Monica

I don't care about iPhone at all, but the announcement of AppleTV caught my interest. I'd probably pay $300 for a device that lets me dump the cable service (depending on what content costs). I don't watch a lot of TV but I don't want to watch what I do watch on my computer; this fills a real need for me. Alas, it appears (from Apple's site) that my plain old TV, bought about five years ago, can't talk to this new box; they use the words "widescreen" and "enhanced definition", neither of which I think applies to my TV (assuming "widescreen" means 16:9 instead of the standard 4:3 aspect ratio -- why that should make a difference when they could just letterbox is beyond me). They can make an allowance for wired networks but not for recent-but-not-current TVs? Bummer.

Spam subject line of the day: "mollusk suffrage". On consideration, giving them the vote probably wouldn't make things worse.

I cleaned out my spam traps last night; the problem has definitely gotten worse recently. There's more spam and the distribution (or performance of various filters) has changed:

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My ancient and venerable digital camera has been somewhat unreliable in a way that's not worth repairing, given that it's ancient and venerable. (I often tend to hang on to hardware past the point when I really should just upgrade anyway. Exhibit A: my HP LaserJet 5L, which has mostly served me well for more than a decade.) But hey, digital-camera technology has certainly gotten better, and low-end photographers like me don't need all the expensive bells and whistles. So today I set out to improve my photographic situation before Pennsic.

Oh, Cannon PowerShot A530, I think we are going to have a long and pleasant relationship. I don't know what half your advanced functions even mean yet, but I will enjoy finding out. The camera is a good size for my hand, has controls that are tight enough not to be mushy without being difficult, and seems to take good pictures. (The real test of that involves a different operator, I suspect.)

It comes with software that I'm ignoring for now; my computer has a built-in card reader and that works just fine.

Conversation with the sales guy while discussing features I wanted:
Me: I wouldn't object to re-using my current memory cards.
Him: What do you have?
Me: Compact flash.
Him: Almost no one uses that any more.
Me: Bummer.
Him: A gig of SD (what everyone uses now) costs $25; do you care?

I'm pretty sure my current 128MB card cost rather more than that. :-) (And on the other hand, given how cheap memory is, you'd think that as a gesture of goodwill, the camera would come with more than a 16MB card. I didn't bother to peel off its plastic.)

Dani got me something very similar to this for my birthday:



(I stole the image from All Funky Stuff, which does not have individual product pages. I couldn't find a photo of exactly the one he got me, but this isn't far off.)

Yes, it looks very much like a phone from early in the last century. It looks at home on my ancient wood desk. It's actually digital -- that's not a dial; those are push-buttons. The center of the dial is a redial button. Spiffy!

I chanted torah Saturday morning. It went very well; I did make a couple mistakes, but the associate rabbi was checking for me and he was able to feed me the corrections without throwing me. We've never worked before in that way. (The associate rabbi usually doesn't come to this service, but my rabbi is out of town so he led the torah study and most of the service. I led the torah service and concluding prayers.)

Later I will try to write up what I talked about. Thanks for the ideas.

The D&D game Saturday was fairly long (from around 4:00 to around midnight); we knew there'd be a lot going on and wanted the luxury of not playing on a weeknight. I'm glad we had a good long stretch for the climax of the story.

When I got home, I saw a flash of gray and white on the front porch. First thought: why is Baldur outside? Second though: waitaminute, that cat's not big enough. That's maybe half a Baldur. It turned out to be a vary friendly, affectionate young adult that sat patiently at the door with every expectation of being let in. I saw a tag on a collar but couldn't read it (too-small print in too-dim light), so I asked Dani to help me. When I picked up the cat I adjusted my estimate still further; this was about a third of a Baldur. :-)

The tag had a phone number but not an address. I thought about the lateness of the hour and called anyway; I figure that if one of my cats had gotten out I'd want someone to report a sighting right away. I got a machine, so I left a timestamp and an address. The cat was curled up sleeping on our doormat when I went to bed (I left the porch light on) and gone in the morning. I hope that if he's lost he was reunited with his people.

