Now that I've turned in my take home final in Computer Networks, life as we know it can resume. The exam was an interesting exercise in techno-fiction. What else could one do with questions like this one: 9. Suppose you are designing a sliding window point-to-point communications link to the moon. Assume the moon is approximately 390,000km from the earth and that propagation delay through space is 300,000km per second. If frames are 1000 bytes in length calculate how many bits we will need for the sequence number if a selective repeat protocol is used in order for the circuit to approach 100 percent utilization. Now I know Barb Johnson is probably already thinking "43! The answer is 43!" (actually I think the answer is 7), but the proper response to a question like this is a full length Arthur C. Clark opus with a lot of subplots about people having transcendental moments in space pods.
Seasons are so definite here that they are almost places. We have finally arrived at the place called winter. We've had about 8 inches of snow in the last few days. Driving to work after a fresh snowfall, I'm always amazed at how thorough snow it. Every least twig is considered. Power lines and fence rails get beveled lines. Poles get little caps. Birches get fractal Rorschachs. The democratic and obscessive snow makes me think of what Annie Dillard says about deciduous trees: it's the work of a manic depressive with limitless capital. As I hoped, the Heron kind of glows in the snow. Speaking of decorations I've gotten kinda festive on my work page.
Continuing my mission to find articles of merit in trash magazines, I direct your attention to the December Vogue which has the pictures and article about Hillary Clinton, a wonderful artsy photo thing of the 12 days of Christmas (8 maids a milking?), and a piece by Allen Gurganus describing his first meeting with Eudora Welty. Cruise it at the newstand. Don't buy it and put it on the coffee table. All those pages with the perfumes will asphyxiate your cats.
Thanks for the New Orleans info. Here are all the whodat picks.
	Here's Camp Unity on the lake as I was leaving for work on the first snowy day. The lake has a skin of ice from the shore to about 50 feet out and it grows every day. New Year's Day is the first day that it's legal to put an ice fishing hut on the lake which means you can drive a truck on it. Ice fishing, as far as I can tell, is about bourbon and male depression about the end of hunting season.
Lastly, check out Martha's advent chores.