Monica

Government 12 days of Christmas, from mortuus. Yup, sounds right.

Bruce Schneier observes that "password" is no longer the most common password; it's "password1". Who says users can't be trained? (Link from goldsquare, I think.)

Hebrew question: the word "lamdeini" means "teach us". Adding the suffix ("ni") seems to have changed "lameid" to "lamdei"; why? Why isn't this "lameidni"? Just because that sounds awkward, or for a grammatical reason I haven't yet met?

Packing report: if I were just going on the trip and there was nothing special about it, everything would fit in one checked bag and my backpack (small carryon). But if I want the option to bring anything back, that would be a bad idea. So, two checked bags, one small. (I've used the small one as a carryon, actually, but as long as I have to check anything, why shlep it through airports?)

Yay! In about 28 hours I'll be in Jerusalem! I'll miss Dani and the cats, but boy is this going to be fun!

There will be no time when it would be in compliance with both Jewish and federal laws for me to light the channukiah for the seventh night (tomorrow night). How peculiar. (We leave Newark at 3:50PM and it'll be morning when we get off the plane.)

Actually yesterday, but sometimes I'm slow. :-) ( image )

Quote of the day (heard from Dani): Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

Applying animal-training techniques to one's spouse -- must investigate this. :-) (From shalmestere.) Dang; failed to cache it before they took it down. Anyone recognize it and have a copy?

This year's Bulwer-Lytton contest (for the worst opening line of a novel).

New vocabulary (PDF), from a coworker. My favorite is: Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer. I also like: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Seen in a .sig file: "6.5013 is the natural logarithm of the Beast."

Quote of the day (a few days ago) from dglenn: "'kthxbye' is the pinnacle of English's advancement, shortening 'All correct, Thank you, God be with you.' into seven lowercase letters. Humanity is doomed." -- kaeru in Urban Dictionary

Cat meets bird, and the victor isn't a foregone conclusion (forwarded by dyanearden). I recommend against drinking while reading. This reminds me of something that happened to our Irish Setter (big, dumb dog) once: I watched a butterfly tease him for a good ten minutes, dive-bombing him but not quite far enough and then flying back up a few feet.

Speaking of animals: Pavlov's cat, from alice_curiouser.

I wonder how subcutaneous fluids are processed. If my cat isn't eating/drinking enough I can give him fluids, which don't enter through the mouth, but they exit the normal way -- which means somewhere inside the cat they enter the GI tract. My vet probably already thinks I'm weird, so I may as well ask her. :-) (What actually prompted this is the observation that, it appears, a dose of fluids can stimulate his appetite, almost as if the fluids were clearing out some blockage or something -- but how could they? And anyway, there shouldn't be any blockages; he had a blocked bile duct a few months ago and they both cleared it out and installed a much-larger bypass.)

We have an invitation for seder for the first night, from a fellow congregant. This is good; Dani knows the family, so he won't be among strangers, and they like to sing, and they're the sort of people who don't race through the haggadah to get to the meal. So everyone's happy -- yay! Second night is odd: as a Reform Jew I don't see the need for two-day yomim tovim, and Dani is secular, but he's used to two nights from his family (necessity of parental divorce) and I don't mind, so I may yet try to find us something. (I said "well, there's always Chabad" and he said "let me know how that goes for you", so I guess not that since the point would be to do something for him.) He's still opposed to just holding one ourselves.

My rabbi will be leading a trip to Israel at the end of this year. I'm thinking seriously of going. I'd like to see some of the place, and I'd love to do it with my rabbi -- so there'll be, y'know, some religious content, as opposed to just being a tourist. I'll have enough vacation time to do it, since most of the fall holidays have the decency to land on weekends this year, and a bonus I'll be getting at work removes any doubt about being able to afford it. It sounds like this will be a family-friendly but not family-obsessed trip; i.e., I won't feel like e fifth wheel. So I don't see a down-side here, and I think it would be an exciting experience.

Short takes:

This comic reminded me of some cats I've known...

