A Gift of Reading. The day after Thanksgiving is the semi-official kickoff of the holiday shopping season. I hope you'll consider saving a bit of your budget for some folks who need help from the rest of us. One program I'd like to recommend again, as I do at this time every year, is the "Gift of Reading" sponsored by the Mercury News and Kids in Common. Reading is such a basic part of a productive life, and this book drive is a worthy way to get books into the hands of children who will gobble up words, given the chance, the way we all gobble up our Thanksgiving turkeys and trimmings. For many of these children, the books will be their only holiday gifts this year. So Gift of Reading is looking for new or like-new volumes, and asks that you not wrap them so the books can be sorted by age group. A cash donation is also welcome. You can find much more information on the program's website. Or call +1 (408) 882-0900, extension 11, or send e-mail to communityrelation@mercurynews.com. Please help out if you can. (Image via NASA) [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

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This has relevance to other kinds of thinking besides computer architecture...

Joel Spolsky: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all." [Scripting News]

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