Monica

Tonight I was defeated by my synagogue's IT people -- who, I might add, are probably not doing anything especially clever, and certainly weren't out to defeat me.

During the trope class the instructor gave us an exercise to do and then went across the hall to set up Trope Trainer on the computer. We're using the classrooms in the religious school; this will be relevant later.

Five minutes later he was back. He pointed toward me and said "you're a computer professional, right?". Ok, not in the sense he meant, but this shouldn't have been hard and now my reputation was on the line. So I went across the hall to see what the problem was.

Trope Trainer runs from the CD -- that is, you have to have the CD in the drive to run the program. I wouldn't be surprised if you could copy everything to your hard drive and then lie to the software somehow, but that's not how it works by default and they don't offer the option. Ok, whatever.

So we run the program and start getting "disk access blocked" messages. They are coming from the firewall. Inspection of the firewall reveals no way to configure it or temporarily disable it. Ok, I say, off to Control Panel. This machine is running XP, so it takes me a little while to find the security settings. When I do, I'm told "access denied".

Lookie, I said, someone who actually set up a computer such that the default login doesn't have administrator access. Wise, but right now it's in our way. Does the teacher know the administrator password? Ha, silly me -- they don't tell him things like that.

One of the students is on the staff, so I asked her if she has admin access. Nope. And then I got the rest of the story.

They were, apparently, having trouble with kids bringing in computer games and playing them when they were supposed to be using the computer for studying. It's not that anyone cares about the games per se, but there's only the one computer and they were tired of having to monitor it. So they set up a firewall to prevent that. No one realized that there was any legitimate-for-this-context software that would also be hindered.

So sometime before next week they will fix this somehow. And I am glad that people there take security seriously -- the administrator password wasn't anything obvious, nor was it written on a post-it note next to the computer. But alas, I was not able to deliver working software into the hands of the teacher and my classmates. (I didn't think of the copy-the-CD trick until later, though I think all access to the drive was being blocked anyway.) I am disappointed.

Thus far I've been unsuccessful in getting the new machine to talk to the digital camera. I'm awaiting a response from tech support for the camera. Aside from that, the new machine is behaving splendidly so far.

My old machine (called, for the nonce, Bouncy) is now failing in the exact same way its predecessor (Doornail) did: after increasingly-shorter periods of uptime, it reboots and, more often than not, produces a blue screen. Attempts to reboot at that point always fail; turning the machine off for a couple hours and then trying again gets a short-lived boot. This says "overheating" to me, but it's not appreciably quieter than normal, so I'm guessing the fan is still running. All the usual precautions have been in place all along -- UPS, antivirus, automatic updates (OS and virus), safe computing practices... I don't get it. If I knew what I was looking for I'd pop the cases and look around. But I'm pretty clueless about hardware. (And we just had Bouncy open a couple months ago to poke a graphics card, so I know it's not full of dustbunnies. I don't think Doornail was the last time I powered it up, either.)

The questions in my mind right now are: what happened to Doornail and Bouncy, can it be reversed, and what do I do to prevent it from happening to my new machine?

Could I have a faulty UPS? Could a faulty UPS do damage consistent with these symptoms?

(Oh, and just to clarify: this failure pattern is not the only reason I replaced Bouncy; it's just the final step in a series of annoying failures. The CD burner hasn't worked in months... stuff like that. If it were just a hard drive, that'd be different.)

A recent news article about a spate of traffic violations (with police lying in wait to write tickets) mentioned that the vehicle code requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks or at intersections (even without crosswalks). I guess a different law covers failure to yield to jaywalkers.

I was amused by this indirect response to my post about probability.

I have a new(er) machine at work, which I'm in the process of configuring. (This always takes longer than you expect. Today's main hassle was making cygwin and ant play nicely with each other, which took a while to diagnose.) Anyway, after bringing the OS (Win2k) up to date and installing a bunch of software, and before running any web browsers, I ran Spybot Search and Destroy. It found three pieces of spyware. Sheesh!

The graphics card on my new machine is fuzzy -- or rather, its output is fuzzy (though for all I know the card is too). I have the latest driver, and the fonts are still harder to read than on my old machine, with all parameters and the monitor identical. This must get fixed before my eyes rebel. I wonder if there is a way to choose an appropriate graphics card, or if I'd just be shooting in the dark. But aside from that, the machine is definitely a win -- I timed a process that used to take 3-4 minutes at 40 seconds today.

December already? Where's that coem from? :-) We have no free Saturday nights in December: gaming, then my company's party, then Dani's company party (early) and a friends' party we wouldn't miss for anything, and then a family visit. (And then more gaming on new year's day, but that's not technically December.)

(For those who've asked, "random bits" are longer than "short takes".)

Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)

After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months). I have been unable to correlate it with anything else going on in the house. His last physical was in January and he was fine, and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the kitty psychologists in my reading audience have any theories?

Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.

I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.

Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.

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.

When what turns out to be the hard drive starts making that "clunking" sound, you've got about three minutes to rescue what you were working on. (Fortunately, it was the secondary drive that I didn't really care about anyway.)

This is actually my very first personally-witnessed hard-drive failure. I had a drive die once when I wasn't home, and I had one get taken down by a failing power supply and another by a power surge (yes, through the surge protector), but I haven't seen this particular failure mode before.

I just installed my new scanner, an HP ScanJet 3670. It replaces a well-worn MicroTek ScanWizard (SCSI interface) from, oh, 7 or 8 years ago. It was a good scanner, but either it or the SCSI card has started to fail (I have no other SCSI devices), and scanner technology has gotten better in the meantime, so... (The new scanner was a gift from my father, who can be relied on to research hardware and software and choose well.)

When I installed my previous scanner, I remember having to install associated software, twiddle around with TWAIN settings (whatever TWAIN means), and go through some false starts before the machine could even see the scanner. Later I got a digital camera that came with its own image-manipulation software, and when I wanted to use the scanner with that software (why have two different programs that do virtually the same thing?), I had it to do all over again, and it was painful. And this scanner is now on its third machine, which means I've gone through the installation hassle more than once. So I waited until I had a chunk of free time before breaking out the new scanner.

I plugged it in (USB, of course). I loaded the driver and associated software from the CD. I put something on the glass and pushed the "scan" button on the scanner. (A "scan" button! What a novelty!) And an image appeared, just like that. No configuration; it just worked. I expect that from hardware these days, but I thought I would still have some software configuration ahead of me. Nope. Let's hear it for good UI!

The scanner can also be driven by imaging software, of course. If I were already set up with PhotoShop or some such, and that was my environment of choice, I could integrate my scanner. But I'm not, and that "scan" button will be just perfect for my needs. If I don't like the image, I can always pop it into the program that came with the last scanner and go wild. But I don't have to go through another piece of software if I don't want to; from the scanner itself I can launch HP's capture program, preview the image, and save it to disk as a JPG.

It more than makes up for the steroid-enhanced power cord that doesn't play nicely with other plugs. :-)

lyev, watch your mailbox for some test scans of the material we discussed a while ago. If you like this first batch (1200 dpi, by the way), I'll queue up the rest.

At morning services the rabbi asked me if I could help him fix a problem with his Mac. From his not-very-technical description it sounded to me as if he had somehow corrupted a shortcut on his desktop. I decided it would be easier to pay a house call than talk him through it on the phone, so I stopped by after work.

Now I'm not a Mac person. Tried 'em when they came out in 1984, had one on my desk at work a few years later (1989?), even ported an application from X-Windows to Mac once (1990), but I don't really know how to use them, never looked again when they became more mature, and never became one with the UI philosophy. I figured I could puzzle it out on my own, but with him looking over my shoulder while I did so I feared leading him down too many bad search paths that he might internalize.

So I chatted briefly with a co-worker who uses a Mac. He showed me how to get a file browser and that what windows calls a shortcut the Mac calls an alias. Most of my instincts were correct. In an oh-by-the-way manner, he said that if the mouse has one button rather than two, you get right-click by control-clicking.

I am so glad he made that off-hand comment! The Mac in question does in fact have a one-button mouse, and the odds that I would have guessed that key combination are low. I would have instead concluded that Macs only have one mouse menu.

So fixing his problem was in fact trivial; I deleted the old shortcut (not gonna try to fix what I can easily recreate), found the application, and created a new shortcut. I watched him reboot and then use it successfully. Mission accomplished in just a few minutes. I explained what I was doing at each step (and he didn't know about control-click either); I wonder how much he'll internalize. (His kids convinced him to get the Mac, from what I understand. But they're all away for the summer.)

I realized on the way out that I missed an opportunity: I should have told him that the price of computer consulting is rabbinic consulting, and gotten him to give me pointers to some responsa I've been wondering about. Ah well; maybe later. :-)

A recent newspaper article described a (local) fire that started because "the occupant's lit cigarette burned a hole through the hose in her oxygen tank". Excuse me, but some people are just too stupid to live. (She did live; I hope the only damage she did was to her own property.)

Friday night the 20s/30s group at my synagogue had a dinner before the service, and then after the service a couple invited us to their house (across the street) to continue schmoozing. I stopped by for a bit; it's been interesting to get to know some of the people who are approximately my age, as opposed to 10-20 years older.

At the gathering I encountered a (new to me, old in reality) game on the Password theme. The rules were gone, and I'm sure we weren't playing it right (I suspect it's meant for teams), but it was cute. The deal is that you have a hand-held gizmo that provides a supply of words (on a cardboard disk inside); when it's your turn you try to elicit the word with the usual restrictions about what you can and can't say, and when you get it you advance to the next word and hand the gizmo to the next person. Now, concurrent with all of this is a not-very-predictable timer, and when it goes off the person holding the gizmo loses. It was cute, and I can envision ways to do it as a team game.

