We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to siderea.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and say you want a set, and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

jducoeur gave me: Faith. Family. Communication. Study. Music. Language. Service.

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Friday night I went to a fellow congregant's home for a monthly shabbat gathering (about which I've written before). I've been to most of these gatherings though it's mostly different people each month so I'm the outlier in that regard. (That's fine; the family-oriented service that would be my other option at my own congregation does not really work for me.) It's really refreshing to have an adult-oriented gathering -- singing, discussion, some personal sharing -- on a regular basis. This time I particularly noticed an emerging sense of community -- most of these people didn't know most of the rest and yet we clicked anyway. I've got to figure out how to bottle this and carry it into Shabbat afternoons.

There is no way that house is really only 1.6 miles from mine. The path is Pittsburgh-flat (nothing is really flat in Pittsburgh, but there were no major hills) and it took me 40 minutes to walk home. I don't mind a 40-minute walk in nice weather (which we actually had), but I was a little surprised.

Last Sunday we went to my niece's graduation (she got a master's degree from the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU). I hadn't realized the class was so large; I somehow had the impression, probably because of all the close collaboration they do, that there were maybe 25 students. I didn't count, but I think close to 100 graduated this year. Wow.

The ceremony was very well-organized. You know it's going to take a certain amount of time for each student to walk across the stage, receive a diploma, and pose for a photo with the folks on the stage (dean etc) -- so the emcee (I didn't retain her actual position) gave a short summary of each student while that was happening -- projects worked on, internships, and (where applicable) where the student would be working. She'd finish that, take three steps to be in the photo, then step back and start announcing the next student. And since all the projects were done by teams, meaning we'd be hearing the same names over and over, she managed to space out the explanations of what they were so that it wasn't tedious but we got clues about what they were rather than just names. Very smooth.

Today I got a notice in my mailbox from the neighborhood association. We have a neighborhood association? Cool! Not all of Squirrel Hill -- six blocks of our street plus some side streets. There is a block party in a few weeks that I will miss unless it rains (I'm free on the rain date), and there is apparently an email list (which I will now join). Even though we've lived here more than a decade I still do not know most of the neighbors, and it would be nice to start to fix that.

I recently found myself in a conversation about grandparents, and it made me think of one in particular. The grandparent I feel the strongest connection with, even though I had the smallest amount of time with him, was my paternal grandfather. It's odd what I do and don't remember: I don't remember what he looked like at all, but I remember his voice and I remember some of our time together. And while I don't specifically remember the incidents, I know that he taught me to think, to question, and to analyze. He surely taught my father the same things and my father taught me, so his influence carried on after him.

My grandfather came to the US from Italy when he was a child. I now realize that I know very little about his life before I was born. I know that my father was the first family member to go to college (grandpa was smart, not necessarily educated), but I realize I don't know how my grandfather earned a living, what took him to Ohio, how he met my grandmother, and lots of other things. Fortunately for me, my father will know many of these things and I can ask him.

Even with all that, though, I marvel at how close I feel to a man I didn't have nearly enough time to get to know.

Friday at work I completed a big merge of my project's code to the main branch in source control. (Yeah, two hours before leaving for a four-day weekend, but I'd done a lot of testing first.) I've learned some new things about Perforce (source-control system) and our build system. I have also learned that while I can do this sort of configuration management, I really, really want us to hire someone who actually wants to do this stuff on a regular basis.

This morning I was asked if I could read torah next Shabbat. ("How much?" "As long as it's a valid reading, I don't care what you do." "Ok.") This does get better with practice; I don't think I would have been able to learn a non-trivial chunk in less than a week a year ago. Cool.

Thursday we got email from our Hebrew instructor. She is, alas, sitting shiva in Israel, so she sent mail to tell us that (1) class was on anyway as originally scheduled and (2) we'd have the sub again. Only three people showed up; the sub told me that happened at the last class (three weeks ago) too (different three people; that was the night my in-laws were in town, so I missed it). The sub is good, so I hope she's not taking that personally. The bad student I previously wrote about wasn't there, so we actually covered new material. I suggested to the sub that she send email to everyone with the assignment and what we would be doing next week; with luck this will innoculate us some against "but I don't know this!" whines from people who miss classes and don't do the homework. We'll see.

I had a nice conversation with the sub on the way out of the building, and then for half an hour after that, about theology, observance, the local community, learning languages, and the like. That was pleasant. (And hey, we now have each others' email addresses...)

Today we visited with my family. They do Christmas, so Dani and I still do the gift thing with them for their sake. My parents got me two more volumes of Rashi's commentary on torah (yay!), and we got a bunch of other goodies. In a moment of "oh, you did that too? oops", both my parents and my sister got us nice tea assortments. Tonight we cleaned out the tea cupboard (I've been meaning to prune it for a while); who knew that tea had sell-by dates? (This revelation came when considering a box that neither of us remembered buying.) Mmm, new, fresh tea.

We got my sister an iPod (nano), which she was pretty excited about. She does not have a computer, but she has access to several nearby (her kids, our father, and if worse comes to worst she can come to our house, though it's farther for her). She has a long commute and no CD player in her car, so I figure she'll spend an afternoon loading a bunch of CDs onto her iPod and be good for a few months before needing to do it again. Not having a computer of her own shouldn't be a huge hardship, despite the protests of her kids. (We bought her an adapter to charge it from house current and an adapter for playing in her car.)

