Monica

On the way to Thanksgiving dinner we found ourselves wondering what happens to the turkey that the US president pardons each year. We were both under the impression that the president is presented with two turkeys, one of which gets pardoned and one of which becomes dinner. I said I thought the pardoned bird went to a zoo or some such, and that it would be wrong for it to go back to the farm where it could become somebody else's dinner.

We talked about the similarity to the two goats on Yom Kippur, one of which becomes an offering and the other of which is sent to Azazel. I pointed out that neither of those goats gets out alive (though they at least serve a holy function), and said I didn't think the turkeys worked like that.

When we got home I looked it up, and found that we were both wrong on several points. (I blame that West Wing episode, though perhaps my mistaken impression predated it and I shouldn't.)

The president is presented with one turkey, not two. There is a backup turkey, in case something unfortunate happens to the first one. (Still on the goat theme: like the backup wife for the high priest on Yom Kippur? Topic for another day...)

This turkey is presented by the National Turkey Federation. (Today I learned that there is a national turkey federation.) This started in the 1940s, apparently as tribute. They ate the turkeys until sometime in the 70s, when presidents started sparing them. The regular ceremonial pardon started with Bush the First (though it also says Reagan pardoned one).

I hadn't thought about this at all, but there is a selection process where a pool of candidate turkeys is filtered on not only size and appearance but also tolerance of loud noises, flashes, and large crowds.

And yes, the turkeys end up at various places where they will not become food.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, someone shared a link to a blog post from Zoe Chant, who -- because we were all suddenly in lockdown and dealing with extra stress -- offered a free e-book of hers to anyone who asked. I asked, she described a few options, and I chose Dragon of Glass, the first book in what would be the Fae Shifter Knights series. I loved it and got each of the following books as they came out. The fourth and final book just came out a few weeks ago, so I'm finally getting around to writing about them.

As implied by "fae", the knights (one per book) are from another world or realm. They're transported, one at a time, into modern-day Earth, and have to learn about magical cooling boxes and lights without flames and smartphones and television -- and social conventions. I enjoyed the fish-out-of-water aspect, laughing not infrequently. It would be easy for this to be overdone, but it's not.

The knights were one fighting band on the other side, where their world fell to evil magical beings. Somehow, during their final battle, they were frozen in glass and sent into our world. (That's explained, but it would be a spoiler.) Each knight has a corresponding person in our world, a "key", who can help unlock that knight's magic (which is greatly diminished in our world). Each of the four books focuses on one of the knights while contributing to the overall story. When I started reading Dragon of Glass I thought I was getting some light-hearted fluff, but there's more depth to the series and I found the larger story engaging.

As implied by "shifter", each knight has an alternate, magical form -- dragon, unicorn, gryphon, firebird. (When they were frozen in glass, it was in those forms, at the size of tree ornaments. The set got broken up; part of the quest for the knights and keys already here is to find the other ornaments.)

Aside: There is a whole genre of "shifter romance" that I was largely unaware of two years ago. These books, and many of Zoe Chant's other books, are in this genre. There are definitely romantic elements (and some sex scenes), but as someone who's not really into romances, I didn't find it overdone or intrusive. It was just part of the story -- not the reason for the story like (as I understand it) with some mainstream romances.

The knights have a leader and mentor, a "fable" -- not a fairy, as the character keeps insisting. (At a foot tall and with wings, you can understand the confusion.) As a reader I had more trouble connecting with this character than with the knights and keys, though the fable does get some funny, snarky lines. (Part of my problem is a personal one: the number mismatch of singular "they" trips me up as a reader, every time, even when I know who the referent is. My brain treats it as a runtime exception or something. I've tried to overcome it, but have not yet succeeded.)

The final book, Firebird of Glass, was heavier than the others (as was the end of the third book). The series has been building toward a final confrontation (the forces that took over the knights' world want ours too), and at times the book is sombre and grim. When I started the book I had predictions, expectations, of how this final confrontation was going to end; partway through the book I developed different predictions -- and in the end the author surprised me with something I never saw coming but that felt right.

I enjoyed the series, and I think some of you would, too.

Here in Pittsburgh, voting by mail in 2020 and in this year's primary was smooth for me. Ballots were mailed in time, the process was smooth, tracking worked. Naturally I assumed that for the minor off-year election today, the same would be true. Boy was I wrong.

