A family tradition in our house (since last year) is the creation and decoration of a gingerbread house, except instead of gingerbread we make rice crispy treat walls, using molasses and pumpkin spices to get a great tasty thing going. And that’s before the sugar-laden icing and candy.

It is a truly scrumptious endeavor, even if it does not look quite as house-like as last year’s. Next year we will actually let our daughter participate. She was in bed already this time, and still is not yet two years old.

Here are the pics. Let me know what you think. What traditions do you and your do each year around Thanksgiving and Christmas? Did we put up our tree (today) too early for any of you?

Back in July, Google announced that they were making it easier for users to make their email more secure by using the https:// prefix instead of the http:// prefix when going to mail.google.com. If you used Google to handle your email, then you already could have just typed https://mail.google.com/ into your web browser, but Google added a setting to redirect you to the secure connection for all of your email, even if you typed in http, without the s.

If you use Google Apps to host your own domain’s email, then you should now see this setting showing up in your mail settings, several months later.

Whether your email address is a Gmail.com address or you use Google Apps, I highly recommend that you turn this setting on. Using the https prefix will ensure that your email messages, settings, etc. are encrypted between Google’s servers and your web browser. This prevents your internet service provider, next door neighbor, and that guy sitting next to you in the coffee shop from reading your mail.

To turn on the setting, click on the Settings link toward the top-right of your email screen. You should then see, under General settings, the option called “Browser Connection”, allowing you to check the setting called “Always use https”. Check the radio button, hit “Save”, and you’ll be good to go.

Why not turn this on? Well, sending data back and forth between your web browser and a web server using the encrypted connection will be a bit slower than unencrypted data sent back and forth (the encrypted data has to be decrypted on the two ends of the connection), so if you feel confident that your internet service provider does not read your email, then you probably do not need to worry about it. Of course, if you are sitting in a coffee shop with free WiFi (or you unsmartly do not have your home wireless router set up with a password for encryption), then you certainly had better encrypt your data. If that’s the exception and not the rule, you can always just type in https instead of http and leave the setting off.

If you are like me, though, and are more the forgetful type, I would just turn the setting on.

You would think four gigabytes of RAM would be enough. Apparently for my Windows Vista-powered desktop, though, 4 GB is insufficient:

Late last night, Apple released another update for the iPhone: v2.2. I installed it this morning and things seem to be working well; no problems to report so far.

The highlights include:

• Several enhancements to Google Maps, including Street View and walking directions
• Ability to access podcasts directly from the phone
• Improvements to Safari (the built-in web browser), including “better performance”
• Improvements to Mail, such as better handling of wide HTML messages and fixes for “isolated” issues with scheduled fetching of email
• Home screen shortcut – press the Home button and you’ll be taken back to the first Home screen

That last new feature is AWESOME. When you have several pages of applications, like me, it’s a pain to get back to the first screen (where most of the more commonly used apps are kept) by swiping over and over again. Now it couldn’t be easier to get back to the first page of apps!

More info on this and previous updates is available on Apple’s website.