Even though you're unlimited in the length of your clues, and can also pantamime, I found myself playing in "25 Words or Less" mode. "Cinderalla" was "glass slipper fairy tale" (which I could shorten by 1-2 words with more planning), "lapel" was "jacket part" + pointing to the relevant position on my (unjacketed) chest, and so on.

Ever since my computer melted down in April and got its new motherboard, I've been having intermittent problems with peripherals. I'd been trying to collect enough data to deduce a pattern, but the warranty expires next week and no pattern has emerged yet. So I took it back to CompUSA, where it will presumably take them several days to determine what, if anything, is wrong. I'm betting that things other than the motherboard got fried when the fan died, but not catastrophically -- so they weren't caught in April. Joy.

So I am currently using our backup machine, which we got originally (cheap, used, minimal hardware) so Dani could set it up as a Linux box. Never succeeded at that, but it's useful to have a spare machine sometimes. However, things have changed since I last used this machine; Dani had in the meantime set it up with VPN to talk to the machines at work, which was completely incompatable with plain old ordinary internet access. (I'm sure that's not a requirement of VPN, but he doesn't know how to configure it and I've never seen it before.) He's not currently using it, though, so I blew it away and reinstalled all the network drivers and now it's fine.

Does anyone reading this remember how to remap the keyboard under Win98? It's been too long.

Having spent a chunk of the afternoon futzing with computers, I'm behind on my friends list. I'll try to catch up soon.

We got home early enough that I was able to pick up my computer tonight. (It was ready on Friday, but I couldn't get there before Shabbat.) According to them, the cooling fan was defective and the processor overheated, so they replaced both. (Actually, the paperwork says they installed a new heat sink, but doesn't say anything about a fan. But I can hear the fan, so presumably they replaced it.) I didn't know that "heat sink" was a replaceable part.

The reason we got home early enough to do this is that the SCA event was enough of a disappointment that we bailed. (And for this I missed morning services? Sigh.) There were a few contributing factors. First, there wasn't much in the way of planned activities other than fighting and fencing, and the site wasn't really conducive to just schmoozing. A lot of folks I expected to see there weren't in evidence; maybe they were off doing stuff behind the scenes or maybe they weren't there, but either way, it meant I didn't get to visit with them. The advertised lunch was very disappointing in both content and quantity; I'm used to much better. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I live in a group that does a good job with food; I don't know. Many of our friends weren't staying for dinner, and I was kind of hungry from the lack of lunch, and it was cold and rainy, so after the choir performance we went home.

The choir performance went fairly well, and we had more of an audience than I thought we would given the event logistics. One member was sick and one was absent for unknown reasons, but we still had reasonable part coverage.

I got email tonight from Amazon UK telling me that the new West Wing DVD has shipped. This came as a pleasant surprise, as the published release date is Monday. With luck, we'll actually be able to watch a couple episodes before leaving town for Pesach. (I am, of course, assuming that they aren't going to close the city of Toronto due to SARS...)

Check out this list of top 100 April Fool's pranks (link courtesy of a coworker). I'm glad to see kremvax on the list; that was fun.

I saw a news item this afternoon that a plane is currently being quarantined in California because some passengers showed symptoms of SARS. If I were a healthy passenger on that plane, I'd be pretty irked at my heightened exposure. I hope they can separate the sick from the healthy quickly, before some idiot on the plane breaks out the duct tape.

Yesterday I got a phone call (on the answering machine) from someone saying "good job" on my letter in the paper. Not that I write letters to papers often, but that's still never happened to me before.

CompUSA called yesterday to say that the fan in my machine is dead and the motherboard probably is too, so they're going to replace both. ( Read more... )

I've been vaguely meaning to write about intermarriage for several weeks now, and independently the topic formed in the comments here. But I haven't had time to write my own thoughts on the subject yet.

A coworker and I had approximately the following exchange this afternoon:

Her: Is there a Jewish holiday that corresponds to Easter?

Me: Well, Easter sort of corresponds to Passover, kind of. According to tradition, the Christian last supper was a Passover seder.

Her: (blink)

Me: Is that what you wanted to know?

Her: I meant dates.

Me: Oh. Yes, most years they're within a few days of each other. Sometimes they're a month apart. (pause) This is more than you wanted to know, isn't it?

Two days ago my home computer started spontaneously rebooting intermittently. Sometimes the reboots hang at the Win2k splash screen. Thus far, I have not been able to discern a pattern.

McAfee says no viruses, and I haven't done anything particularly risky lately. And I'm behind a firewall. So I suspect a hardware problem of some sort.

The machine is less than a year old, so it should still be under warranty. But it's still a nuissance.