My ballot was spoiled on arrival. It had my name printed on it (uh, secret ballot anyone?) along with a bar code. It was printed across part of the ballot, obscuring some candidate names. There were no return envelopes, neither the secrecy envelope nor the outer one with identifying info (the one you mail). Just this misprinted ballot in an envelope sent to me.

I visited the URL printed on that envelope and submitted a support ticket. Crickets. Later I called the phone number listed there. When I finally reached a human, the person said "oh you've reached the state; you need your county". So I tried to track them down. No luck.

It was now a week before the election. No time for a replacement ballot to arrive and be received back. I looked up how to vote in person (and confirmed their Covid protocols).

I want to interject that the people at my polling place today were great. This isn't their fault. They did everything they could to deal with this problem not of their making.

I learned this morning that this ballot misprinting happened to other people too. Mine was the first case in my precinct at my polling place, so they had to look up the instructions for handling a surrendered mail-in ballot. I had brought everything I received, as instructed. I filled out the form. Then they saw in their documentation that I had to hand over the ballot and the two return envelopes. The return envelopes I never got. We all agreed that my name being printed right on the ballot ought to confirm my ID for validation purposes (that's why they want the outer envelope, where my name should have been printed), but we didn't feel safe relying on logic. This is government, after all.

They offered to escalate so I could vote now but said that could take a while -- how long could I wait? I was on my way to work (I now go to the office one day a week). Fortunately my workplace is flexible that way, but I still didn't have another hour to spend on this at the time. I considered leaving and coming back after work, but figured anybody who could help worked 9-4 or something like that and wouldn't be available anyway.

So I cast a provisional ballot. I'm assured it will be counted some days hence. I have a tracking number. This still feels very wrong.

Even though my vote will probably be counted, even though it probably doesn't make a difference this time, I feel disenfranchised. What happens in the mid-terms next year when people are more motivated to place hurdles in front of voters? What happens to voters who are likely targets (like immigrants) or have mobility challenges or who lack confidence in standing up for their rights? I'm a white professional in the heart of a very blue city (albeit in a purple state) who had the time and perseverance to try to chase this down after the bad ballot arrived. I have way more advantages than many, and I failed. What hope did others have?

The problem wasn't at the state level where most of the attention is, and it wasn't actual election tampering as far as I can tell. It was an error made by the county that affected an unknown number of people. Nobody's watching counties in all the election shenanigans. I'm in Allegheny County, not voter-suppression-ville. This was an accident, but I couldn't get it corrected.

Brr.

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Trope Trainer is a software package for working with Hebrew cantillation (trope). You can use it to view, listen to, or print the weekly Torah reading (or parts thereof), weekday readings, holiday readings, etc. As the "trainer" in the name implies, one of its purposes is to teach the cantillation system -- or, I should say, systems, because there are regional and other variations.

I didn't use it for that because I already know (my community's) cantillation system; while occasional curiosity might lead me to ask it "hey, how does the Lithuanian tradition chant this?", in practice I haven't. No, what I use Trope Trainer for is to print legible copies with the vowel markers and trope markers. These are useful for practicing and, when I know in advance so I can print it, for checking the reader during the service, because the scroll used for readings does not have vowels and trope marks. (There is always somebody following along during a Torah reading to correct the reader in case of mistakes.)

Back in August, somebody in my minyan asked me to be his checker the following Shabbat, so I launched the program to print a copy. But the program was stuck at "checking for updates", a state that had previously passed so quickly that I wasn't used to seeing it. If I cancelled, the program crashed. Repeatedly. A little digging revealed the probable cause: the company went out of business and their domain isn't there any more. Presumably the software is checking a now-dead URL and the programmers didn't handle failures. (There are other reasons the service might not be available, so this isn't just "didn't consider the company might die".)

I asked on Judaism Codidact about alternatives and people made some useful suggestions, but cutting/pasting text from elsewhere into Google Docs, while it works, is inelegant and also produced some formatting glitches.

My too-clever hind-brain said to me: hey, if the software is trying to reach a particular URL, you could intercept it (edit the hosts file) and then try to figure out what to send back (though you would have to learn how to write a web service, but hey, that seems doable?). This is the point where people who know more than I do say things like "Wireshark", which I installed but couldn't figure out how to use to identify what it was trying to contact. I asked for clues on Power Users, where someone helpfully asked what the program does if it's not connected to the Internet. Bingo -- the programmers didn't anticipate "our site is down" but did anticipate "not connected", presumably because some in the observant world do avoid the Internet.

