cellio | random bits

I chanted torah Friday night and Saturday morning. Friday night went well, and I got lots of compliments. Saturday morning I made several mistakes, starting when I tripped over something I'd never tripped over in practice. Sigh. But it made me laugh, because earlier that morning my rabbi had told this story: He just came back from the national convention of North-American (Reform) rabbis. They had 1900 rabbis there, and for morning services on a torah-reading day, instead of having one of those rabbis do the torah chanting they had some students from a local high school. (Nice touch: you save figuring out the precedence while giving the locals a unique opportunity.) For one of the aliyot, they called everyone who had been a rabbi for at least 50 years. There were nine of them, so there was this poor high-school kid chanting under the direct scrutiny of 450 years' worth of experience. The kid was clearly shaken (I hope he was warned in advance). I found myself thinking that I don't think I would be especially shaken; once you've passed the threshold of 1900 rabbis in the room, who cares if the senior-most ones are looking over my shoulder? And then, fifteen minutes later, I went and stumbled over the torah reading. Oops. :-)

Sometime before the end of Daylight Spending Time, I want to replace my car. My current favorite is the Honda Fit, but that's based on specs and reviews; I've never driven one. (So I want to go to a dealer, but I know that once I do that I set things in motion, so I should do this when I've set aside time for car shopping.) I just checked edmunds.com and was surprised to find that people are currently paying sticker price. Either the recent kudos from Consumer Reports had a real effect, or there's a shortage, or something else is going on that I haven't thought of. Maybe I should wait a few months and see if that changes.

Aside: in PA do you pay sales tax on the purchase price of the new car, or on the purchase price minus your trade-in? Last time my trade-in was 15 years old so I didn't notice nor overly care. This time, according to Edmunds, my trade-in is worth close to $10k, so this matters. (I try to always have a bottom-line figure in mind before walking into a dealership.)

I got a bizarre phone call recently. The caller was an attorney (he didn't say with whom), and he was calling because he had found my name on a list of people who had worked on DCE, the Distributed Computing Environment (which I did from 1990 to around 1995). He said only that he was researching "prior art". He asked what my role on the project was and I told him (peon for one of several companies working on this joint project). He asked how familiar I was with the code base, and I said "well, it's been 12 years, umm". I apologized for not being able to help him more, and he said it's ok; he's got a couple hundred names. (Belatedly I wondered where he got his lists and how many interns or whatnot he used to get current phone numbers for all of them.)

Last night at lorimelton and ralphmelton's excellent Saint-Patrick's party, I ran into someone else who worked on that project. I asked if she'd gotten a similar call or if he'd lost steam before getting to the "S"s in his list of names, and this was news to her. It occurs to me now that hers is a more common name than mine, so he might be filtering his list based on probability of getting the right person.

Someone recently commented to me that with the growth of the internet, Google is becoming less useful as a way of finding answers because of all the junk you get in the results (such as fora where someone else asked the same question but no one has answered). I said that for more targetted queries, I'm trying to train myself to go first to Wikipedia -- which might not have the answer, but is likely to have outbound links, so someone else has culled the search results for me, maybe. For broader queries and when I just plain forget, I still use Google.

As an example, I said (while feeding drugs to my cat), I wonder how antibiotics work. That is, they always tell you to take the full course even if the symptoms go away earlier; why is that? So, off to Wikipedia I went, and came up empty. And thence to Google, where I found a page on howstuffworks.com called "how do antibiotics work?" (bingo!) -- with no answer to my question. So I still don't know. It's not important enough for me to invest real effort (maybe I'll ask my vet next time I see her), but I was disappointed to fail so soon after describing what I thought was a good approach.

That aside, though, Google and Wikipedia have made it much easier to go from "I wonder..." to "oh, that's the answer", which means I'm much more likely to actually chase down answers to random questions a little bit. If I had the internet in my pocket that would be even better, as I wouldn't lose the things that come up in conversation while out.

Short takes:

I accept responsibility for the rain earlier this week; the karmic consequences of the carwash were worth it for the desalination. However, the drop in temperature that turned the rain to noisy rain and thence to snow is not my fault. (I think the noisy rain was freezing rain rather than sleet. I learned the difference Friday when I got curious.)

Earlier this week Erik was not very interested in food, but after a day or so of that (and getting fluids) he was back to having an appetite. Then yesterday he ate two cans of food, approximately 10% of his body weight. What's up with that? Today is back to normal. I'm not complaining (I want him to eat), but I'm puzzled.

Security audit of Hogwarts, from securitymentor2.

I am interested in finding movies (or TV shows) in Hebrew with English subtitles. (I need to improve my comprehension of the spoken language.) Bonus points for science fiction, fantasy, and non-police drama. Ultra-bonus points for anything I've already seen in English (B5 or West Wing dubs, anyone?). Anti-points for romances, fast-moving action flicks, and children's shows unless they also have something of interest to adults (e.g. yes for Rocky and Bullwinkle, no for Barney). I don't care about DVD regions. Anyone have any thoughts on where to look for such things?

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For whatever it's worth, Netflix has a modest (15-20?) selection of Israeli movies with English subtitles.

My favorites were "Walk on Water", "Sima Vaknin Machshefa" (stupid but cute IMHO), "Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi", and "Yana's Friends".

Oh! And if you haven't seen "James's Journey to Jerusalem", that's one of my favorite Israeli movies. It's fun and deep.

Thanks! Much appreciated.

random bits

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