Today after brunch Dani and I went shopping for cell phones (and plans). Sprint, Cingular, and Verizon all offer the same package: 2 phones, 500 shared prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, free long distance, $60. We ended up choosing based on the maps; we told the salesman that 98% of the time we're in Pittsburgh but we want to Just Not Care that other 2% of the time. So we ended up with Verizon, and we have 30 days to discover if that was a mistake (dead spots locally, etc).

Transferring the existing phone numbers turned out to be a PITA because we were instantiating a family plan from two individual plans. It took the salesman at least an hour to get this set up, and he had to call his tech-support people. At the end he said it could take up to three days for the service to transfer, but we both have service on the new phones tonight. (Dani got his a couple hours before I did; dunno why.)

Soon I'll read the documentation on the phone. I managed to get rid of the annoying background image, icon-based navigation (give me text, darn it!), and invasive ring tone; the rest can wait. Granted, I solved one of those (the icon thing) by saying to the salesman "this looks like a good phone but I can't see what those images are supposed to be; can it do text?". :-)

Ok, I admit it: I'm growing old and (slightly) feeble. I need a new approach to cork removal. I sometimes buy wine with screw caps just to avoid this problem. Something's gotta change.

I've never been any good with the traditional corkscrew, the ones that bore a hole through the middle of the cork. I go off-center, or shed little bits of cork into the bottle, or otherwise damage the pristine state of the target liquid. I currently (try to) use a device I've heard called a "dishonest butler". It has two prongs that slide down the sides of the cork, and then you wiggle/twist the cork out using the handle. But apparently I don't have sufficient wrist strength for this any more. And I'm tired of having to ask Dani to open my bottles of lambic ale, darnit. I don't drink often, but when I do I want the ability to do it without outside assistance. I mean geez, it feels like I should just ask him to pass the Geritol while he's at it. Not good.

I think Consumer Reports did a survey of cork-removing devices a few years ago, but I don't still have the article. I have this vague recollection that it's possible to spend what seemed an outrageous figure (like $50 or so) for high-tech low-effort gadgets designed so that even your grandmother can open ornery bottles of wine. That's not necessarily outrageous, particularly when relatives come fishing for gift ideas.

Does anyone reading this have any recommendations -- what to look for or where to look? (I'm not really after recommendations for alternative beverages.)

Knitting fun (too bad I'm not a knitter).

Clue-by-fours for loud cell-phone users (PDF) (link courtesy of goldsquare).

A response to the responses to that cheese sandwich on eBay (link courtesy of profane_stencil).

Brilliant idea I wish I'd thought of: today a coworker and I retrieved some heavy boxes. After putting her box in her trunk, she pulled out a "corner" -- two foot-long 1x4s joined edgewise at a 90-degree angle, covered in cloth and with long outside edges covered in velcro -- and stuck it onto the carpettted floor next to the box. Voila: no box sliding around the back of the car while driving home! Her sweetie made it for her.

I said before that I think it would be a mistake for West Wing to continue past the Bartlet administration. I still think they should end the show, but if they do continue it, based on what we've seen so far I would keep watching a show with Alan Alda's character as president. He hasn't lost his edge in the many years since I saw him in something new, and so far he's being written well. It probably helps that what we've seen of his politics matches me reasonably well. :-)

This rant isn't productive (in fact, it might be counter-productive), but it sure is funny (so long as you don't mind coarse language). Link from buoren.

Seen while walking home Saturday: a car with blinkers on, being followed by two police cars with flashing lights but not sirens, all going about 30mph, and all running a red light at a busy intersection. If the police were escorting the car I would have expected one in front and one behind; if they were chasing the car, they weren't doing a very good job of it. There were plenty of places to pull over, so it wasn't a traffic stop in search of handy road-side. The whole procession turned a corner and I lost sight of them. How odd.

