cellio | Entries tagged with misc

My synagogue is trying to recreate holiday services using video and Zoom, and they asked me if for Simchat Torah I would be willing to do hagbah, the lifting of the torah, recorded in advance. I did that this morning. This means picking up an open torah scroll by the bottoms of the two support rods (spread a couple feet apart), holding it overhead, and turning around in a circle so everyone can see it. Because it's Simchat Torah, the scroll is rolled all the way to one side or the other (we read the very end and then the very beginning, from two different scrolls). They gave me the D'varim one, meaning all the weight was on the "wrong" hand for me, but it was fine. (There's a trick; you don't just lift but push off from the edge of the desk and put physics to use.) The scroll weighs probably 25 pounds -- not super-heavy, but awkward. So lots of people decline this honor, but I can do it if I'm careful and don't rush it.

This afternoon a package was mistakenly delivered to our porch. I picked it up, said "um no", and walked to the neighbor's house to see if anyone was home to come get it. No answer. The package was large and awkward, not too heavy -- I could lift it just fine and could have carried it across a flat surface fine, but I wasn't confident of open steps. Probably weighed about 25 or 30 pounds. As I was walking back into our house (thinking to fetch paper to leave them a note) I saw Dani and told him what had happened -- and he went out and delivered it.

So I guess that's strong 1, weak 1, net 0 for the day? Can't help thinking I should have been able to deliver that box, though.

A few days ago I was musing elsewhere about some online elections. Specifically, Stack Exchange has been running elections to replace all the moderators who have quit, and it's highlighting some weaknesses in their election scheme. Ranked voting is much better than "first past the post" but you still have to put the right checks in place.

If your election system uses ranked voting, think about how voters can reject candidates. The Hugo awards have "no award" as an automatic candidate in each category and you rank all candidates. My local SCA group lets you mark candidates as not acceptable and any who get 35% NA are removed, which gives the voters a veto when needed. Systems in which you pick N candidates lack this safety check.

"Cast N votes" doesn't let you distinguish between "this candidate is ok but not in my top N" and "I oppose this candidate". And even if you allow "not acceptable" marks on candidates (like my SCA group), you still need to allow ranking those candidates so voters can express "the clueless candidate before the evil one". If I recall correctly, my SCA group gets that part wrong; if you vote "not acceptable" you can't also rank the candidate, so you can't express degrees of unacceptability. If your goal is to deter NA votes that's a positive; if your goal is to elect people who are broadly acceptable then it's a negative.

Stack Exchange uses "cast three ranked votes" and now allows uncontested elections, so the only way for a community to reject a candidate is to round up more candidates. Because Stack Exchange royally screwed some things up with its communities, recently there have been newly-elected moderators who'd only been users for a few months. A candidate in one election is largely inactive (and said so).

The new and mostly-inactive users might be fine people, but in the past the bar was higher -- moderators were expected to have been regular, positive contributors for a while. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess; SE has lost a ton of mods in the last year for good reasons that still apply, but they don't want to admit there's anything wrong. So it's important to them to have bodies in seats.

Every voting system has flaws. When choosing, you need to decide which flaws are ok, which you actually prefer, and which must be prevented. Ranking all candidates, allowing an NA mark or "no award", and applying an threshold is more expressive than "rank N" but also carries more voter burden. Too complex? Depends on the characteristics of the electorate and the importance of the results, I guess.

Codidact isn't going to mandate a particular election scheme for its communities. Nothing is baked into the software, and on the network we host ourselves, our policy is that our communities can choose their moderators in any way they choose so long as the method produces unambiguous results that can be audited. (That's because any disputes are going to be escalated to us, so we'd better know how to fairly adjudicate them.) But even though our communities can choose how to choose, we should probably plan on offering some sort of facilitated options -- we can run election type X or Y for you, or y'all can do something else. Not every community wants to build its own system, after all; we shouldn't make them. I think we're a ways away from moderator elections yet (our communities are in start-up mode), so there's time to talk with our participants about what makes sense.

Tonight I became aware, via a question on Mi Yodeya, of Yovino v. Rizo, a recent Supreme Court case. A federal court of 11 judges heard a case and ruled 6-5. One of the majority judges wrote the opinion and then died before it could be made official. The rest of the court said the verdict stood, arguing that the judge fully participated in the case like everybody else. The Supreme Court disagreed. From their conclusion:

Because Judge Reinhardt was no longer a judge at the time when the en banc decision in this case was filed, the Ninth Circuit erred in counting him as a member of the majority. That practice effectively allowed a deceased judge to exercise the judicial power of the United States after his death. But federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity.

