I'm enjoying the holiday break immensely. The semester has been particularly stressful. A few weeks ago, I asked George, "What happens when you find you're spending all of your time either attending or preparing for meetings?" He replied, "Then you know the Peter Principle is working?" Good ol' George.

Yesterday, we had a traditional holiday feast, perfectly prepared by Alisa. (I contributed only a little bit of help at the end, having learned a long time ago its safer to stay out of Alisa's way when she's cooking on Thanksgiving.) She used the roasting book that Phil and Jackie got for her last year and the turkey turned out perfectly -- a lot better than Ethan's Pompeii Turkey. It was a wonderful, quiet holiday with the family. A quiet snowfall in the morning gave way to sunny skies by lunchtime, so we could look out the windows during the meal and enjoy the scenery, knowing that we didn't have to go out and drive in it.

Today, Phil and I spent much of the morning playing a really long game of StarCraft. It was a 7-player map that we played together against two computer opponents. I find playing against human opponents to be stressful enough that I don't enjoy it. But playing with someone against the computer is perfect. But we've played all the small maps. As the maps get larger, I have a hard time being aware of the 5 or 6 different parts of the map where stuff is happening. I often am trying to protect one area only to find another has been completely overrun during a 5 or 10 second inattention. We had a couple of false starts and, so once we got established in this one, we didn't want to give up. The game took at least two hours -- maybe three. But eventually we were victorious.

For the first time this afternoon, I used Skype to make an international call. Esperantists have been using Skype pretty extensively to have international conversations. But I don't like talking on the phone in the first place and I especially hate the delays and the non-duplex nature of the connections. One thing for the old analog network: when you had a connection with someone, you had a real, two-way, direct connection. But I've mostly gotten used to the quarter-second delay that my cellophone seems to impose on every call. I'll probably get used to Skype. I figure it's just the NSA routing domestic calls outside the US so they can "legally" capture them all in Echelon (or it's successor).

I called Tim Morley, who I'm hoping will attend the Global Voices summit in London next month. We talked about history and goals and I agreed to send an email to Ethan to try to get an invitation lined up for him.

StevenBrewer