Greetings all, Happy Thanksgiving Eve!  (There such a thing, of course there is, and this is it :) 

I spent this morning attending Grandparents Day at Oaks Christian School, the middle/high school which Megan and Alexis attend, together with my Mom (!), and it was great.  Megan is in the Advanced Middle School band (flute), which gave a performance along with other art groups, and they were all terrific.  The key to kids' performances is to keep them crisp.  Five minutes is good, ten minutes, not so good.  The same with the speeches.  Overall Oaks' organization of this event was superb and a good time was had by all...

Later I hosted a conference call with Aperio's Technical Advisory Board, a group of longtime / expert customers who help us review our product development plans.  They're all smart opinionated people, motivated to help us, and it was a great discussion.  The challenge is always to take notes, so many ideas get thrown around, so fast...

And then later still, I didn't ride, and had a huge burrito for dinner while watching football (Monday night's 51-29 demolition of the Packers by the Saints).  Warming up for Thanksgiving tomorrow, I guess...  it was a fun game, and a great  burrito, but I am massively full.  Okay, I know, too much information.  Off we go...

This sucks: Thousands ordered to flee homes as storm hits Southern California.  Those fires are a double whammy, not only to they threaten homes while burning, but they burn up the brush that stabilizes the soil, so later when it rains we have mudslides.  And we now have record rain.  Yuk. 

Barack Obama named Paul Volcker to head his Economic Recovery Advisory board, prompting Powerline to note: back to the future.  It does seem as if experience is called for, and Volcker received high marks from nearly everyone during his nine-year tenure as Fed Chairman (1979-1987). 

Slate helpfully explains What it means for the Fed to start "printing money".  Volcker made his reputation as an inflation fighter, now he may have to create some inflation to stave off recession. 

A rerun from John Robb as he explains Normal Debt Levels.  According to him, the Fed will have to print quite a bit of money to make up the deleveraging gap - about $30T.  I swear his posts make more sense to me now than they did two months ago; he did too know what he was talking about... 

Sign of the times...  Philip Greenspun reports that Eclipse has declared bankruptcy.  They were the makers of ultra-light jets; I had high hopes of being able to buy one someday.  They never really made it, their jets never really worked (!), and the price never really made it low enough.  Personal jets are still a rich person's plaything, not yet a reality.  But you have to believe it is only a matter of time. 

If you're a longtime reader, you know I like Salon, and I like King Kaufman.  He's had a daily column about sports for as long as I can remember, but no more; as he reports this is the end of the daily.  So be it.  I will look forward to his weekly :) 

Jeff Atwood wonders is Email = Efail?  I would have to say, no, most emphatically no.  The idea that you can replace a queued communication medium like Email with a realtime mechanism like Twitter or IM is ridiculous.  It is wishful thinking, predicated on the idea that it is okay to ignore things if you couldn't pay attention to them at the time.  (Might as well get rid of voicemail; if you can't talk to someone when they call, why listen to their message?)  The key problem is limiting input; if you have too many emails, you can't process them all.  I'm sympathetic, but the solution is intelligent filtering, not dumping your inbox entirely.  That's just giving up. 

By the way, I meant to mention, I'm experimenting with a new Email technique which has a lot of promise.  The problem is spam on my phone.  Usually when I'm away from my desk, my laptop keeps running and keeps filtering my spam (thank you, SpamBayes).  My laptop syncs to Exchange, and so does my phone, and so spam is also filtered from my phone.  Furthermore my laptop picks up email from my personal accounts via POP (Gmail etc), and that gets synced to Exchange, and on to the phone.  So it all works.  However if I'm traveling with my laptop, none of it works.  Now I have major spam on my phone with nothing cleaning it out, and I don't get personal email.  It all doesn't work... 

So here's the solution.  I have an old server at my house which runs Windows, and I installed Office 2003 and I'm now running Outlook on it, syncing to Exchange.  This instance of Outlook has SpamBayes installed, so it filters out the spam, and it retrieves email from my personal accounts via POP, so they get synced into my Exchange inbox.  It does all the work my laptop used to do.  My phone (and my laptop) just sync to the Exchange inbox, and it all works.  And because my server is always on, it all works all the time.  Stay tuned for more, but so far, so good...

Wired reports Lotus Guns for Porsche with the Evora - moving up the food chain.  "Lotus believes the Evora will propel it into the big leagues. It is betting on the car to broaden its appeal beyond the hard-core enthusiasts who so love the Elise by offering the same razor-sharp handling in a car more suited to daily driving."  So be it.  I must say, it's cute :) 

TTAC notes the Aston Martin Rapide, their entry into the four-door sports sedan category.  The Quattroporte remains the best looking of the bunch, but this is a nice looking car, unlike the Panamerica...  interesting, these cars are all amazing...  I guess there are other people (besides me :) who want a real back seat in their sports car...