Shabbat

Friday's musical service went well. It looked like we had at least 300 people there (maybe 350 or 400), which is a lot more than normal. The congregational choir sang, which was nice, and some other cantorial members of the cantor's family were there too. Fun night!

I had an interesting conversation with our cantor about the service (or services?) the worship commitee will need to lead this summer. She expects to be out on maternity leave then, so she said she's working on lining up substitutes. We talked about stage-management issues when none of the people on the bima are regulars, and while I don't remember how we got there, I ended up saying (in an appropriate context) that there are certainly members of the worship committee who could competently fill that role for one week, and she said she really wished we'd volunteer in that case, and I said "ok, then I'm volunteering". (I also said I'm not the only one who could, though I of course don't know who else would.) Dunno where it will go (if it does); she and the rabbi will need to have a talk. I had previously made such a comment to the rabbi (during the last cantor's maternity leave), and it went nowhere. But maybe that cantor wasn't on board with the idea. I have been trying very hard to avoid stepping on any toes; music at services is her domain and I don't want her (or the rabbi) to perceive me as pushy. On the other hand, I'd much rather have one of us than an outside singer who might or might not even be Jewish, and she agrees with me on non-Jews, so we'll see. (I think the previous cantor was more interested in having a good singer than in having a Jew. I personally don't think we should have non-Jews leading any part of services, and the congregation has gotten better about that, but we're not completely there yet.)

Saturday morning had one bit of frustration, and I have to have a conversation I'm not looking forward to. During the service we go around the circle so people can say the names of people they're saying kaddish for, and recently we've started to also go around saying names before saying the prayer for healing. One of the people there (who used to be a regular, then disappeared for most of a year, then started showing up again a few weeks ago) treated this as a bit of a political soapbox, saying he wanted to add the names of all the Iraqi prisoners to the list. Saying that much would have been fine; going from there into a rant about the despicable behavior of the people responsible, on the other hand, was inappropriate. I don't disagree that the assessment of the behavior, but the healing portion of a Shabbat service is not the time and place for political diatribes. He should have saved it for the informal conversation afterwards. (It doesn't help that this particular individual, err, really likes to hear himself talk, so he is never brief and on-point.) So I was annoyed (but not fast enough to stop it on the spot), and I could tell some others were annoyed, and I've received one email complaint already. (It's not really my minyan, but people see it as mine when the rabbi isn't there.) I'm tempted to send him email, which will allow me to choose my words carefully without having to interact with him in real time, but calling is probably the correct thing to do.

After services we headed to Johan and Arianna's for a meeting of the Pennsic camp. (This was mostly to decide if we need to make any infrastructure changes this year and to decide what projects to tackle. This year we're going to try for some box benches, to solve both seating and stuff-containment problems.) It seems we don't see each other as frequently as we used to, now that two are no longer coworkers and one has dropped out of the choir and so on, so it was nice to see everyone and just hang out. (Well, not everyone; the out-of-town contingent didn't make it in.)

Sunday, including PDA thoughts

Today we got together with my parents to celebrate mothers' day, our anniversary, and my father's birthday. We took them to Sunnyledge (I think that's the name of it), which does a very good Sunday brunch. Ironically, while the buffet usually includes a couple kinds of fish that I can eat (along with meat, which I can't eat, and other dishes, which I can), today the ocean-based offerings were shrimp, mussels, swordfish, lobster, and lox. So one out of five. :-)

My father recently got himself a PDA. I was curious to know more, because he has the same vision problems I do. He was constrained in also needing something Mac-compatable, so his choices were more limited than mine would be, but for one data point, his looks pretty good. He has a Tungston E, which has a crisp, legible display that can fit a fair bit of text in fonts I can read. The graffiti interface is also much easier than the last time I used one -- this was "Graffiti 2", and most of the strokes look like letters, rather than semi-thematically-related glyphs (like an upside-down "V" for "A", which I remember encountering before). I was completely unable to write a "k", and my attempts at "u" kept producing "v" instead, but I think a small number of hours of practice would actually fix that. And I could write resaonably quickly too without it getting confused, which had not been true before.

My father carries his in a shirt pocket. Women's shirts don't tend to have that pocket, and even if they did the placement would be, err, suboptimal, so I'd need to find something I could reasonably carry in a back pants pocket. I imagine this has constraints on size, heat-tolerance, and durability. (Or are there belt-based solutions?)

I'd also need to think about how I would end up using it; things like the calendar, address book, and standing grocery list are obvious, but can I use it as a text editor to, say, compose LJ posts or edit a D&D character sheet when I don't have a real computer to hand? I know there's a Hebrew calendar out there somewhere, and someone I know has a siddur for hers, both of which would be handy. I'd want some application that supports a table or database of all my books/CDs, so I stop accidentally buying duplicates; I assume that's straightforward. I'm going to assume that music applications are not feasible.

What do people who have PDAs end up using them for after the first few months? (I know that dglenn also asked this question recently.) What's involved in having web-browsing? (What do you pay in monthly service fees?) My father didn't have a browser on his, so I didn't get a feel for whether most web sites even render on such a small screen.

I'm not going to run right out and buy one, but I'm at least entertaining the idea now, which is a change.

Short takes:

Fun stuff: Anton Chekov's book-signing (and reading) in Union Square. Link from nickjong, who got it from Neil Gaiman.

Non-fun stuff: Soldiers in Iraq losing internet access, just in case they want to ship out more photos from prisons or something. (Link from insomnia; see also this one from tangerinpenguin and others.) Feh. Some of my coworkers are in Iraq right now (civilians, on a base, nowhere near prisons); if we stop hearing from them I guess we'll know why.