"Federal judges are appointed for life, not for eternity." That, my friends, is reasoning worthy of the talmud. :-)

I skimmed through the ruling to see if they were, in fact, arguing purely on this principle. Not quite; they note that a judge can change his mind up to the moment the ruling is formalized. So it's possible that, had he lived, he might have done so, though I don't know how often that happens at all, let alone by someone who wrote the majority opinion. But it's still an edge case that ought be considered.

Tangentially, I wonder why they waited at least 11 days from when the opinion was written to when they made it formal in court. Were they on recess at the time? Does it usually take that long -- maybe this is "just paperwork that can be done any time"? If so, courts with elderly or ill justices might want to adjust their procedures, just in case. (You can't fully prevent the problem, but maybe you can reduce the likelihood.)

Dani gave me a large, heavy package.

He cleaned out a substantial part of my Amazon wishlist. :-) Many of them are used, which is just fine as far as I'm concerned. A book should not have to languish unloved when someone else is eager to give it the attention it deserves.

Woot!

I-376, like many other highways, has those overhead digital signs that somebody updates with topical messages like "accident, right lane closed 1 mi" or "stadium parking exit 72A" or, when they've got nothing better to say, "buckle up -- it's the law". There are two of these signs on my commute that, in their default states, say "distance to downtown: N mi, M min". Which, while usually not especially helpful to me (I live five miles from downtown), is still more useful to me than seatbelt nags. (I always use seatbelts.)

This morning, while stopped in traffic near Oakland, I saw one of those signs update from "4 mi, 5 min" to "4 mi, 6 min". That was less inaccurate, but far from accurate -- I reached downtown about 25 minutes later. (This is all very unusual; two of three lanes were closed due to a bad accident. My commute is sometimes slow, but I don't remember the last time I was in stopped morning traffic.)

It got me wondering -- do the indicators on those signs update automatically based on sensor data or are they human-controlled? The fact that an update happened but didn't jump to a more-appropriate number makes me think that we're dealing with an automated system that only bumps one unit at a time. (I would hope that a human would have updated it to warn about the accident.)

Why would it be designed to only increment in single units? Or is it a bug? What are the inputs to these signs, anyway?

No supermoon here; the Pittsburgh sky is a giant snow-cloud. I'll just have to wait to see others' pictures.

While today's snow is not the first snow of the season, it was the first snow on a weekday during commuting hours. The roads were fine; other drivers were the usual beginning-of-season challenge. Ah, winter.

I got what might be a bug bite on the back of my leg, but given where it is I couldn't get a good look at it to evaluate. So I tried to use the camera on my phone to get a view of it, but I was having trouble focusing "blind". Then my phone backed the pictures up to the cloud and I decided that was creepy, so I stopped (and deleted those).

Plan B (when I got home) worked much better: "dear, could you look at this?".

Message from landlord: "In accordance with city ordinance blah blah, we will be conducting a mandatory evacuation drill on $date at 10AM."

Implied message from landlord: "Unless you particularly want to walk down 43 flights of stairs, that might be a good day to make other plans."

Unknown: whether the latter was intended -- fewer people in the building means fewer people who can mess up a compliance-check, after all. Though this would have been more plausible if they'd called it for 8AM rather than 10.

On a tangent, I wonder how people with mobility impairments get out of office buildings during alarms. There's no job-related reason I couldn't have a coworker in a wheelchair, after all, so somebody must have thought this through. (Please let somebody have thought that through...) Do they keep an elevator in service in that case (even though elevators are normally disabled during fire alarms), or is the floor warden responsible for rounding up people to carry the person downstairs, or what?

I needed a fairly long ethernet cable to run to the TV room, and we failed at making our own so I decided to just buy one. Amazon has 50' cables for $6-10, but I wanted it today (new TiVo, for which "wireless" on the feature list apparently really meant "wireless-capable, if you get a peripheral", fooey).

I went to Best Buy, where their price was $36. We had roughly the following conversation:

Me: You price-match, right?
Rep 1: Yup.
Me: (shows Amazon listing for exact same cable)
Rep 1: This doesn't ship directly from Amazon; that doesn't count.

Me: I'm prepared to pay a little more to get it locally today, but I can't really bring myself to pay more than three times their price. Is there anything you can do for me?

Rep 1: Nope.
Rep 2: (walking by) Um, let me see what I can do. (I follow Rep 2 to a different desk.)

He gave it to me for $10.

It occurs to me to wonder now if I'm part of the problem for brick-and-mortar stores. On the other hand, if their price had been $15 (a 50% markup) I probably would have just paid it.

One morning back in June a police officer stopped me, said I hadn't stopped "long enough" at a stop sign (he didn't say I ran it), and gave me a ticket. He also told me that he was being ultra-picky because there had been complaints in the neighborhood, he didn't think highly of his current assignment, and if I were to plead "not guilty" he wouldn't show up in traffic court unless specifically ordered to. O...kay. Not how I particularly wanted to spend a couple hours, but my unblemished record and exaggerated fees were at stake, so I did that. (Traffic tickets are kind of like phone bills, apparently -- $20 or so base cost plus $100 or more in fees...)

