American Thanksgiving is fast approaching. I'm looking forward to the three day week coming up, also not looking forward to it. It will be two days of work that won't be helping the project get finished. I'd make the developers work the holiday if I thought I could get away with it, but probably not. Two of them are from India so it isn't like they'd be celebrating anyway ...

Finally got back in to biking around the canyon at lunch hour. A director in the company kept booking half hour meetings at 11am that would stretch in to 12:15 or so and chew right through my riding time. Saw one of my favourite signs while in the canyon (see over to the right). That is the North American sign for "Good biking is over here". Plus by not defining what a single track trail is I can always claim innocence.

Kat and I will continue to avoid Black Friday. There would have to be something I *really* wanted and it would have to be very discounted for me to put up with the crowds of shoppers. So far nothing has met that criteria. The one big purchase that Kat and I were going to do has already been done online. We've ordered a pet-specific Roomba (I hope that link works, I think there are shopping cart specific values in there that may cause issues). That is the big gift for the house. For those of you who don't bother following the link, it is a robot that vacuums your floors for you, avoids banging in to furniture and will go back to the base station for recharging when the power starts to run out. Kat and I can indulge in more leisure time as robots make our lives easier. Hmm, I'm sure I've heard that statement before. What could possibly go wrong?

We figure if the robot scares the animals, that's just another plus.

Speaking of purchases, I recently bought an Eyetv adapter to plug in to the Mac Mini with the plan of getting rid of the CRT television and the DVR that we rent from cable company. Plus (my thinking went) we could burn copies of T.V. shows to DVD after we pulled out the advertisements. Oddly enough buying that piece of equipment led to the following discoveries:

1) It didn't work.
2) The cable company encrypts all the channels so, I can't get them on the EyeTV.
3) The clear over-the-air channels have horrible reception where we are in San Diego due to the hills.
4) We only watch a couple shows on cable.
5) Why the hell do we pay so much money for channels we don't watch?
6) Project Runway is shown a week later on Hulu for free.

So we've decided to drop cable entirely. I won't be able to watch Premiere League Soccer any more, but I see that as a couple hours of the weekend I get back. I'll go surfing or read a book.

So an initial investment of $200 is leading to a $20 cost to ship it back, a $200 refund from the company, and $60 less a month in cable costs. That's a win.

Some quick links.
One for the cat lovers out there, here.
One for the end-of-the-world lovers out there who are worried about the Large Hadron Collider causing black holes to swallow the world. The Register have gathered up some of the best comments from the fringe crowd.

Beer week was here last week. Some of the pubs around the areas were offering beers along with custom food. An example of the stuff we *didn't* eat is:

3rd Course; Spiced waffles, house made chocolate bacon ice cream, coco nibs
Beer Pairing; Belgian Stout

I'm not such a beer fan that I could pair a stout with bacon ice cream. I like bacon and I like stout, but throwing ice cream in to that equation makes it all kinds of wrong. We did have some coffee stout with a brownie at the Blind Lady Ale Pub. Yummers.

When Kat and I first arrived in San Diego one of our big complaints was the lack of pubs. There were bars everywhere, but no pubs, or very, very few. Now we have a bunch in the area with all kinds of custom micro-brews on tap. I appreciate the change, and from the crowds we are seeing in the pubs, so do a lot of other San Diego residents. So for all of you Canadians who like to mock American beer because it is weak and tasteless, you are mocking the best selling American beers (Budweiser and Coors) and if you look at the matching Canadian beers (Molson and Blue) they aren't that much better in the 'taste' category. There are *tons* of really, really good microbreweries down here. Stone Brewery even has a lovely upscale restaurant attached to its brewery. I put a link in there to their site, for some reason it asks you whether you are over 21, it is safe for work.

On a final note, got back to the beach again. Strapping the surf board to the top of the car and driving down the highway causes the surfboard to bounce around in a disconcerting way. Plus the straps were humming in the wind and drowning out the Stuart McLean CD I was listening to. Stuart McLean and surfing, there's a combo for you. Oh yes, turns out my upper body strength still sucks.