file-transfer process. Very mysterious. We wound up compressing batches of files, uploading them to the net, and then downloading them. Sounds silly, but it works, and wasn’t any slower than doing it over the improvised LAN.