But this required pulling the network cable, because apparently there's no way on a Mac to say "yes I know you have an Ethernet cable right there, but please humor me and ignore it". I don't want to pull the cable every time I need Trope Trainer; that's too coarse a solution. This is a job for a firewall, but the firewall built into Mac OS only intercepts inbound traffic (or responses to it). I needed to block initiation of outbound traffic from one specific application. Power Users led me to Lulu, which does the job nicely -- and seems useful anyway as an additional layer of defense against malware that phones home (which is most of it, right?). Also, I don't mind having to authorize Java updates and stuff like that.

I didn't want to rely on a hobbled Trope Trainer forever, so I started working my way through the weekly portions, saving PDFs. In the future I can print from those, after all, and can let the software die.

And then I moved to a new machine that can't run the software, which dealt the final blow to Trope Trainer. But going through all this did lead me to that useful firewall, so I don't mind.

My synagogue hired a cantor for the high holy days. (We don't currently have one otherwise.) He's a friendly fellow, obviously very experienced, and very "performative" -- which some people liked but isn't to my taste. (I felt like I was at the theatre.) Unfortunately it's not just a matter of taste; elaborate chazzanut that you can only listen to is fine in a traditional setting, where it's in the cantor's repetition of the central prayer, but the Reform movement did away with repetitions. When there's only one trip through the prayer, everyone saying it together, and it's being led in a way that precludes me saying it, that's a problem. After Rosh Hashana evening and morning were like that, I decided not to go back. (I later skimmed the video of the second-day Rosh Hashana service, which started as a minyan-style service but drifted, and it was more of the same.)

For Yom Kippur I went to Chabad, like I did last year. Night and day -- I felt included from the moment I walked in, I was able to focus on the kavanah, intentions, behind the prayers, the more elaborate melodies didn't impede my own prayer because they were separate from it, a lot of the singing was accessible even with unfamiliar-to-me melodies, and there was plenty of way-finding (page numbers, quick explanations, etc) so people didn't get lost.

All are welcome, all included, on Yom Kippur, the machzor (special prayerbook) says, even transgressors, even that guy. Even me. The incense burned in the temple had many nice-smelling ingredients and one bad-smelling one (forgot the name, haven't looked for it yet) -- and the incense was invalid without all the ingredients. A congregation that excludes someone on the day of atonement is doing it wrong.

In the Al Cheit (confession of sins, really more like errors or "missing the mark"), there's one the rabbi commented on that I think isn't in the Reform machzor -- "the sin I have committed before you with a confused heart". There've already been confessions about intentional and unintentional sins, but this one is a little different -- it's saying that we can act with the best of intentions but still miss the mark because of the information or context we (don't) have. Our increasingly-radicalized society (and I blame extremists at both ends here) will cast someone as a villain for stumbling or for being a little different, but God will understand and Jewish teachings are full of instructions to presume good intent and judge others favorably. It seems entirely fitting that the Yom Kippur prayerbook does so too, even in the midst of listing serious sins that are wilful and wrong.

We ask for relief from many things -- famine, war... mageifah, plague. Yeah, that jumped out at me again this year.

God wants praise from us messy, sinning humans more than from perfect angels, says the machzor.

The final service of the day, Ne'ilah, talks about the gates of prayer closing at the end of the day. The liturgy has this urgency to get one last prayer in before they close. The picture I've always had in my mind is of us petitioners standing outside, pushing our messages through as the gates close before us. The rabbi said that the Chabad interpretation (I don't remember who he said it in the name of, sorry -- long day) is that the people are inside the gates, which are closing so we can have some alone-time with God without the pressures of the world. Or something like that. I'm not sure this idea really matches up with the liturgy, but it's an interesting alternate framing and since the whole thing is allegorical anyway, having different perspectives 24-25 hours into a fast helped me.

Chabad sure does say a lot of psalms. I couldn't usually figure out why.

I felt so warm, so welcomed, so included. The rabbi knows my background, and he welcomes me anyway. Like the transgressor. Like the smelly incense. Like a member of his own community -- and maybe, someday, mine too. (There are barriers both theological and practical, but there are also barriers where I am now, so... who knows?)

