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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! At this point in my life it would be difficult to drop everything and head to Maine to build and refurbish boats for nine months. Still, I'm thankful the opportunity exists for someone.

I've been reading Tim Severin's "Brendan Voyage" out loud in the evenings to my son, Joseph. At the moment Tim and his three shipmates are in the middle of the North Atlantic, in May. Things are going fine, except for the past 36 hours they haven't been getting any sleep because of the force 9 gale blowing them towards the pack ice just 90 miles away. Periodically a huge wave comes in over the gunwale at the end of the boat and soaks everything in freezing salt water. Each time this happens they have to bale and pump frantically for an hour so the boat won't swamp with the next wave. A migrating bird has just died of exposure on their boat, unable to survive the night. The radio works, but the waves are so large that the antenna is ineffective. Fortunately the boat is made of leather (?!), which gives Tim an idea...

Several months ago I sent a copy of The Brendan Voyage to Ruth Ives at The Carpenter's Boat Shop, because I know that the apprentices there have a book they read from during their lunch time, and this seemed perfect.

Here's a review of The Brendan Voyage, a couple of other books they read there, a few stories of my own rowing experience, and some boat-building advice.

• The Brendan Voyage
• Away all Boats
• My Rowing in '94 thankfully, not in the North Atlantic
• Build a Boat: advice from someone who built one at The Carpenter's Boat Shop

The Carpenter's Boat Shop, an ecumenical community and school, offers apprenticeships in wooden boatbuilding and simple, Christian community. There is no charge for accommodation, nor pay for work. Contact Rev. Robert E. Ives, The Carpenter's Boat Shop, Branch Road, Pemaquid, ME 04558; (207) 677-3768.

I started posting recipes on the web to make them easy to find. rather than looking them up again in the cookbook (there's a small internet appliance tucked away in a corner of my kitchen). I wanted to present the ingredients as part of the process, rather than separately, as in a cookbook. What I didn't expect...

...was that such a high percentage of visitors to the website would come in through these few recipe pages. I already mentioned the unique Thanksgiving turkey recipe earlier this month, but no one is searching for a turkey recipe. One of the biggest winners? Pasta with Puttanesca sauce.

It was only after the recipe had been up there for about 2 years that I discovered I had misspelled "Puttanesca" as "Putanesca." Well, I can hardly change it now, can I? How would they find it? I'm open to suggestions.

By the way, I no longer cut up the anchovies with kitchen scissors. The scissors are best used to cut up the tomatoes once they're cooking in the pan. The anchovies get mashed with a wooden spoon. pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

For a while I put my dreams on the web. Some dreams were fairly long and detailed; that's just how it worked out. One day I noticed that one dream was in the top ten of ALL destination search pages (not just the dream pages) in the webserver statistics for thedailychannel.com (this website).

A quick glance at the dream story revealed the reason for the unusual popularity of this single web page. I had dreamed that someone gave me, in the dream, the assembly language Source Code to Ping.

After learning this, as a service to those desperately seeking source, I put in a link to where on the internet the REAL source code to the ping.exe program could be found. pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

Month in and month out, the web page with a photo of the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace has been the single most searched-for page on thedailychannel.com website. I wish I knew why. To accomodate these perennial web visitors, I added a little bit of information about the statue.

Here is what they found: my photo of the Statue of Nike, Winged Victory of Samothrace, which I hope I'll be seeing again soon.

Among other things, while collecting information about the statue, I discovered that a nearby professor of classics, John Paul Adams at Northridge had made a visit to the island of Samothrace in 1992.

I really haven't had a chance to review "Programming Ruby" before, but I have made good use of the Ruby programming language on thedailychannel.com. The book is clear, thorough, fairly well organized, and useful as a reference. All this time it's been sitting on my desk, forgotten and unseen, except when I pick it up to use it. Funny thing about Ruby, the feature I'm looking for in the language is almost always there.

I've used it to create a script that updates this website, and a couple of other utilities too. If you don't want to download the book from the web, you can visit www.amazon.com and grab a copy of Programming Ruby buy at amazon.com by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt. It was a Christmas gift last year from my parents, so it was a great vacation read, too (if you're a programmer interested in object-oriented programming, that is). Thanks again, Mom and Dad! pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

Do you turn here for the latest digital stuff? For you Windows users out there, instead of buying a tablet PC, you might enjoy this new product: a digital pen that writes on digital paper. It's kind of like a portable digitization tablet that works without your computer attached to it.

It's a real pen but when you write on the digital paper, a miniature camera in the pen remembers your drawing and later, when you sync it up like a palm pilot, the drawings go across to your PC. Make a note to try the Logitech IO digital pen buy at amazon.com. Then let me know how it works; I'm a little dubious about whether it will work very well without an eraser. Maybe that is a feature that's going to wait until version 2. pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

There are things I don't tell my wife. The question is, should I tell you?

It's about these Unix commands, 'cron', and 'at'. Still interested?

There's another command, "AT", which does something similar. Supposedly. When I try to run it, it says "forbidden" or some other nasty thing. And when I use "sudo" to MAKE it run, my command runs, but it doesn't work. Why? I have no idea. Maybe the "SU" who is trying to make it "DO" is not me, so all the folder references have changed (to protect the innocent).

I read through Tim Oreilly's massive theory-heavy tome, Unix Power Tools[buy at amazon.com], and nowhere does he give an example of 'at' that works on the Mac OS X Unix, with Su-do or without. Nor does he say how to make the "at" command something which will work for me. Send me note if you have a clue!

pools=XML, Blog, Ruby