It's nearly 11 and Thanksgiving is pretty much officially over. I'll admit guiltily that I didn't see any part of the televised Macy's parade, for I woke up at around 12:30 PM.

No matter what happens in my life, I'll always remember the fact that my mother is a cooking MACHINE. She had 3 types of pie ready before I had even woken up, not to mention the extra turkey that she cooked yesterday. There were two separate rounds of appetizers, the latter including stuffed mushrooms and baked stuffed shrimp.

It was my niece Hailey's first Thanksgiving, which was a largely uneventful occasion. She was paraded around to some of her father's (my future brother-in-law's) family. During the meal, she sat in her bouncer seat and watched football, making high-pitched cooing noises (at 5 months, she's still far too young to share).

I also did a little bit of impromptu music recording with my uncle Buddy (who's not really my uncle and not really named Buddy). He plays some mean folk/blues guitar, and I let him play Rosie for a bit. Eventually I plugged him into Pro Tools, and he laid down a track (which he unfortunately messed up a bit, but I'm going to maybe try and fix it up).

The day was without pageantry, without poignancy, but still had a lot of old-fashioned, feel-good charm. My family is good people and we do love each other. And I'm thankful for that.

I switched my hosting today from BlueHost over to WestHost. So my hosting has apparently changed color and moved out west. To Arizona it would appear. I opted for the "big 10" package which, for 10 dollars a month for 12 months, gives me 150 GB of storage and 1000 GB of transfer. I will use paltry fractions of this capacity.

The process was pretty painless, thanks in a large part to the excellent import/export database tools in phpMyAdmin. WestHost offers VPS, Virtual Private Server, which allows you to have a virtual machine on a shared host. Because of this, they give you GCC (a popular source code compiler, for the non-programmers) and you can do whatever you want from there. I installed Ruby and Rails from scratch (because I wanted Rails 2.1 for no other reason than it's the most current version), then proceeded to configure my rails app to be the document root via a virtual host, before configuring FastCGI.

Honestly, I didn't really expect any of this information to be of particular interest to anyone. I more wanted to post as a marker for me when I look back, so I can say "Oh, this is where I changed hosts".

My old hosting was supposed to go offline at Midnight, so we're past the point of no return, baby!

I watched Barack Obama become the 44th President of the United States last night.

And I must admit, I cried.

It was to be expected, seeing as I cried during the Democratic National Convention (multiple times) and cried after casting my vote on the walk home. I feel so inspired by this man! I am an optimist; I believe that people are inherently good and want to do the right thing. The fact that we might finally be getting away from all of the fear and division of the past 8 years is exciting. The fact that we might be able to help the millions of people around America who are having a difficult time economically or with their health care is uplifting. And the fact that we have a new leader who truly believes in himself and more importantly in us is enough to, quite frankly, make me cry.

Besides, who wouldn't be taken in by that puppy comment. I mean come'on!

The next two things I want to blog about both come directly from things I saw on Facebook.

First, everyone knows that Sarah Palin has mediocre intellect and extremely poor public speaking skills. These facts are made more apparent by her statement that media criticism of her amounts to a violation of her First Amendment rights. We are left to wonder, has she read the First Amendment. It starts with "Congress shall make no law..." (I didn't look it up, but will be mighty embarrassed if I was wrong) and goes on to list a whole bunch of things Congress can't make laws about, like freedom of speech, the press, religion and assembly. I would reallly hope that intellectually mature and especially educated individuals are past the point of thinking that freedom of speech means the right to say whatever one wants whenever and wherever one wants. The governor clearly doesn't know any better. In fact, I would offer that the kind of media criticism she has come under for her 'Obama?=?Terrorist' comments is EXACTLY the discussion of public political figures that the First Amendment was put in place to engender.

Also, there seems to be a problem at Halloween parties this year.

Wired is telling me to ditch my blog. Their argument is that Facebook and Flickr make it easier to do what I'm doing with my blog anyways. Now, I was never on the cutting edge of blogging. I didn't even have my livejournal until my junior year of college, which was 2002...about the middle of the bell curve for blogging 'taking off' and ancient history if I was really trying to be emo about things.

Now I'm not even the top result for "travis briggs" in Google, a statistic I prided myself on forever.

And why should I bother watching the World Series? I love watching the Red Sox, but I loathe watching other teams play. Especially when one of the teams is from the National League, a league that I spend the entire regular season ignoring. I'm simply not familiar with the players....not to mention that Fox coverage of baseball is only slightly above TBS's. Nothing beats the local broadcasters for local coverage of a baseball game.

But I'm probably just bitter because I don't have any friends to go to a bar and watch the game with...