I am starting to think new-phone thoughts, and I'm looking for some meta-advice: advice about traits and how to research stuff more than specific models. (The latter are welcome too, but my questions are a litlte higher-level.)

One of my strongest concerns is about size, both physically and digitally. My current phone has the following stats:

• Dimensions: 151.7 x 75 x 7.9 mm
• Display size: 5.5 inches, 82.2 cm2 (~72.2% screen-to-body ratio)
• Resolution (this is very unusual): 1440 x 2560 pixels, 16:9 ratio (~538 ppi density)

In recent years phones have reverted to worse-than-2:1 aspect ratios. They've reinvented candybars, dammit. But maybe that's ok, if I can still see stuff. So, can I?

I almost always use my phone in portrait mode, as I think most people do. I don't watch movies; I read text. Web pages, mostly. That text needs to be able to be wide enough to be comfortable to read, and for web sites to not break if (when) I need to zoom. For context, on my current phone I have Chrome text scaling at 110% (minimum size, starting from whatever their default is), and "force enable zoom" because some web developers are rude that way.

The aspect ratios I'm seeing on modern phones are generally in the range of 1080:2400, give or take a bit. That 1080 width is significantly smaller than my current width of 1440. I assume that just means that, for phones of equal physical width, my phone is just packing in a lot more pixels per inch, so the display is a little crisper. I don't think I've seen pixel densities that high on specs I've looked at.

Pixels, schmixels, maybe: I don't know why this matters. Does it? I would naively expect that lower pixel density means a little more blurriness, but since I have to zoom most things to see them at all, do I care?

But there's a wrinkle. In order to get that physical width, with the change in aspect ratios I'd need to accept a phone that's about a centimeter longer. I'm concerned about pockets. Women, especially curvy women, if you carry a larger phone in your pants pocket, what's the secret? I assume that "butt-dialing" is just a figure of speech and folks don't actually carry phones in back pockets, right? (I tried putting mine there and it felt both uncomfortable and unsafe.)

So at current aspect ratios, I need to either settle for a narrower phone, raising questions about whether that width can meet my vision needs, or accept a longer phone, and figure out how to test that with front pockets of my jeans and chinos, because buying a whole new wardrobe to accommodate a phone is ridiculous. Phone in pants pocket is a hard requirement: purses, belt pouches, backpacks, "on the desk next to you", and dresses are unacceptable solutions. I want the safety of having it actually on my person (harder to separate from me), and I want to be able to feel vibrations because most of the time the sound is turned off in public. (Granted, "in public" has been rare of late, but I hope my next phone outlasts the current restrictions.)

Other factors besides size:

• I want this phone to last for a few years, so 5G seems prudent. All the 5G phones except iPhones seem to be huge?
• I'm pretty solidly on Team Android. I'm not a fan of either Apple or Google when it comes to how they treat people, but I'm less of a fan of Apple and I'm already used to Android. (Also, my tablet is Android.)
• I take pictures sometimes, and am even trying to learn to use the non-default settings on the camera, but "has a camera that doesn't stink" is likely to be good enough. Lots of phones these days hype their super-megapixel 4-lens cameras; I don't think I care. If I should care, please clue me in.

Does anybody make a phone that might meet my requirements with a more pleasant aspect ratio (and thus form factor for vision and pockets)? Short of reading specs for phones one at a time, how can I find out? Searching for things like "5g android 16:9 2021" isn't producing hits.

I have an open-source project I am very enthusiastic about (Codidact). Mostly my role does not involve the code directly: I'm the community lead (i.e. primary talker-with-people-who-use-it and triager of feature requests), and I do some design of features, workflows, wireframes, internal documentation, and stuff like that. And I beat up on the test server a lot when there's work in progress to poke at. We have infrastructure to support all that.

But sometimes I'd like to get a little closer to the code, mostly for my own education and partly so I can maybe help do smaller things because our team is pretty small still. And there was that one time that I really wanted to fix a front-end bug that I admitted was limited in scope; it was bothering me, but not something to drag a developer off of something else for. And it was in the Javascript code, which I can bumble my way through, so ok, I figured, I can do this. (And there was that weird thing about dates in Javascript, but I digress.) But I didn't have a dev environment to test it with, and ended up putting it in a userscript to test and then asking somebody else to plug it in for real, which meant I needed help from one of the developers after all, and I shouldn't be that lame.

