Joe has a cool entry on using a “Stream” concept to approach algorithmic sequences.  I realized it's particular beauty when I saw his Fibonacci example, which blows the doors off some code I barfed out recently for this type of problem.

I'd like to welcome my good friend Jeff Flint and his wife Bethany to the world of blogging!  I just ran across their url in my referrer logs.

Jeff was a fellow trombone player/fraterny brother/crazy person with me at Baylor.  I got a chance to hang out for a little while with he and Bethany recently and had a great time.

I'm looking forward to staying more in sync with the Flints.

Well, it seems that the XBox finally has enough good games for me to want one.  Specifically Halo 2.  It's nice to see a console with a well-defined online strategy, even if I don't like it.

I've been thinking about this year's holiday wishlist, and I think it's going to have to include an XBox and Halo 2.  I've just been so dissapointed by the buggy online offerings from Sony and the non-existent ones from Nintendo.

I HAVE been enjoying the single player experience on PS2 and GameCube.  Metriod Prime 2 is an incredible sequel, Burnout 3 (PS2) is a blast (even though online is buggy as heck with zero support), and Paper Mario is just plain entertaining.

Look for my wishlist soon.

For the second year, I deep-fried a turkey for Thanksgiving.  Altogether, I think this was my 4th time, and this was by far the best experience. Here's some links to my past experiences.

The changes I made this time were:

• I let the turkey warm up a bit.  This kept the condensation from occurring so rapidly and therefore there was less popping when the turkey went in.
• I turned the turkey upside down (legs up).  This was suggested by several friends.  This reduced the “volcano effect“ of the hot oil through the body cavity.  It also kept the breast meat more uniformly in the oil.
• I made my own injectable marinades.  I usually just buy something premade.  This year I made a butter and herb marinade, as well as a Chipotle Tabasco marinade.  I've always done a half-and half, one side more exotic than the other.  Both turned out well.

Anyway, it turned out great.

Becky's parents and her brother Andy came down and we all drove up to Belton to have Thanksgiving “late-lunch” with my parents, brother and sister-in-law.  Everything was great.

[UPDATE] fixed spelling of volcano

This is one of those “duh” type moments, but I just realized that, even though SP2 installs HTTP.SYS, it stil uses IIS 5.1, which means IIS is NOT using HTTP.SYS.  This would explain my recent trouble and why trying to control port usage with the httpcfg tool didn't seem to do anything.

I'm pretty bummed about this. I probably would have installed 2003 server instead of XP had I realized this sooner.  I'm going to give a serious effort to write a managed Subversion server that uses HTTP.SYS.  That would probably reduce the barriers for using Subversion sufficiently to get more people interested in it.

[UPDATE]  In case you didn't make the leap and realize what the implications are for IIS not using HTTP.SYS, it means you can listen on the same port that IIS is.

I don't really want to become a link blog, but Brian Grunkemeyer has an exceedingly interesting piece on arrays and how they mesh with generics in the 2.0 CLR.  He goes into alot of interesting information that you don't need to know, but knowing makes you appreciate the the work going into it.  I've had the pleasure of speaking with Brian, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Pardon my ripping off of the title, but I really found that it quite succinctly summarized the post.  Don Box has a pretty valueable little tidbit on doing just that.  Very handy indeed.

I'll have to digest it a bit to see how applicable it is to 1.x.

Today is my little brother's birthday!  Happy birthday Andrew!

OK, I was not prepared for the onslaught of hilarity that ensued in the comments of my last post.  Somehow I think it's not over yet.  It's good to know that even though there are alot of us Mark Millers, that most of us seem to have a good sense of humor.

I about fell out of my chair at the thought of someone stirring a butter knife around in the trash to make it a more damaging weapon.  I think I'll have to use that in a movie.

For a split second, I was baffled at Scott Hanselman's recent post which claimed I had been working with him on some documentation tools.  Then I realized that, of course, this was a different Mark Miller.  This was not the first time I've been frustrated by the seemingly large number of Mark Miller's, especially in the blogosphere.

The real question is how can I distinguish myself from the others?  Certainly not by continuing to post rather bland entries to my blog.  I'm not able to make my work blog public (which is what I'd like to do), where there's alot of nifty activity.  I guess I just need to make a more concentrated effort to get my thoughts out in the open without revealing the application of the thoughts.  This probably could have a nice side-effect of thinking a little more abstractly about the decisions I make and maybe see a more broad application than I originally had in mind that make make a design work better.

Also, why WASN'T I working with Scott on some project? Why aren't I connecting with others more? That's a problem.

So, stay tuned, i guess.