cellio | short takes

The user interface on my watch could be better. I would not have guessed that the way to get it to stop chiming on the hour is to press and hold a certain button (nothing else involves holding buttons), nor would I have noticed that sometimes the colon between hours and minutes blinks and sometimes it doesn't. I had to hunt down the manual online to learn this, as the alternative was a day of inconvenient chirps.

Speaking of unfortunate user interfaces, the torah portion I'm learning for a few weeks from now comes in the middle of a long stretch without any paragraph breaks. I'm not looking forward to trying to find the beginning of it in the torah scroll. And just to add insult to injury, it starts off with a bit of a tongue-twister. But I'll get it, and it'll be good for me. Maybe next year I will remember that someone who has trouble with the sequence of phonemes in "Yitzchak" should avoid certain portions. :-)

Sunday night there were just four of us for dinner, and afterwards we broke out Dani's copy of Puerto Rico. (None of us had played before, though we'd all heard good reviews.) Interesting game, and by the end I was starting to understand some of the strategy. It's a Rio Grande game, so at its core it's an optimization problem.

Oh right; I must remember to cross out two letters in the enchilada recipe I used Sunday, in the phrase "ungreased casserole dish". Oops.

Today was long-awaited study with my rabbi (i.e. had to wait for the holidays to be over). Good session, about which I hope to write more later.