Dani has decided to tackle the vast collection of Magic: The Gathering cards (most of which are his, but the older cards are mine). We haven't played in years; I would consider playing again in a simplified world, but they lost me when not only were there 6000 different cards, but they decided that many of the commons needed four different types of art. When I can't easily track what my opponent has in play, I lose interest. I understand that it's worse now; Dani says they are still publishing expansions and making money at it. After 12 or 13 years of this, I wonder how many cards there are now. (For comparison, the basic game, the one I played in the beta edition, had 300 cards. The first, and best, expansion set added, I think, about 75. Things went downhill from there.)

A few links:

These "new rules" might be incorrectly attributed (the reason they're on Snopes), but they sure are funny.

Advice from hindsight (from unspace).

This biscotti recipe sounds easy enough to try (from cookingengineer).

The origins of the great war of 2007 (link from rjlippincott).

Aieee. As tsjafo comments, I wouldn't trust the government with a pill that can alter memories. Granted, they're a long way from erasure, but I still don't trust that sort of technology in the hands of anyone with the power to compel -- in which category I would also place health providers, 'cause they're mostly owned by the insurance companies.

Rob at UnSpace (unspace) wrote a good entry about blogs and plagarism today. I know that at some level "information wants to be free", and I've certainly snagged the occasional article from a free-but-registration-required site for my own archives or to share. And maybe I'm depriving the original site of hits, which I hadn't thought about much before. But more importantly to me, even if information wants to be free, it doesn't want to be incorrectly attributed. There's really no excuse for stealing a person's reputation by stealing his words -- especially on the web, where attribution and linking are so easy.

The installation of air conditioning for our second floor continues. Actually, the installation per se is done; we have cool air flowing. Yet to be done is some plaster work to make the holes go away, and a lot of clean-up. I'll be curious to see whether they put the bookcases they moved back in the right places (maintaining alphabetical order); the last contractor who needed to move them didn't get that right on the first try.

Today's mail brought another non-trivial trinket from a charity -- one I've already told to stop doing that. They lose points for two things this time: (1) sending me this stuff anyway (that's not why I sent them money -- and, in fact, it's been more than two years since I sent this one money precisely because of this sort of thing) and (2) sending me a personalized item with someone else's name on it. If the Goltz family is out there, act quickly to claim your piggy bank, 'cause it'll be going out with the trash in the next few days. (That's sad in a way -- if it didn't have a name on it, I might have been able to give it away.)

For those who follow Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed): he moved his site and someone set up a new RSS feed at rlpreacher_blog. I don't know if they're going to eventually edit the original feed with the new link, but you might want to pick up the new one just in case. Edit: They merged the feeds, so you don't need to do anything.

dglenn

MIT's time-traveller convention (from arib).

Remember those rebates I'm due from CompUSA and HP? I got a ding letter from HP, saying I didn't qualify because I didn't send it in in time. I called their 800 number and said "I disagree with that", the rep put me on hold for about ten minutes, and then the rep told me "ok, you should have your check in three weeks". Notably absent from this exchange is the part where the rep says "why do you disagree?" and I support my position. I suppose they could have spent those ten minutes pulling the original envelope from a file and looking at the postmark (um, no), or their database could be so slow and awkward that it took them that long to look up a previously-entered field. Or, maybe they simply roll over and comply in the face of any customer challenge. That might be cheaper than anything else. (Now if CompUSA would just cough up... I am so never doing this again!)

Why does just about every Trek series do at least one mirror-universe episode, and why are they almost always so embarrassing to watch? ("Mirror, Mirror" from the original series is the only exception that comes to mind.) Somebody must like these, right? I mean yeah, ok, it's a chance to do warped things to established characters without consequences, and with scantily-clad women, but for me (a straight woman who likes the baddies to at least not be stupid), that's not enough. Oh well. With luck they'll only waste one more episode of Enterprise on this. They had an opportunity to do good stuff with their few remaining episodes, after all.

Note to future self: kosher-for-Pesach yogurt is runnier than usual. I have no idea why. Next year we might skip that.

Dani and I have decided to buck the Hallmark tradition and have a nicer-than-usual evening some other night in February. Besides, until Saturday he had a choir practice scheduled for tonight.