This weekend I read about a new (expensive) geek-appeal gadget, a robotic vacuum cleaner. It wanders around your house and automatically goes to the docking station to recharge or empty itself when needed. The review I saw said that it's slow -- its navigation isn't the greatest, so it might do a stretch several times before getting to parts it hasn't done yet -- but since it's the robot's time, the reviewer doesn't care. He was out running errands. :-) This sounds handy (though I do wonder how pets would view it). Now if they could just build the laundry robot, the shopping robot, and the kitchen-cleaning robot, life would be grand. (At $1500, I should clarify that this is wishful thinking, not a planned purchase.)

Shabbat morning we had another new torah reader (and new service leader, the mother of the torah reader). They both did good jobs and I think the mother, at least, will sign up to do this again (and even read torah). I am pleased by the progress our minyan is making, building participation one person at a time. We need to think about workshops or tutorials or something for people who lack self-confidence. (There are several people who I think would do just fine, but they don't think so yet.)

Today was the local SCA group's 12th-night event. It was a fun, low-key event, like many I remember from 20 years ago. This was the second year we've done it; I hope this establishes the tradition. :-) Free site (university), pot-luck feast, good mix of planned activities and schmooze time -- very pleasant and comfortable.

Mapquest says Pittsburgh to Cincinnati is a 4.5-hour drive (slightly under). Is that really right? I thought Pittsburgh to Columbus was close to four hours, and Cincinnati is a good deal beyond that. I thought Cincinnati would be 6 or 7 hours just from looking at a map.

My synagogue has each grade-school class run one service a year. This has been frustrating for me for a variety of reasons, but this year they made a change. Fourth and fifth grades are now having their services at the monthly "family" Shabbat service, rather than the primary congregational service, and all classes are being split into two services. (Some classes have 50+ kids, and that was just too crazy.)

Last night was the first of these modified services, and it went very well. It was much less chaotic, the kids got to do more, and it was more of a service than a pageant for the parents. And the younger grades, which are more problematic, are doing their services in a more supportive (for them) and less annoying (for the rest of us) environment. It's a win all around, I think.

When there's a bar or bat mitzvah (which is almost every week), that person participates a bit in the Friday service (kiddush and v'shamru). The girl who was bat mitzvah this Shabbat is really good -- good Hebrew pronunciation, good singing voice, and, most importantly, good kavanah. She seemed to really connect with the words she was saying; she was leading, not just performing. At the oneg I told her how impressed I am and that I hope she'll continue to be involved -- confirmation, youth group, etc.

This morning's service went well. For the second week in a row I successfully wound the torah scroll to the right point before the service; I'll learn my way around yet. :-) (Usually the rabbi does it, but both times I was there first and I guess I'm sort of the quasi-gabbai or something now, so I took a crack at it.)

Three of our upcoming Torah readers specifically signed up for their own bar/bat-mitzvah portions. Two are students (so this was fairly recent). None of them have committed to doing more than the one portion, but I hope at least some of them decide to stick with it. Right now I've got five people (including myself) who are "regulars", and several people who are doing it once and then will decide. (I'm not counting the rabbi, who reads in weeks without b'nei mitzvah. I think there are four of those in the next six months.) I'd like to have about eight regulars.

On my way to services Friday I ran into someone on the street who said "hey, aren't you a cantor at [congregation]?" I said I had led services there occasionally but now they've hired a professional (who, I said, is good), and he said flattering things about my work. That was pleasant. (He doesn't belong there either and goes only occasionally, but seems to have hit several of my services purely by accident.)

