It's here!  My 2004 holiday wishlist.  First off, I don't post this to be greedy, I just think it's a handy way to let people know what kinds of things I'm interested in, let ME figure out what I'm interested in, and give me a future insight into what I thought was cool at this point.  Some of this stuff is way outside of what I would consider as typical “gift price range”, and I would never expect to get it.  I'll probably continue to update this as the holidays progress and I invariably cave in and get some things for myself or see something new and cool.  I'm going to categorize from the beginning since that's the way last year's turned out.

If, for some crazy reason, you're interested in actually getting me something, you might let Becky know in order to avoid duplicates (rebecky at dontspam mail dawt com).  I looked at several online wishlist sites to avoid that problem, but I didn't like any of them.  Any suggestions?

Video Game Stuff:

• XBox Console - It's finally on my list.  I'll probably take care of this one myself. Got it with the help of some used games
• Additional XBox Controller - This controller situation on the XBox is unclear to me.  There seems to be several official styles.  Which one is better?  Dave relates his distaste for them in the comments of a recent post.  What's the deal here? Evidently, the “S” controllers (that linked to) are the good ones according to the people I've talked to, and the consoles come with them now as opposed to old stupid ones.  Thanks Ben!
• HD cables for the XBox - I don't have any non-component sources hooked into my TV now (5 total now).  Why stop? I was just getting really tired of composite.
• XBox Live Starter Kit (w/ headset) - This is much cheaper than I thought it was. I've got 4-months XBox live free, and already picked up 1 communicator (Although I could use another)
• Halo 2 - The reason for the above Thanks, Rich!
• Any other recommendations for XBox stuff?

Computer stuff

• new keyboard and mouse with fingerprint reader - I've got a super old one on the coffee table now.  My wife will attest to that.  Fingerprints are cool.
• Pixma iP5000 Printer - It got the best reviews I've seen for a high quality photo printer.

Photography

• Canon Zoom Wide Angle-Telephoto EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Image Stabilizer USM Autofocus Lens - I've settled on this one after some insightful feedback from Jerry (see comments).
• Sweet camera bag - This one's really cool, and not really that expensive. 
• Any other sweet digital photography gear I should be wanting?

Home Theater

• Component Video/Audio switch - As I mentioned before, I'm out of inputs.  I have an older version of this that only does video.  This one does audio (optical/coax/stereo) as well and is auto-sensing!  Very cool.

Movies (DVD)

• The Bourne Identity Thanks Andy!
• The Bourne Supremacy
• Shrek 2

Clothes:

• Coming soon.

Gadgets:

• Green Laser - Jerry brought his by a few weeks ago and we had TONS of fun with it ... so bright.
• Phidgets - I found these on Scott Hanselman's list.  Way cool!  I can think of some cool stuff I'd like to do with the RFID stuff.  I wish they had stepper motor controllers.  I might finally finish my electronic pan/tilt head.

More to come!  I'm out of time for now.

Feel free to post YOUR wishlist items in the comments.

Jeff reminds us that it's his birthday.  Sorry I don't have a better picture of you on-hand.  Happy birthday, buddy.

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!