Someone I know has dogs named Mac and Winnie (he couldn't bring himself to name the latter Windows, I guess). His wife's cats, named before he met her, are Linux and Solaris. Y'know, if I were single, inclined to name pets after operating systems, and met a person of the appropriate gender whose pets were so named, I'd pay attention too. :-)

I assume that most people have seen spiritrover and opportunitygrrl by now. Their journals are fun to read. I hadn't realized that so many others in the area of space exploration were getting in on the act, though, until someone pointed out fuse_sat's query about joining the SCA. It's a fun thread. (The rest of the journal is entertaining too.)

More spam subject lines:

• "tonight tetrahedron" -- nope; the next D&D game isn't until next week.
• "cauliflower limp" -- not if you cook it right (and if this is meant to be allegorical, I don't want to know...).
• "ebreo insight" -- I know it's spam, but it could be renaissance-dance-geeking, darnit! (I caved. It was yet another product to enhance a body part I don't have.)
• "no visual side effects" -- maybe, but I think most people would be more concerned with visible side-effects.

I'm 40 and I grew up in Pittsburgh.

What do you call...

( going around my friends list )

Welcome to siderea, aka Tibicen -- SCA person, early-music geek, and interesting writer. Apparently the Boston crowd sucked her into LJ. :-)

Last night my rabbi gave a class/discussion on mourning, funerals, etc. This was for the group of people who may be called on to lead shiva minyanim (services in a house of mourning), or who might help out those families in other ways. I didn't learn a lot that was new, but I think it was useful to pull all the information, and all the people who might need it, together. And we were given books, and books are never bad. :-)

I came home to find that there was no West Wing episode. I'm glad NBC ran a message on the bottom of the screen during the replacement show. But I was surprised: I can understand pre-empting a show for a baseball game that you're airing, but near as I can tell, they decided to pull West Wing because they didn't think it could compete with someone else's broadcast of the game. So did they think the Law & Order episode they showed could compete, or was it an old rerun and they were giving up on viewer share that night?

I wonder if Nielsen et al have changed the way they do ratings. In these days of TiVo and VCRs (often multiples), I can't believe they're only interested in people who watch the broadcast live. Yeah, we fast-forward through the commercials when time-shifting, but it seems like that's still better than not seeing them at all. So live is best, fast-forwarded is not worthless, and not watching the show at all is worthless.

We finished watching the second season of West Wing a couple nights ago. (Now we wait until April, if past performance is an indicator of future trends.) I'm impressed by this show, and the last episode of that season was very effective even though it used some techniques I normally consider cheesy. It was well-done, both in the writing and the direction. I hope the show doesn't go into a death spiral with Sorkin gone.

I went to services this morning at Tree of Life, where lulav and etrog were provided for pretty much everyone who wanted them. I still cannot hold a lulav, an etrog, and a siddur (prayer book) in a useful way. Fortunately, I'm starting to memorize the responses. :-)

My brother-in-law-once-removed [1] called tonight asking for computer advice. He said he was sitting in front of a dead machine, he had the Windows 98 CD in the drive, and how does he boot from that? This spawned several mental threads: (1) Define "dead". (2) Hey, aren't you a Mac snob? (3) Beats me, but I think Dani has done this. I opted for #3 and gave the phone to Dani. :-)

[1] My sister-in-law's husband. I know that English doesn't distinguish between Dani's sister and Dani's sister's husband in the "-in-law" thing, but it still feels weird to call him my brother-in-law when he's not related to either of us. I mean, if my brother-in-law is married to my sister-in-law, doesn't that sound just a bit too much like incest to you? It does to me.

This Shabbat is Sh'mini Atzeret (cue chorus of "what's that?"s -- goljerp did a good job with this here). In the Reform movement it's also Simchat Torah. In my congregation, this year, it's also the b'nei mitzvah of my rabbi's twins. And, due to unfortunate timing, it's also baronial investiture, a once-in-every-several-years occurrence in the local SCA group. I want to be able to spawn clones in the morning and sync memories at the end of the day, darnit!

I was surprised to see the following logo today:



I had assumed that, in general, when translating a business name with semantic content from one language to another, you would actually translate into the target language, rather than transliterating the phonemes in the source rendering.

I mean, it's one thing if your name is, say, "McDonald's"; that's just a person's name without an obvious corresponding word, so you'd just transliterate it. But "Burger King" has semantics that are lost in (this) translation, which makes me wonder why they did that when they didn't have to.

Dani and I have been (slowly) working our way through the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD. We may have to pick up the pace; I just noticed that the second season is being released at the end of April. :-) (Of course, we don't have to watch everything immediately, and we will be distracted by West Wing around then...)

Dani moved the SCSI card to my current computer (its third host machine), so I have access to my scanner again. During the software installation I saw pop-up hype along the lines of "take advantage of the full power of Windows 95". I had forgotten that this software is that old. I'm just glad it still works; I gather that a lot of 95/98 code stopped working on 2k.

Win 2k couldn't correctly detect the SCSI drivers on the CD. I had to run the setup program from the CD myself. That was surprising.

