I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season! Carol and I have been traveling a lot this year and we are staying home this Christmas, hanging out with our friends in Sedona Arizona instead of traveling to see family in California and Rhode Island. I was going to buy a new laptop for my work and writing (my MacBook Air is 3 years old) but in spite of my laptop being dinged up it is otherwise in good shape. I decided to do something radical with it yesterday: When I bought my laptop 3 years ago I initialized it with a Time Machine backup from my older MacBook Pro. Needless to say, there was a lot of cruft on my system. I was also running a developer's preview of Yosemite (with all available updates). Yesterday I reformatted the disk drive and did a fresh install of OS X Yosemite - without restoring anything from Time Machine. I did manually (command line) restore several directories from the latest folder in the Time Machine backups to save the time of not doing fresh git ...

Carol and I just got back from a cruise from San Diego to Hawaii to Ensenada Mexico and back to San Diego. We have done this cruise before but several people in our extended family wanted to go and we enjoyed the family time. The best part of this particular cruise is that you get about 10 "sea days" which I enjoy. I took this picture from the Promenade Deck where I spent most of my time reading (and I hate to admit, hacking some Haskell NLP code): Carol and I don't gamble but she received a birthday gift from the cruise line of some free slot machine time, as seen in this picture: We had a lot of fun on shore also. Brother Ron, sister Anita, Carol, and I went snorkeling in Maui on a reef 2/3 mile offshore where we saw many green sea turtles. Here is a picture of me that my brother Ron took and a picture of a sea turtle that I took with Ron's camera: We also had fun on the big island, Oahu, and Kauai. When the ship stopped in Ensenada a few of us went inlan...