Over Thanksgiving weekend I had the opportunity to learn two new parenting tips. First: if kids want you to read them a story and you don’t have a book handy, just make one up. Second: kids have no idea when you’re plagiarizing.

I shared a story with Emma and her cousins that went something like this:

Once upon a time there were three astronauts who wanted to go to the moon. But when they went to the doctor, he told one of them “you can’t go to the moon because you’re getting sick!” And he said “no way!” but it didn’t matter, so they had to get another guy to go to the moon with them. Then when they got halfway to the moon part of their ship blew up and they were like “oh no!” and they got on the phone and said “Houston we have a problem.”

It’s been a few months since I posted some video of the kids, but that’s all about to change! Here’s a video of Emma making Grayson laugh. It reminds me a lot of the video of Emma laughing while playing football, although Emma was three months older in that video that Grayson is in this one. In any case, I think you’d be hard-pressed not to smile during either. You’ll also notice that Emma feels the need to say “jump jump jump jump” while she is jumping. In case you weren’t aware that is what she was doing. :)

Recently, Randall Munroe of xkcd1 diagrammed a complete map of optimal tic-tac-toe moves. I thought I would see how the high-resolution version looked through the Seadragon scripts I’ve integrated into my blog (seen previously in high-resolution panoramas).

So below I’ve reproduced the original high-res image from xkcd in a zoomable format. I split the map for X and the map for O into two separate graphs. At any given zoom level, the optimal move is in red, then wherever your opponent goes you would zoom in on that space and it would show you the optimal move again. It’s pretty simple. It should be noted that it’s not very hard to ensure you never lose at tic-tac-toe. The only way to win is to play someone who doesn’t realize this and wait for them to make a mistake.

I just celebrated my thirtieth Christmas1, which turned out to be my first white Christmas. It was quite magical—it started snowing around 9:30 am on Christmas day, while we were in the middle of opening presents, and it didn’t let up until about noon the next day. It snowed continuously and consistently, but never very hard, which created the softest snow I can remember. I’m sure it would make for great skiing.2 With the exception of not getting to see some of my relatives because of the weather, I’d rate this as one of the best Christmases of my life.

I have several pictures from our white Christmas in Newton, which are split into two albums: outdoor pictures and indoor pictures. While I was at it I also uploaded another set of photos from Thanksgiving that I still hadn’t loaded from my camera.

An interesting thing that happened is that my youngest brother, Jake, got the same present for Christmas this year that my other brother and I received for Christmas when he was about four weeks old: an NES. Well, technically, it is an NES-compatible device, that plays all the old NES cartridges.3 We had lots of fun playing the old games—I think we put in a good six hours over two days playing two-player Dr. Mario. We’re a lot more evenly matched in skill now than we were as kids, which makes it a lot more fun. We also broke out Duck Hunt, and Jake taught Emma how to play. Here, watch a video of it (and you might notice the snowfall outside too):

It’s really a testament to how timeless Nintendo’s old games are.