morning minyan

In an odd twist of timing, the rabbi emeritus of the other synagogue showed up to services this morning. This is, I'm pretty sure, the first time I've seen him this year; he travels a lot and doesn't always come to minyan even when he's in town. But he was there today (with a guest).

He hadn't seen me lead that service before, and he said lots of complimentary things to me afterwards. He also said he was heading off (with said guest, who turned out to be someone from JNF or UJF or some other Jewish TLA) to a meeting with my rabbi and he was planning to say nice things to him about me. Heh -- I'm glad I had that conversation yesterday. :-) Later in the day I got email from my own rabbi commenting positively on this.

So I think my rabbi is supportive. Time will tell how this affects my leadership opportunities in my congregation. (The worship committee is meeting next week; I don't yet know if lay leadership for Friday nights is on the agenda.)

lemming: things I enjoy

At the request of tangerinpenguin:

List 5 things you enjoy, even when no one around you wants to go out and play. What lowers your stress/blood pressure/anxiety level? Post it to your journal and then tag 5 friends and ask them to post it to theirs.

• Rewatching "comfort" TV shows -- M*A*S*H, Twilight Zone, Blake's 7, others. The key is the rewatching, it seems.
• Cooking something adventurous. "Adventure" is more likely to be about flavors and ingredients than about technique; diving into complicated pastry, for instance, is not my idea of relaxation.
• Snuggling with the cats. Ok, snuggling with the human is nice too. :-)
• Writing -- here, fiction from the D&D game, or other stuff, so long as it doesn't involve deadlines and customer requirements.
• Thinking/talking through off-the-wall halacha -- the less practical, the better.

I don't generally "tag" people for stuff like this; if you want to go ahead and I'll enjoy reading the results.

random geek notes

Someone at MIT is doing what looks to be an interesting blog survey. It appears that, even though they ask people to spread the news via their blogs, they didn't anticipate the resulting demand on the server. So it may take a few tries to get the server to talk to you.

I wonder if LJ's addition of tags is going to cause people to change the way we partition our posts. Will we tend toward more-numerous, tightly-focused posts, for the benefit of tagging? Or will we keep doing what we already do and if a post has a dozen tags so what? Time will tell.

Earlier this week Dani and I got email from a friend saying, roughly, "so-and-so from the old net days is in town; we've never met or anything, but how about we all get together for dinner?". This sounded just off-the-wall enough to be fun. The person's name was vaguely familiar (Dani spent more time on the relevant newsgroups than I did), but "put random unknown geeks in a room together and see what happens" can be fun sometimes. (This is different from "have dinner with $net.celebrity", where the participants don't feel equal.)