We are here in Gilroy California observing old family traditions with our son, Glen and his family, Barb, Cody, Patrick, Bryce and now Lizy, Smellfish, Marlin, Sunny and Chocolaté. Yes the turkey is in the oven. The gals will be “slaving over a hot stove all day” to bring us two kinds of dressing, sweet potatoes, home stewed cranberry sauce, three kinds of pie and all of the trimmings. Us guys will probably fritter away the day flying our abominable flying machines in the new “Flight Simulator X” game that Glen and I bought each other for Christmas (and promptly gifted them early so we could enjoy them together.) Actually the gals were at the bottom of that plot, so it isn’t as bad as it sounds. We have also been busy visiting the Monterey Aquarium and we even drove Unkle Lloyd Starr’s R/C model boat out at Uvas Lake. Even Judy took a turn at the helm. Gary had the distinction of being the only skipper to loose control and run aground.

Hi tech problems:
Loading the new flight simulator program highlighted a problem that I have been having with my computer. In the last month or so it has became just plain s…l…o…w. The new program simply froze it in its tracks. Not only that program but any program we ran would fail at unpredictable moments. Glen and I started sleuthing and discovered the computer was communicating with only a third of its memory. Long story short…, we replaced the memory, no help; we taped pressure pads at critical points of the motherboard to get better connections, no help; we did incantations and sacrificed the entrails of an old computer; the hex remained. Obviously the only reasonable solution is a bran new computer. A new ThinkPad T60 will replace the three year old ThinkPad T30. It will be double the older computer in nearly every respect: Double speed, 2 GHz; double memory, 1.5 GB; and nearly double hard drive; 100 GB. Incredibly this comes at nearly half the cost in just three and a half years. When I bought the replacement memory I did a bit of reminiscing to back in about 1980 when we first bought a small home computer called a Compu-Color. I hand wire-wrapped a small circuit board with nine computer memory chips and built a 16 kilobyte memory module for only $75. This was a big savings over the $300 the manufacturer wanted. The memory in the new computer at that $75 price would have cost over 7 million dollars in 1980. That is only 26 years ago. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1968 using a computer that pales in comparison to the computer in my PDA.

So when you sit down at the Thanksgiving table with your family and friends around you, take a moment to think about the high tech revolution that has taken place before our very eyes. Computers are everywhere, in our cars, our telephones even our toys. We have incredible health care, the safest food and water supply and the freedom to roam and still communicate with all our family and friends. Just a 150 years ago the state of the art communication was the Pony Express; St Louis to San Francisco in only ten days. Think about where the technology can take us in the next three years or ten years. I simply cannot imagine twenty five years. So, gather your family around you and fasten your seat belts. What ever it is, it is going to be a wild and exciting ride.