Dave's Thoughts of the Day: November 26th

Good to be back... welcome back to our blog experience.

Thanksgiving was tremendous this year.  In fact, it was the best Thanksgiving I can remember for a long while.   We had a great turkey in the family this year.  I'm telling you, this was the best Thanksgiving Turkey I ever ate.   The skin was so crispy, the meat was tender and flavorful, maybe a little too salty, but no matter.  Everything WORKED.  The stuffing, which might have been stove top, was tremendous.  The cranberries in sauce, which my mom provided, were phenomenal.  The mashed potatoes, exemplary.  The gravy, complimentary.  The rest of the weekend was eventful as well.  Some shopping was involved, and a little Monopoly as well.

I made a huge comeback in the game of Monopoly on my sister.  I was down to just a couple hundred dollars with all of my properties mortgaged, including all three of the orange ones that I owned.   I thought it was over: my sister had hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place.  One more trip to either place and the game was over.   Instead, I not only survived that trip but then landed on Free Parking (we put our fine and tax money into Free Parking).   THEN I took the Free Parking money and unmortgaged  all the orange spaces and built up all the houses/hotels I could.   I needed a ton of money for that but I went ALL IN... it's like going all in in Poker.   I knew that I was going to lose anyway if I landed on Boardwalk.  Then, miracle of miracles, I not only avoided "Luxury Row" again, but my sis hit one of the orange properties.  Suddenly, I had a lot of real cash!   I finished up building the hotels on all remaining orange properties.  A few trips around the board later, and she had to mortgage everything.   Even the hotels, even Boardwalk itself.   Somewhere in between I negotiated a trade to give her something like Illinois Avenue for Marvin Gardens so that I could build up the yellow ones as well.   Then it was on... a few rounds later, I won the game.  COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.

So Notre Dame is undefeated.   I have nothing further to add to this.   They did everything they could possibly be asked to do.  They didn't lose a game, they beat all the teams they needed to, and they played a tough schedule.  There really is nothing else for them to prove.    I wish them luck on the way to the National Championship Game.  Maybe they could beat Alabama.  I certainly don't think so, but perhaps Notre Dame struck at just the right time.  Defense, to me, is always the difference between BCS winning teams and the field.  If it wasn't, wouldn't Oregon have a few National Championships by now?

I'm a little under the weather, but it's not nearly that serious this time out.  Ibuprofen is simply the greatest.

I'm getting tired of people who expect to perform miracles on data.  If you busted up your external hard drive, it's gone.  FINITO.  End of story.  Fortunately I made it pretty clear that I cannot claim any responsibility on damaged or lost data.    Those disclaimers are important because you can't levy any weight of expectation onto an impossible situation.  

Portable/External data sources wind up being far less reliable than anything installed inside a desktop.  I think a good reason for that is the simple size of the disks involved.  A 2.5 inch hard disk is just asking to fail with the unbelievable amount of density between data bytes.  AND it moves.   A full 3.5" hard disk installed within a well ventilated PC could last for years, even decades.  


That's all for now... not much time for more, but I hope everyone had a good weekend.  Back tomorrow.