Actually, we also had a nicer-than-usual evening last night. ralphmelton and lorimelton got engaged at the end of the last Sunday dinner that fell on February 13; Ralph had slyly arranged for things to run late so that he could propose just after midnight in front of some of their friends. So they made an especially-nice dinner for friends last night to celebrate the anniversary. We had risotto with goat cheese and salmon, spinach salad with fruit, and two homemade desserts: chocolate truffles and a concoction of ladyfingers, raspberry mousse, whipped cream, and (I think) alcohol. It was all fabulous.

Yesterday afternoon we joined a crowd of people helping out an older friend of ours whose basement recently flooded. There was stuff to be thrown out, stuff to be cleaned up, and stuff that said friend had to look at so we'd know how much effort to put into saving it. That last was, of course, the bottleneck. There were a lot of papers that had gotten wet but were now dry, but that might have started to grow mold. A lot of those papers were records from her parents. Lesson learned: store papers of that sort neither in the basement nor in the attic. (I lost some papers once to an attic with a leaky roof.)

My synagogue is running a trope class, which started last Wednesday. (It runs for six weeks.) Some of the people in the class are good-naturedly grumpy about my taking the class because I'm a "ringer". I pointed out that there is plenty I don't know about trope and I expect to learn things in this class. That said, I haven't brought the book in from the car yet. :-) (After this week's class, probably.)

At work, today was largely a day of putting out fires. They weren't usually my fires, but often I seemed to be the only person who knows where we keep the fire hose. This must change. :-) (This will change, as some of the people involved are new hires who are responsible for learning this stuff. But knowledge transfer has not been orderly.)

Yesterday a repairman was supposed to come between 8:30 and noon. Dani and I agree that a phone call at 2:10 saying he'll be over soon, with no prior contact (and no ability to track him down), does not meet expectations. Now, to see if Sears agrees with our assessment that we're due expedited service if we reschedule through them... And to prevent Dani from salvaging anything useful from a morning spent at home, the meter reader who was supposed to come between 8 and noon didn't show either. Whee. (At least Dani is set up to work from home fairly easily. I'm not.)

They listed direct-dial numbers for a bazillion departments, none of which obviously said "garage-door openers go here" to me, and a general number. I called the latter. There was no "talk to a human" option, but there was an exciting automated system that was ready to serve me. Or something.

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Short takes:

Real Live Preacher recommended the "Velveteen Rabbi" weblog, so I took a look. I found this post about the liberal/conservative divide in Judaism to be interesting. The weblog is syndicated on LJ as velveteenrabbi.

While I'm not comfortable with Bush's nominee for attorney general, my opinion of the guy just went up a notch. Some folks are mad at him because he didn't elevate his own opinions over the law. Gonzale s said in a 2001 interview: "The question is, what is the law, what is the precedent, what is binding in rendering your decision. Sometimes, interpreting a statute, you may have to uphold a statute that you may find personally offensive. But as a judge, that's your job." Wow, someone in a position of authority who gets it! Now, if I could just be more confident that his ears hear what his mouth is saying...

Thanks to everyone for the comments on my earlier entry. People Who Ought To Matter in VW are certainly going to get a letter from me when this is all over. My inclination to buy a VW in the future has been affected by this experience; I am also now a little more likely to trade this car -- for some other manufacturer's vehicle -- when the warranty runs out, rather than driving it into the ground as I did with my previous car.

(Noted in passing: fourth season of West Wing in September; second season of Blake's 7 allegedly in October.)

I sometimes wonder about the security implications of the quizzes and other memes that run around LJ. Consider: your passowrd is (I think) stored in a cookie. You follow a link while reading your friends page (so you're probably logged in) to some unvouched-for site where you give your user name as part of getting some bit of content to post in your journal. I don't know a lot about cookies, but isn't it fairly straightforward for a malicious meme-writer to harvest your password that way? I try to never fill those things out while logged in, personally. (Yes, I do sometimes fill them out, out of curiosity -- the ones that are likely to have interesting content, like the mind map and the friends-list-evaluation ones, not the "what kind of eggplant are you?" ones.)

The two instances of Giant Eagle that I shop at seem to have both stopped carrying my cats' favorite food (Tender Vittles). While googling to try to find out if the product had been discontinued (no one at the store seemed to know anything), I found a place where I can mail-order it by the case for about what I normally pay for it. Ok, that works. Gee, I wonder if I can mail-order the cat litter under similar circumstances, rather than shlepping it home from the store myself? I'll have to try that.

This afternoon I attended a bridal shower for a friend. I so do not know how to be a girly girl. :-) It was a fun time, but there was a lot more estrogen in the air than I'm used to.