interlude: non-class stuff

[cellio]

First, thanks to "Mr. Fixer", as he is known on LJ, for calling and talking me through my emacs issues (on the Mac). It turns out that there are three ways to launch emacs (different emacses) on this machine; one I didn't know about and the other two were clashing over the .emacs file. For my own future reference: running emacs from an xterm works, and so does running from the Mac shell if I use the "-q" option to surpress the .emacs file. (Since the .emacs file is for a different version, with settings for fonts and colors that don't matter when running in a shell, that's fine.)

I discovered tonight (when trying to install a mouse driver hakamadare clued me in about) that I don't know the root password for my machine. Err, oops. I wonder how I can fix that. (Maybe I'm lucky and the person I got the machine from remembers.)

Wednesday night I joined Andrew and his family (sorry Andrew; I can never get the user name right on the first try), mabfan, and gnomi for dinner, conversation, and ice cream. I had a good time. How can you not, when in a single evening you can geek about halacha, science fiction, comics (that was mostly mabfan, TV, and music? :-) Mabfan or Andrew, please remind me of the name of that TV show you were so excited about getting on DVD?

Much time was spent trying to find a way, within halacha, for someone (I won't out you here) to read the new Harry Potter book on Shabbat. (Some of my suggestions were rejected because they would involve waiting until morning; apparently solutions that don't involve starting by quarter past midnight aren't interesting.) I hope you find a solution, but if not, I suspect a 22-hour delay isn't fatal... :-)

Erik (one of my cats) is staying with a friend while I'm here, and apparently he's very comfortable in her house. She can offer him avian theatre (we don't get many birds visible from cat-accessible windows), and he quickly established his place in the household. Good, as he'll be going back for Pennsic in a couple weeks. :-) I miss the cats, but knowing they're in good hands helps.

Never mind the academic stuff: I'm beginning to wonder if I would have the physical stamina to attend this school if I lived in this city. That's one steep hill! I'm staying in a dorm at the top of the hill for this program (so no biggie), but the houses up here are all in the multi-million-dollar range, so ordinary people don't live here. (Actually, I wonder about the people who live in some of the humongous houses up here. Are they insanely rich, or large families or other groups? Some of these places look like they'd easily be 10,000 square feet.)

There appear to be no vending machines on Hebrew College's campus. How odd.

I've had a few instances of an odd style of encounter here, and I wonder if it's a Boston thing or if I'm just unlucky. I have asked people on the street (or in the T) what should be simple questions (e.g. "which of these intersecting streets is Center?" when there's no sign), and people who seem to be from around here don't know. In the example I just gave, it was a group of students who'd just gotten off a city bus. On the T, I asked someone who seemed to be a regular T rider (based on overheard conversation) "does this train go to Government Center" (a big stop), she said she didn't know, and then she got on my train (after I got the answer elsewhere) and rode it past that stop. There have been a couple other cases, too. Is this a "don't wanna talk to strangers" thing, or what?

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Well, mabfan already beat me to saying Voyagers! but I'll add about my lj handle that nmHz is the way most NPLers nicknom me.

And I figured out the last bit on the HP problem --- a Jewish bookseller who's closed on Shabbat; you pre-order and do a formal kinyan so that halachically the book is yours; you then lend the book to the nice fellow who happens to be a bookseller. Before Shabbat begins the person to whom you've loaned the book brings the sealed carton of books to the local shul, so there'll be no marit ayin, unseals the carton (which may technically violate the Scholastic rules, I'll admit) but places the unsealed carton in a locked box (so the spirit of the Scholastic rules is maintained). The shul has an oneg. Shortly after midnight, the person who has borrowed all these books unlocks the box in which they've been stored and returns them to their rightful owners.

Now, having solved the problem (I believe) from the standpoint of the halachic technicalities, I have come to the conclusion that this craving to read the book at 12:01 is not really that different than the craving to eat Chicken Cordon Bleu or the desire to someday compete at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. It's one of those desires that one realizes must go unfulfilled when one accepts the ol hamitzvot.