My Mac with its older operating system is not compatible with some library or other that we use (details forgotten; I just remember the long setup sequence that ultimately failed). And people said "why not update your OS?" and I said "ha ha no" -- not going to break what's working on a machine I depend on. Clearly, what I need is an inexpensive dev environment somewhere, maybe something I could connect to remotely or maybe outdated-but-more-current-than-mine hardware that would be good enough for this purpose.

I went to the elves for counsel, and one suggestion was a cheap AWS instance (considered it), and then our team lead said "a Raspberry Pi would be fine". And lo, Raspberry Pis are cheap, but they're also aimed at the do-it-yourselfers, and to say that I am not a hardware tinkerer would be an understatement. I am not at al enamored of the "ooh, let's take a bunch of parts and build a fabulous machine!" project; I just want a working machine. I will spend money to keep more of my hair attached to my head. I said this to our lead, who said "here's a place that'll sell you all the stuff including a pre-loaded operating system, but you have to put it into the case yourself", and I said "deal".

My box of Pi stuff came, but did not include any assembly documentation and there were a few things I was mystified about. (I had a package of heat sinks but no clue what to do with them, for instance. They were three different sizes, so I thought it was a general package from which I was supposed to choose one. Got that sorted.) With some further help from the elves I was able to sort out what goes where, and this afternoon I assembled it all, pulled out a spare monitor that I knew spoke HDMI because it still had an HDMI cable dangling from it... and found that the other end of that cable was not HDMI but some older fatter connector type with pins (yeah I've lost track of video-connector history), and I do not in fact have a spare monitor with an HDMI port.

But wait, I said. Surely in the vast world of gadgets and connectors and adapters, there is a thingie that lets you plug in two HDMI cables, maybe because you need a longer cable (extension-cord style). And lo, this is a thing, and when my $5 part arrives I will be able to set all this up and see if it works.

It's always something, isn't it?

(I believe that, longer-term, I will be able to set this up so that I can connect to it remotely, from a few feet away, and it won't need its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least most of the time. But for now, it can have a corner of the desk to get up and running until I learn how to do that.)

I see one more benefit to doing all this, one that's not about Codidact. Someday I will need to replace my primary machine, as all hardware goes the way of dinosaurs eventually, and I'm not sure I want to keep buying into the Mac ecosystem. I moved from Windows to Mac some time back (the Windows option at the time was Vista), and maybe I will move from Mac to Linux next time. I'm comfortable on the Linux command line, but am unfamiliar with the Linux GUI setup. This seems a way for me to explore that world some.

I received a (paper) letter today from a health provider I use routinely. It said that in an internal audit they found that they had overcharged me, and so were enclosing a check for the over-payment.

It was for $0.02.

Did crediting my account not even occur to them? Or is there some law that requires them to send a refund, even when it produces silly results?

There's probably some interesting psychology in my response. Charities (that spend more money on fundraising than on their stated causes) sometimes send physical letters with coins visibly taped to them, I guess to get people to open the envelope. I open the ones with nickels and dimes but toss the ones with pennies. But I scanned the check.

I planted sweet banana peppers for the first time this year (one plant). The wisdom of the Internet (TM) says to harvest them when they're yellow. Some say not until they're turning red, but that seems to be about hot banana peppers, not sweet.

"Harvest when they're yellow" -- that sounds so straightforward. Nobody seems to be more specific. Bright yellow? Yellow with no hint of green? Mostly yellow? So yellow you can see the orange coming in? Is there a second measure I can use to disambiguate, maybe something about how it feels?

The oldest of these (the large one in the center) is more yellow than green but isn't boldly yellow, so I assume I should wait.

(Meanwhile, the cherry tomatoes that have been on their plant for a couple weeks are still green. This feels late, but it's probably not the same variety as last year. Labeling was off last year so I don't really know what I had.)

We're hiring, so I've had recent occasion to see a hiring "dark pattern". I don't know how widespread this is outside of the tech industry, but I see it a lot in tech and it needs to stop.

The pattern: asking for "number of years of experience in (insert tool, language, or skill here)".