Hold my beer, a look at washroom multitasking (not safe for work), from brokengoose.

Sometimes I am too optimistic when it comes to other drivers. I left work at 6 tonight, expecting to go home (not quite four miles away), feed the cats, take care of a few other things, and then drive over to my synagogue (a mile away) for a 7:00 meeting. Heh. Right. It took more than half an hour to go the first mile. The roads in question weren't icy, just wet. I should have known better, I guess.

My bathroom scale isn't accurate enough to weigh Erik, but it feels like his ribs are getting less prominent. He's still bony and underweight, but I think he's gaining. I hope so. We have an appointment with the vet on Monday where I'll find out. (On average he's been eating 7-8oz of canned food per day. More on the weekends and sometimes less on weekdays, because it works better in small doses every few hours.)

I've been at my synagogue for something every day for the last week. We just interviewed a candidate for a rabbinical position, which is a big part of that. That's been an educational process for me.

In a few weeks our comapny's network configuration will change in major ways. One change is that we'll be using an Exchange server for mail instead of our current IMAP server. (No, we don't get a vote on this.) So all of us who have been using other mailers have to move to Outlook, and we're being smart and doing that part of it before the server change. It'll be fine in the end, but I keep feeling like I've just moved five years' worth of mail and now I can't find anything. (I had to move all of my saved mail onto the server so I could then download it into Outlook, as no direct translation path existed.) On the bright side, the tech-support person the company sent to get everyone configured was one of the most fun I've worked with. I'm pretty sure she's a Unix user when her employer isn't looking; she definitely groks geeks.

Seen in a locked entry: "You know you're living in 2006 when... you pull into your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in your groceries." Guilty. :-) Hey, calls between our phones are free...

A lab report that's more honest than most (link from ian_gunn).

The Slow Crash argues that civilization will fall not with a bang but with a whisper (link from brokengoose). I'm reminded of one episode of the short-lived Dilbert TV show where there was some sort of economic crash and the very next day everything looked like a scene out of the middle ages. It was a nice spoof.

First the serious one (from unspace): a conscious woman on life support, who happened to be poor and non-white, was removed from a respirator against her will, which is legal in Texas due to a law that Bush signed. Where were the outraged statements from the White House and Congress this time?

Also from unspace: JMS is compiling books of his B5 scripts for sale. It appears that they'll have extra commentary and stuff. I didn't explore far enough to find prices, but I assume they're up there.

And now some lighter stuff:

Compiled religious wisdom from aliza250 (short) should appeal to the geeks reading this.

grouchyoldcoot's struggle with a Christmas tree made me laugh out loud for several minutes.

In context this made perfect sense. Out of context, I'm glad no managers were walking by at the time.

"Well, if you don't want to do incest, nepotism will work."

(A coworker needed to cons up a relationship diagram with doubly-linked nodes, like a spouse who's also a sibling or a child who's also an employee...)

We had dinner with ralphmelton and lorimelton last night. We hadn't seen them since before Pennsic, so it was nice to spend part of an evening together. And yum, grilled angel-food cake with fruit chutney. :-)

osewalrus on why I blame the administration for the Katrina disaster. He says a lot of good things here.

Apparently the rumor I heard this afternoon is true; CPOF will be used in hurricane recovery. I wonder if the collected data and the Underwater Railroad can play well together.

On a much lighter note, Baptist or Anabaptist? made me laugh out loud. Thanks, patsmor.

This letter, supposedly from the Duke of Wellington in 1812, is a beautifully-written response to bureaucracy. (Link from Dani.) I must cache this now that I work for a more bureaucratic employer.

Great. My car has a heisenbug. The pesistent warning light failed to persist through today (it cut out on the way home from work on Friday). I called the dealership to ask if my inability to demonstrate the problem would preclude their exam, and they said yes. So I didn't have it looked at tonight. And I have no idea if the problem is gone temporarily, gone never to return, or a sign of a burned-out indicator. I'm going to assume not the last, for now.

