Merry Christmas

Having kittens means you get to enjoy the, well, joy of decorating the Christmas tree every day when you replace the non-breakable, non-heirloom decorations and hitch up the lights like loose trousers dragging towards the floor. But, still, they’ve been a joy.

That’s one Christmas tree our kittens did not invade–because we kept them away while we built it.

My beautiful wife wanted an image for one of her LinkedIn posts, so we built a book tree like you see on the Internet from our old tech books. The books include:

• Primers on operating systems such as VAX, OpenVMS, Windows NT, Windows 95, and OS X
• Computers like Apple II, Commodore 84, and PET/CBM
• Programming languages from Machine Language, J++ (Microsoft’s brief attempt at replicating Java), a pile of ASP.NET (which probably belonged to my wife who has now tricked me to tuck them in with my tech library to free space on her shelves), C, C++, C#, VisualBasic, Java, JavaScript, PHP, iOS SDK / Objective C, SwiftUI
• Hardware and networking books from the turn of the century, when I studied those topics briefly at the community college and got a large collection from eBay for $100, a real steal but it would have been a better steal if I’d ever read them
• A couple of testing books like the ones from James Whittaker
• A handful of security books, including one that prompted this comment on my wife’s post on LinkedIn:

  

I know, I know, it’s not the reason for the season, but we will attend church this morning and exchange gifts and eat turkey, but our normally small gathering will again be diminished by immobility and continuing COVID fears.

It will also be the last day for listening to Christmas records, and, no, I won’t have made it through all of the Christmas records we own, which is a substantial number.

But we will make time for this Christmas classic:

Merry Christmas, gentle reader.