I've been reading a book called The Kiruv Files, about Jewish outreach. More about that later, but one observation now: one of us, either I or the Orthodox rabbis who wrote it, has a fundamental misunderstanding of Reform Judaism. The book takes a few swipes at Reform, predicated on the assumption that "all halacha is optional for you guys" (so therefore you can change the rules to suit your whims). Um, no. That Reform does not accept the system of halacha handed down to us, wholesale, and that Reform insists on personal autonomy, does not mean that we get to ignore it all. Many Jews do, of course (and not all of them call themselves Reform), but serious Reform Jews can and do accept some halachot as binding -- just as binding as traditional Jews do. This is why I do not work on Shabbat, why I keep kosher, why I pray in certain ways, and why I do or don't do bunches of other stuff. The problem, to the outsider, is that a different Reform Jew will have a different set of binding halachot.

Thursday night's board meeting included the quarterly financial review (budget vs actuals). The reports are getting clearer, in part due to requests from me. :-) And I see that a couple of our newer board members are very concientious (and nit-picky) in reviewing these things, which makes me happy. I'm in my last year; someone else has to be as anal-retentive for me, for continuity. :-) (I'm also on the nominating committee for the next round of board members, which should be interesting. That was announced Thursday.)

Tuesday lyev and I had a small dance workshop (no one else could make it) in which we reconstructed Belfiore (15th-century Italian) from first principles. It turns out that there is one ambiguity that I hadn't remembered from the last time I looked at this (with Rosina): do the three dancers start side-by-side, like in Petit Vriens, or in a single-file line? We had assumed the former, but one of the figures is difficult that way and there are references in the text to dancers "above" and "below" others (where we are not talking about vertical displacement with respect to the floor). We only had two dancers so couldn't try a complete implementation, but I can see the single-file line working. Eventually we'll be able to give it a shot, or lyev will get the Thursday dancers to try it. And I should check our notes from Joy and Jealousy now; I didn't want to do that before because it's actually been long enough that I've forgotten and this way I could come to it without (obvious) preconceptions.

Tonight we went to a restaurant that was so dimly lit that I actually had to take the menu to the front (lobby) area so I could read it. Argh! I'm not surprised by dim light from fancy and/or pretentious restaurants, where I guess the assumption is that you don't need to see your food and candles are romantic, but -- Outback? C'mon! I guess I should be on the lookout for a flashlight small enough to carry in a pocket; I think they make such things targetted for shining a light on your door locks at night; I would imagine that's designed to be fairly small.

The user interface on my watch could be better. I would not have guessed that the way to get it to stop chiming on the hour is to press and hold a certain button (nothing else involves holding buttons), nor would I have noticed that sometimes the colon between hours and minutes blinks and sometimes it doesn't. I had to hunt down the manual online to learn this, as the alternative was a day of inconvenient chirps.

Speaking of unfortunate user interfaces, the torah portion I'm learning for a few weeks from now comes in the middle of a long stretch without any paragraph breaks. I'm not looking forward to trying to find the beginning of it in the torah scroll. And just to add insult to injury, it starts off with a bit of a tongue-twister. But I'll get it, and it'll be good for me. Maybe next year I will remember that someone who has trouble with the sequence of phonemes in "Yitzchak" should avoid certain portions. :-)

Sunday night there were just four of us for dinner, and afterwards we broke out Dani's copy of Puerto Rico. (None of us had played before, though we'd all heard good reviews.) Interesting game, and by the end I was starting to understand some of the strategy. It's a Rio Grande game, so at its core it's an optimization problem.

Oh right; I must remember to cross out two letters in the enchilada recipe I used Sunday, in the phrase "ungreased casserole dish". Oops.

Today was long-awaited study with my rabbi (i.e. had to wait for the holidays to be over). Good session, about which I hope to write more later.

That's refreshing. On Sunday I ordered a couple of books from Amazon third-party sellers (neither urgent), and B5 second season from Amazon directly. Monday morning I received mail from one of the marketplace sellers telling me my book had shipped, and I got similar mail from the other Monday evening. (Both of these are books that I came out of the tikkun with recommendations for.)

Sunday afternoon we went to my niece's graduation party. The balance of guests was not what I expected. I was assuming there would be a flock of 17-year-olds and a smattering of folks our age, mostly relatives. As it turned out, the kids were all migrating among many parties, so at any given time the adults outnumbered the kids by, oh, 5 to 1 or so. (Graduation was Friday night, so this was probably the prime party weekend.)