This afternoon lyev came by to drop off some "Dragon" magazines (he's cleaning out his house and I expressed interest). We chatted for a while about music, dancing, gaming, and assorted other stuff. He's a neat person; I should spend more time talking with him.

The cable guy also came today to try to figure out why we have selective, sporadic, bad reception. It's a recent problem, since the digital-cable experiment, and it's particularly bad on UPN. Fortunately, I was able to demonstrate the problem to him live on one channel and via videotape on another (different problem). How do you schedule a service call for an intermittent problem? He found the culprit, a bad connector between the house and the pole, and fixed it, so with luck that'll be the end of that.

Recently I've been reading Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh, a language snob with whom I apparently have a lot in common. The book is part style guide, part collection of rants, and some of his rants sound very familiar. :-) We do have some areas of disagreement -- he believes terminal punctuation must go inside close quotes, and he has a problem with "email" -- but it's an entertaining read so far. And his case against "email" (he thinks it should be "e-mail") does make a good point: no other letter-hyphen-word construct in the language has lost its hyphen ("A-frame", "t-shirt", "D-day", "C-section", etc).

Overheard in the office: "My tires were slippy and didn't have any gription". I've heard "slippy" where "slippery" was meant before; this seems to be the same linguistic quirk that produces "prolly" when the word is "probably". But "gription" was a new one for me, and quite entertaining. (It would be clever were it intentional.) We all got a good laugh out of it. (The coworker was not serious; the neighbor he was quoting was.)

- - -

Yesterday at a meeting the CEO introduced a new employee, who previously worked in the military as a translator specializing in Hebrew. So the CEO said "can you say something in Hebrew for us?" and the employee said "ken" (yes). I found myself longing for the idiomatic knowledge that would have allowed me to respond with the functional equivalent of "smart-aleck". Oh well. :-)

This morning I asked one of our developers for a feature we had discussed a while back that never got implemented. He agreed that it would be a good thing, sighed about the size of his queue, and said "If I get one more request I'll implement it". I turned to our administrative assistant and asked her to ask the developer for this feature, which she proceeded to do. (Just to be clear on this, this is something she has no earthly use for. I fed her the words.)

Now the developer is complaining that that's not fair and it's not what he meant. I think it was a valuable lesson about specification, and he should suck it up, give me my feature, and be more specific in the future.

I suspect that's not what will happen, though. Oh well; I'll just have to be more creative.

Is there a word in English to designate the person who is my husband's brother-in-law? Saying that he is my brother-in-law implies, to me, that either he is my sister's husband or my husband's brother. The person I'm describing is my husband's sister's husband.

I don't need this word often, but the person in question comes up in conversation just often enough to cause me to trip over this too many times.

This morning I saw a billboard that said something like "innocent people do not commit insurance fraud". Well duh! Innocent people don't commit any crime/sin, by definition! If you commit a crime, you're not innocent any more, at least of that crime. I presume that what they meant is that "decent upstanding respectable people don't commit insurance fraud (and that's why you shouldn't)", but I guess that just doesn't sound as dramatic.

Unfortunate timing: the folks who are trying to get a local house filk off the ground are trying again this Saturday, and there's an SCA event that I'm already committed to. Sigh. My company is also having an open house/party Saturday evening, which would otherwise be a good time to try to introduce some of my friends to folks there. (It's also one of two social things my company has coming up, and I won't be going to the Xmas party on a Friday night.) I guess Dani will have to wait a while longer to meet my co-workers.

On the Mark, in its SCA persona of Ensemble Rigodon, is doing a short concert at the event Saturday. So is the barony choir, but I don't think the performances are back to back so that should be fine.

The Sinai worship committee met tonight. The chair of the committee is too nice; she doesn't like to cut people off even if we've drifted far away from the agenda. I wonder how this group would respond to a firmer style of meeting-running. (Fortunately, I think by the time the position next comes open I will have abandoned this notion of putting my money where my mouth is. :-) ) Rabbi Gibson mentioned his plan to have congregants read Torah occasionally, which reminds me that I really need to drop him a note and ask for the parsha I want. (Behar. It's my "birthday" parsha, so to speak.)

One of the questions on the agenda for the meeting was what to do about the Monday and Thursday services. A few years ago we (well, they -- I wasn't there yet) started having afternoon services twice a week, because services aren't supposed to be just once a week. But turnout is generally very low, so we've been trying to figure out what to change to make them more attractive. The main focus tonight seemed to be scheduling, but we got off-topic and never actually decided to change the time. Grr.

I frequently hear the advice that when baking, you need to follow directions exactly. While ordinary cooking does fine with the "handful of that, pile of that, a little of this" approach, baking is different. Or so I'm told by people who probably know what they're talking about.

So why does every cookie recipe contain a phrase such as "drop on cookie sheets 2 inches apart"? 2 inches on center, or 2 inches edge to edge? Dammit, it matters.

There, I feel better now.

(I always interpret it as edge to edge, and then usually end up spending more time baking than I needed to because I can fit fewer cookies on a sheet.)