My hearing was this morning and, as expected, was successful. Most hearings took about a minute: the clerk tells the judge what the charge is, the judge says "talk to me" after swearing you in, you tell your story, and he either says "ok" or "no" and sends you on your way. I didn't say anything about what the officer had told me, of course; I merely said (honestly) that I had stopped, that the officer had an obstructed view (he was on a narrow side street behind another car, with buildings going almost to the street), and that I've never had a moving violation in (mumble) years of driving. That was sufficient.

What was interesting were the cases that weren't so straightforward. These were generally the ones that people brought lawyers for. These included:

A charge of driving on a suspended license. There was a quiet, heated exchange, and after the judge ruled the defendant guilty I heard his lawyer say "I need to talk to you right now". Sounds like somebody wasn't completely straight with his counsel...
A charge of an illegal turn (admitted) with an add-on of reckless endangerment. The lawyer argued that the latter requires intent and this wasn't intentional; the defendant hadn't seen the sign -- and also, this would carry six points. The judge asked the police officer if he was ok with that, there was a huddle, and the officer agreed.
Aside: that police officer stayed there for three cases in a row all at that same intersection. I couldn't tell if they were on the same day, but I assume so. (Locals: a no-left-turn sign at the five-way intersection on Blvd of the Allies.)
One defendant said it was his car but he wasn't the driver. The officer said something like "I always process these the same day; either he has a twin out there or it was him". The judge asked him how confident he was on a scale of 1-10; he said 8. Guilty. (I have no idea what "process" means here.) Since no mention was made of a driver's license having been shown, I suspect this was a case where the driver didn't stop and the ticket was issued based on the plates.
One defendant was initially stopped for an expired inspection sticker, which led to the discovery that he was driving on a suspended license. The defendant said he had borrowed the car from a friend and who thinks to check the stickers? (I can sympathize for that part, though not the suspended-license part.) The police officer took a hard line with him, saying that it's his responsibility as a driver to check these things. There was then a discussion I couldn't hear, and I think he was found guilty on all counts. (Aside: how can they even read those stickers on moving cars? They're not big. Are they relying on cameras with zoom or something?)
A feeble, elderly man who, on being asked how he pled, launched into a long, fairly-incoherent babble about how he's a good driver and not like those reckless kids and blah blah blah, and he's 93 years old and knows how to drive -- and never actually answered the question or said what happened during his traffic stop. The judge just said "ok" and sent him away. Were I that guy, I might have considered paying the ticket by mail even if I wasn't guilty, because the alternative might risk too much scrutiny -- though, demonstrably, his approach can work.

Last night my watchband broke (one of those metal expanding/stretch ones, my preferred style). It looked like it might be fixable with the right tools and know-how, which I lack.

There are three watch-repair places in my neighborhood, opening no earlier than 10AM and closing no later than 5PM. There are none near where I work, though I tried the lone jewelry store (no luck).

So after work I went to a local store to buy a replacement band. They refused to put it onto the watch for me for liability reasons (!), and would not accept my offer to sign a waiver. I declined to buy it without that demonstration that it was in fact the right size (hard to really tell in the packaging), and I can't really see well enough to do that myself. (I could have taken it home to Dani, but then I'd have to go back if it didn't fit, and...bah.)

Watches (in this class) are not much more expensive than the band. I just mail-ordered a watch from Amazon.

Sorry, planet. I tried to do if not the right thing then at least the less-wrong thing.

If anybody local wants a scratched-up but functional watch, let me know. Getting it to stay on your arm is your problem.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

This parlor game comes via

talvinamarich:

Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

He gave me: Lisp, On the Mark, Accessibility, Books, Role-Playing Games, Filk, Faroe Islands (one of these things is not like the others).

( Read more... )

Come Thursday I will have read torah four times in three weeks. Fortunately none of the portions were new to me (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur afternoon, Shabbat during Sukkot, and coming up, creation for Simchat Torah). And I led a good chunk of a service on Yom Kippur, which was nifty but of course required prep.

There has been a great deal of cat-herding surrounding the congregational web site, publicity for an upcoming Shabbat dinner (or rather, the lack of same when it was expected), committee and board meetings, etc.

I'm glad to report that we've had some respite from the rain; I've been able to eat in the sukkah four times so far. The new ~~christmas~~ sukkah lights are working out ok (previous ones were failing).

And, of course, work and household stuff demand their usual attention.

This stretch of fall is hectic, but we're coming into the home stretch now. Sorry if I've seemed to be ignoring anybody.

At first I thought the person next to me, whose desk touches mine, was having a really intense hacking session. Then I realized two things: I wasn't hearing the clickety-clack of keys being pounded upon, and my chair was vibrating. And no, not construction downstairs either, as it turned out. Oh, ok.