Many of the adults were from the church choir (my father and Kim both sing in it). I noticed that most of the choir members were wearing red, so I asked my father about it. Sunday was Penticost, which I suppose I could have worked out on my own if I'd thought about it, and there is a tradition of wearing red for the holiday. (I think the reason had something to do with an association between the holy spirit and fire, but I didn't quite catch it. Education welcome.) I'm glad that the red shirt I pulled out of the drawer that morning had a spot of something on it (so it went to the laundry pile). I would have given an incorrect impression without meaning to. I much prefer that my incorrect impressions be planned. :-)

I found myself in the uncomfortable position of balancing kashrut concerns against being kind to my family. They went out of their way to make sure none of the side dishes contained dairy so I could eat the meat, when I would have preferred to stick to the dairy/veggie dishes instead. (They also made sure to put meat and cheese cold cuts on different platters, segregate the ham from the turkey, and so on.) I could see that I was going to upset my mother if I didn't eat the meat, though, so I did.

(I'll eat meat meals in my parents' home, and for that matter in my friends' homes, so long as the basics are observed (species, no dairy, etc). I want to be able to eat with my family and friends. In a situation where there's a variety of food, both meat and non-, however, I'll avoid the meat. Most parties are like that, for example.)

Sunday evening we had a lovely dinner with Ralph and Lori (mmm, brownies!) and then played a new-to-us card game that I've forgotten the name of. It was entertaining, whatever it was. It involves cards in rows and columns where you rotate cards to try to make edge patterns line up; if you do that you get to remove cards, which have point values. (The object is to maximize points.) There are enough unusual conditions to make the game interesting while not being so many to be hard to track. Most card games with individualized cards fall down on the latter point for me -- Magic, Illuminati, Chez whatever, etc.

Sometime during the evening it rained, which I didn't think much of at the time. I was surprised to come home to a dark house. Fortunately, we knew where the flashlights, candles, and mechanical alarm clock were, so this was not as inconvenient as it might have been. Pity I can't read by candlelight, though, but it was late enough that this wasn't a real hardship.

Panasonic scores points for at least one model of VCR. I'd noticed before that after brief power outages I had to reset the clock but the programming wasn't lost. A five-hour outage is more than the backup can handle, apparently, so this time the programming was lost -- and the VCR told me that in big letters on the screen. Definite UI points there for warning me that they'd violated an expectation I might have had. (Mind, I was going to check anyway, but still...)

Sigh. It turns out the other VCR did bite the dust in the power surge, but in a non-obvious way: it has signal, it has all its usual programmability... it has everything except the ability to actually move a tape. So I guess I'll be dubbing Twilight Zone off of the Enterprise tape each week, because I'm anal about keeping my tapes sorted.

On the bright side, I figured out how to dub tapes tonight. And on another bright side, I'm not sure the dubbed tape will be of lower quality than what the old VCR would have produced. (Seeing the end of last season's Enterprise while cuing up the tape for tonight made it really obvious that the old tapes don't look so great on the new TV.)

I had fun at Pennsic. It was relaxing -- I spent a lot of time just visiting with folks instead of doing stuff -- but I needed that.

The weather was fairly cooperative -- a couple storms, but nothing that forced us to pull down the dining flies. It was mostly sunny and dry. I got all the way to Thursday of the second week before I had to start taking my once-a-day allergy pills every 16 hours instead; last year I was having serious problems by Tuesday of the second week, and I even went home for one night just to get away from the allergens for a while. (Today I still apparently have to take the allergy pills more frequently -- residual effects, I guess. With luck, things will be back to normal tomorrow.)

We ended up breaking down the camp yesterday. I'm going to make a separate entry about that, because it had Shabbat implications that make me uncomfortable.

( some stuff I did )

( score! )

( architecture )

( mechanical woes )