Ah, the Sole Proprietor received word that the family Christmas party will be held in Seattle on Sunday December 13th. Time to buy the train tickets (a roomette, not very large, but private and comfortable) and think about what can be done to get some decent pictures. Of the family, yes, lots of pictures at the party and the usual hoo-haw, but perhaps some things a little more exotic than pictures taken during his lunch hour in Oakland.

This business of train travel is more expensive than flying (these days, lunch is more expensive than flying), but its a nice way to travel. All the meals are paid for, there is plenty of room to sit and watch the country go by or read or wander around or sleep to the sound of the wheels. Its not a real upscale kind of experience. They call it first class and they make it special (they really do), but its not Champagne in crystal with caviar and truffles at noon. The food is OK, but nothing like what it must have been before the airlines arrived, the 20's and 30's when everyone who traveled moved by train. You had to be rich to travel first class then and you don't now so while there are still such things as passenger trains, the Sole Proprietor will ride them when he can.

Work has been hectic, but interesting. Problems with the Netscape 3.x browser handling some cgi scripts the company has developed to test the accuracy of information entered into a form. The 4.x browsers handle it fine, the Netscape 3.x browser, both 3.01 and 3.04 will often work for a few tests, then fail, the error correcting code telling the user that the fields into which the user has actually entered data do not contain data. Interesting. That's the sort of thing the Sole Proprietor does on any given day and it has remained interesting for him over the years he's been at it.

Thanksgiving is coming up. The Sole Proprietor doesn't have any family in the Bay Area and doesn't know all that many people, so he's had more than a few Thanksgivings on his own. They're kind of nice. He cooks something special, putters around the apartment, watches some football, puts his feet up if that's what makes sense at that moment, plays with the cameras and just generally has a good time.

One Thanksgiving, when he lived alone in San Francisco, he didn't have very much money so he went down to Market Street, not the best part of town, and had a Thanksgiving dinner at a big cafeteria style restaurant that catered to folks who wanted quantity over substance. There were maybe three people in a place that could hold 200. Lots of space between customers. Afterward he went to a movie, an X rated picture called Flesh Gordon and the, well, who knows, Flesh Gordon and the Something or Other(s) from Space. Plenty of room in the theater as well, more employees than patrons as he recollects.

Buster Crab, the original Flash Gordon in the movies, would have been proud. The Sole Proprietor recalls the story line was just as dumb as the original series, its just the ladies kept losing their clothes. Something about a ray from space that made the folks it struck overly excited and interested in getting to know the person next to them much better, much faster than propriety usually allows.

This could have been a depressing sort of a Thanksgiving with a little shift of perspective, but it wasn't somehow. He liked the turkey dinner (Its hard to screw up turkey. The various gravies, potatoes and vegetables left something to be desired, but the turkey and stuffing were nice.) and he liked the dumb Flesh Gordon movie. If he saw it today he'd probably cringe at the thought he'd enjoyed it 20 years ago, but maybe not. He gives himself room to be OK about things like that.

Well, a Tuesday done. Had to tweak the Oakland cam to get it working again. Not the camera's fault, he's got to set up the ftp mechanism so it works properly. The way he gets it working (not loading the jpeg) is to delete the file on his web site and let the camera ftp another one. Sends one out every 90 seconds. Works for a while then it stalls. A matter of reading the instructions, something the Sole Proprietor usually avoids.