Jobs are multi-faceted. I'm seeing people who don't know how to choose a number, and just as I see the ones that overshot, I know there must be ones who undershot and were filtered out. I saw a resume recently from someone with a broad role, who listed "N years experience" in something where N was the length of the job, even though the job involved many other things and wasn't primarily about that skill. That's "N years of experience" in the same way that I have "20 years of Java experience". Spoiler alert: I don't.

Recruiters and hiring managers put people in this position: we have this checklist, tell us how many years of each, and we need a number not an explanation. Maybe we're making you fill out a web form and you can't even add a comment or ask questions. In the absence of guidance about primary and secondary skills, people will apply different weighting factors. It's a mess.

I often don't know how to answer either. In the last four years I've gained four years of tech-writing experience, the focus of my job, and four years of git experience, meaning I have all the basics and can untangle a merge conflict (but I've never rebased successfully). Those "four"s don't mean the same thing; I don't spend all day using git. Tech writing is fundamental to my role and I'd have no qualms about fully claiming those four years, but for git I would want to say that I've used it as part of my job for four years. That's different. I don't have the same knowledge that an infrastructure person whose job revolves around maintaining git servers and stuff for the same amount of time has. "How many years of experience?" questions don't allow for that nuance.

People who are trying to be thoughtful and honest run the risk of getting filtered out, and people who count "everything" get filtered in. I wonder how the success rate (meaning "acceptable hire", since you'll never know if you got the "best hire") of this exercise compares to recruiters just not filtering on skill-specific numbers at all (just general experience) and having the hiring team evaluate more people. I'm fortunate enough to be sufficiently "long in the tooth" that I don't need to worry about this gatekeeping -- either you're looking for a top-notch tech writer with all that implies, or you aren't -- but this hurts early-career people where the difference between "2" and "4" can make or break a deal.

As for the Java: I spent years documenting and helping to design Java APIs, wrote some examples, but haven't written anything deep and complicated. Someone with a year or two of full-time actual Java development experience beats me. Would the recruiter be able to tell?

Last year's container garden was reasonably successful, so I decided to try again this year. I'd wanted to grow more vegetables, but didn't find container-suitable ones for the most part. If I find cucumbers that can grow in a pot I'm still up for adding that; I'd need to get another pot but I have potting soil left over so I'm good there.

This year's seedlings are: one cherry tomato (down from two last year, but with better planning for growth from the beginning), one banana pepper, two basil (larger pots than last year), two rosemary (in retrospect probably only needed one), and one each of oregano, cilantro, dill, and mint. The mint is in the substandard pot because my understanding is that mint will eek out a life in a mere patch of dirt and then try to take over the world from there. So I figure it can handle the not-as-good drainage in that pot -- maybe it'll see it as a challenge! -- and if not, I'm out three bucks. I've already made back the cost of the cilantro, basil, and dill seedlings (though not their potting soil), compared to grocery-store prices for little plastic containers of fresh(ish) herbs.

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We have a widget on our site that displays the current Hebrew date. We're using HebCal's REST API to get the data, which comes back a month at a time -- JSON blob that has one entry for each day, with the secular date, the Hebrew date, and some other information. We use the Javascript Date class to get today's date, extract a string of the right format from that, and look up "today" in that returned collection. Easy, right? The API documentation for Date makes a point of saying that it uses local time, not UTC, which is what we want.

(Because the Hebrew day actually starts at sundown the previous day, we've got some "best effort" code in there that starts the day at 8PM. Not ideal, but we're not looking up local sunsets and suchlike... We also display something like "22 Sivan (Tuesday night and Wednesday)" to make it clear.)

Yeah ok, so we have the local date, and we need to look up an entry in the calendar data. Dates there use ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). So we get our Date object, which is supposed to be local, and call toISOString() on it.

Guess what. Date.toISOString does not use the local time. FFS. I've been banging my head against a wall for two hours thinking it was something more esoteric, maybe having to do with that "start at 8PM" code (which I had actually commented out to eliminate that possibility). I finally went to an online Javascript tester, one of those sites where you can type in code and run it, and confirmed that right now today.toISOString() says it's June 2 but today.getDay() says it's June 1.

So now I have to write Google for code that constructs the proper format for the local time, which is down to padding numbers with leading zeros if the month or day number is less than 10 and string-munging and...ugh. (Found it easily enough, but sheesh!)