My father just got a laptop (Macbook), apparently prompted in part by the thought during their trip to Italy that it would have been convenient to have. (Duh; if I'd thought of it I would have lent them my iBook for that trip.) So he's now playing with Leopard, 'cause that's what came installed. He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Tomorrow I'm getting together with friends to play a game of "Dogs in the Vineyard", an unusual role-playing game I previously wrote about. This should be fun!

My mother-in-law's seder has some singing, but mostly in Yiddish. This year (finally) I seem to have earned enough points with the family; I asked if we could add some Hebrew songs, offering to do the work (compiling and copying), and she said (via Dani) to bring a few. Yay. I'm going to make one double-sided sheet (including sheet music for some), on the theory that there's no sense wasting paper and this way there's a choice. Tiny steps... (At this seder I enjoy spending time with the people and I dislike the haggadah. At my father-in-law's seder, the haggadah is fine but the people aren't interested in doing most of it.)

At work we're about to get some expansion space, and they just published the new seating chart. People were given the option to stay put or take their chances. One of our neighborhoods (oh, did I mention that we have designated neighborhoods? that turns out to be fun, actually) is unpopular due to the way the space is set up. Every person there save one moved out. No one moved in. So the seating chart shows Beth amidst a sea of numbered spaces. There was some talk today of renaming the neighborhood; an early proposal was something like "Beth's Fiefdom" but I suspect that the latest will stick: "Bethlehem". If it weren't so close to Pesach I'd bring her a loaf of bread. :-) ("Bethlehem" is an anglicization of "Beit Lechem", which is literally "house of bread".)

San Francisco is about to ban plastic bags from grocery stores, saying that this will cut down on 1400 tons annually sent to landfills. I wonder how they came up with that figure. Do they catalog the landfills? Are they simply assuming that all bags produced go to landfills and wouldn't otherwise? Have they considered that some of those bags are recycled and, when not available freely, will just be replaced by other plastic bags in landfills? For example, I use them when scooping out the litter box, dog owners use them for a similar purpose on walks, and I know people who use them in bathroom trash cans instead of buying small bags for that purpose. I am not (in this entry) arguing against the policy; I'm merely questioning their data analysis. How do they know how much, if any, reduction there will be in landfills?

This article on Roth IRAs (link from patrissimo) seems to suggest that a simple money-laundering exercise lets one bypass the restrictions on using Roth IRAs. How odd. If that's true, it would be a way for people in higher income brackets to hedge their bets, which seems counter to the intent of the Roth. (Traditional IRAs are tax-free on the way in and subject to income tax on the way out, which makes sense if you think you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire. If you don't trust that tax rates won't go up, though, a Roth IRA is insurance -- you pay the income tax on the way in and nothing when it comes out.)

A relative is living in interesting times, in the Chinese sense. Thursday the transmission in her car died; the repair is probably more expensive than the value of the car, but she can't afford a new car if it costs more than a transmission. Friday, a big storm damaged the roof on her patio (fortunately not the house proper); that'll be covered by insurance, but there was a lot of storm damage and it may be a while before the insurance company can pay attention to her. And then, either Friday or Saturday, her phone service died -- not the incoming service, the phone company said, but apparently something inside her house. That'll probably be the first thing to get fixed. (The house isn't that big; how much wire can there be to trace?)

I hope that adage about bad news coming in threes means only threes rather than a minimum of three; I think she's had quite enough excitement for a while.

We went to see my parents on Sunday. It was nice to see them again. Apparently my niece is serious about wanting to move to Italy after she graduates. More power to her. She's an art (art-history? not sure if she formally changed) major who wants a museum job (specifics unknown to me); it seems like that'd be hard to come by and almost certainly means moving anyway, so she may as well go for what excites her if she can.

My parents wanted to show off their shiny new mall (Pittsburgh Mills), but it was raining so we didn't see much of it. I am not a recreational shopper (unless it caters to my particular obsessions, but I don't get excited over things like clothes), and mostly one expanse of stores is much like another to me, so shrug. I don't need to see the third local Barnes & Noble or the 437th Starbucks; I care about the unusual or unique stores, but they are very much the minority in such developments. (And in the "some things never change" department, service in the new mall's new Eat & Park was very slow. We were on the verge of walking out without paying not because we're that kind of people but because we couldn't find anyone who would take our money.)

Later Sunday we went to afternoon tea hosted by a friend, but the aforementioned rain meant we didn't go out into her garden. It was a pleasant gathering, though, and the tea and little sandwiches and cookies were tasty.

Dani and I didn't catch Firefly when it was on TV, so when we were recently ordering stuff anyway we picked up the show on DVD. We've seen three episodes so far, and it's got my attention. I take it we aren't going to find out what's up with River before the end of the show (or the movie)? I was a little surprised to see how overtly a western it is -- the horses in the first episode and the bar fight in the second augmented the soundtrack and the characters' general style. :-)

Given how little TV we watch (less now that West Wing and Commander in Chief are done), I wonder if it would ultimately be cheaper to cancel the cable and just buy the interesting shows when they come out on DVD. As a benchmark for lag time I just checked Amazon, and this year's Invasion is due out in August. But hey -- it says "complete series"? Did they really not renew it? Bummer -- I'd heard that they did, but apparently they changed their minds.

We went to Toronto this weekend to visit family. It was a fun trip. ( Read more... )