Speaking of bugs, the cable connecting the DVD player to the TV is not at fault. Drat. The guy at Radio Shack, after applying a testing gadget, described it as "astonishingly good". I don't have either a spare TV or a spare DVD player to debug with, but the DVD player is more portable so I'll start there. Aside: the set of connections on the back of the TV only slightly resembles the picture in the manual, and they're not labelled. Whee. I might have noticed that earlier had the folks who delivered the TV not also wired everything up for me.

My new SDK developer started work today (yay!). I anticipated and planned for a bunch of possible problems. The only one I missed was network failures with the computer she'd be using. Oops. It's kind of hard to fetch things from various internal web sites without a good network connection. Fortunately, we got that fixed before I resorted to burning CDs. (This is a temporary, floater, machine, as the one we actually ordered for her is apparently still on a truck somewhere.)

sanpaku on a certain class of PS2 games: Honey. You don't really think that fantasizing about blowing people's heads off in the mall could ever take the place of you, do you? Just wait over there while I run over this hooker.

For his birthday I bought Dani a klein bottle. It was a definite hit. :-) The documentation it came with was well-done, too -- definitely as entertaining as the bottle itself. (Why yes, of course I read the paperwork and carefully inspected the bottle before wrapping it up for him. :-) )

The web site is lots of fun too. Be sure to check out the spin-off products, like the "cutting edge jigsaw puzzles".

Dani hasn't said yet whether he's going to apply the calibration decal it came with. You know -- 0, 0, 0, 0... :-)

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, see this explanation from their web site.)

A discussion at work this afternoon reminded me of this episode from a previous company.

Word from On High had come down that all employees would fill out timesheets (reasonable), but that all timesheets would show 8 hours per day, 5 days per week billed to our assigned projects no matter what. (Except vacations and holidays, which were to be reported correctly.) We were mostly engineers who pronounced that Utterly Stupid, but we were not able to prevail. Truth didn't matter; we were required to do this. To this day I do not know why.

But it gets worse. There was an electronic form to fill out, but then we had to print the page out, sign it, and turn it in. No, a digital signature was not acceptable. Rumor had it that the unlucky administrative assistant who ended up with all this paper then hand-entered the hours in a different time-tracking system. I kid you not.

But it gets worse. The electronic form had the world's worst user interface. There were no keyboard shortcuts (not even tab), and there was a lot of fiddling to do in order to be able to record this boilerplate text. It was making my wrist hurt. Every single week. And it was quite possible that that data wasn't even being used except to produce the paper copy.

So I rebelled, quietly. I printed out one week's timesheet. I made a stack of photocopies and hand-corrected the dates to give myself a good supply. In an effort to show just how much contempt I had for this system, I signed the original before the photocopying. And then, each Friday, I dutifully handed in my timesheet without further complaint.

I got away with this for two months and then someone noticed. I was told that I must bring the database up to date immediately and that henceforth I was to follow the rules. Because, I was told, if I didn't record fresh hours each week, it would be obvious that the timesheets I was handing in were bogus. !!!

The prospect of bringing the database up to date bode ill for my wrist. (Yes, I had asked for UI changes way back in the beginning. I was not the only one asking. We didn't get them.) Fortunately, my group had acquired a keyboard-macro package for other reasons. So I wrote a macro for "fill out timesheet" and commenced to use it every week. I did this openly. It even printed the form for me. Apparently it was not ok to use pre-fab photocopies to report the information I had been told to report (regardless of truth), but it was ok to use a macro to do so.

It gets better. I mentioned my solution to the head of another group, whose eyes lit up. He asked about the keyboard-macro package and I told him what it was. We had ordered the package to assist with the UI of a desktop-publishing application; he had no such excuse. But he didn't care about that; when he requisitioned the software for his group, as the reason he gave "for filling out timesheets". He got the software.

Later, on the eve of the company's demise for other reasons, many of us found other responses. My favorite was reporting job-hunting time as "system administration: networking".