This is my second remotely-felt earthquake in this modern office building (third floor). This one was more intense than last year's; when I stood up I felt the floor moving and while I could walk without difficulty, it felt weird. I felt movement for a good two minutes. Weird, for a quake a few hundred miles away, but this one was shallow so it traveled farther (link from

thnidu).

Did you feel it? If so, tell USGS and help science (link from

siderea).

Time by my watch was 1:56PM (at the start), which is five minutes after the reported time at the epicenter. I'm too lazy to do the math to figure out if that's plausible.

Google Maps almost failed me this morning. That's never happened before. Those "M" guys used to get things wrong so much that I couldn't rely on them at all; they even managed to leave out a major state road once, telling me that I could exit the interstate and get onto such-and-such road that was miles and miles away. And those "Y" guys led me on some merry romps a couple times. But Google Maps had always given me what I needed with a smile and useful photos besides.

This morning I had to run an errand in Wilkinsburg before work. I don't particularly know the wilds of Wilkinsburg, but it's not the land of unnamed dirt roads or anything like that. I was a little surprised that Google's directions didn't actually have me turn onto the street named in the address, but a street number of "xxx02" is likely to be at a corner, so that seemed ok. So, armed with directions and Street View of the key intersections I didn't already know (Street View has made my life so much easier in this land of sometimes-inadequate road signs), I headed off... and at the end of the directions found myself at the end of a road facing an iron gate. Oops.

So I called my destination, told them where I was, and asked how to recover. How far was I from such-and-such road? Sorry, not from around here -- never heard of such-and-such road. Ok, I should go back to other-such-and-such road and... wait, never encountered that one on my way here. We went back and forth a couple times and I said I guessed I was going to have to reschedule and get better directions. I repeated what I had said at the beginning of the conversation: I was at the end of such-and-such road facing an iron gate with an "authorized personnel only" sign and no other markings.

Wait, the guy said, is it a blue sign? Yup. Could I see a white building beyond the gate? Yup. He told me to wait. A couple minutes later somebody came to open the back gate so I could drive in. Weird!

So it worked out in the end (costing me 10 minutes or so), but it was very puzzling.

Google Art Project appears to be collecting high-quality images from art museums around the world. I haven't explored much yet but it looks like it'll be nifty.

I thought this picture from APotD of the moon and Venus over Switzerland was a painting rather than a photo when I first saw it. Pretty!

I've often wondered what "X% chance of rain" really means -- anywhere in the geographic area during that time period, or something more specific? I found this answer informative.

The comic in a recent Language Log post made me laugh out loud.

Speaking of language, so did this 101-word story (link from

arib). Go, read!

This elaborate prank on a phone company with terrible customer service is making the rounds. As

nancylebov put it, some people deserve live muzak. (Hey, the Firefox spelling checker knows "muzak". But not "Facebook".)

Who knew Facebook was so complicated? -- a flow chart for one "what comment to post" decision tree.

Reminder: the Jewish Life and Learning project over at Area 51 is still looking for people interested in participating in a beta.

Thanks for all the good wishes, everybody. I will be seeing my doctor tomorrow morning to get checked out. Today's aches and pains were pronounced but not as bad as I had feared, fortunately. But I am learning more about which muscles are involved in seemingly-innocuous activities. :-)

Tonight we tried and failed to find the place the car was towed to so Dani could get everything out of the trunk, glove box, etc (and retrieve the remote control for the garage door). He will seek clarification tomorrow. (The insurance adjuster hasn't ruled on it yet, but we suspect we know how that's going to turn out.)

The easiest way to describe what happened to us this afternoon is: we were in the right lane of Baum Blvd, a four-lane "25mph" (yeah right) road, when we were hit by oncoming traffic. Um, right. No bones are broken and there was no blood, but lots and lots of muscles are rebelling against both of us, some of which waited a few hours to make their complaints known. Tomorrow will not be fun, I suspect. And just in case there was any doubt, yes, airbags can inflict bruises. (Dani, who was driving, said he didn't notice any impact from his airbag. I most definitely did from mine, but then would expect that in the death seat.)

This should be a no-brainer as far as fault is concerned, though it may be complicated some because the person who hit us said he had to swerve to dodge someone else, and that driver also stopped for the police report. I don't know if that's true or not, but either way it shouldn't be our problem; not only was he in our lane but he crossed another lane of oncoming traffic to get there. But Dani hadn't been planning to replace that car just yet, and the odds are pretty good that it was totaled. (The tow-truck driver offered that opinion, though of course he doesn't make the call in the end.)

I've never seen an airbag go off before and was a little surprised by it. One moment some idiot was barreling right toward us and the next I was sitting in a cloud of smoke wondering how in the world our engine could be on fire (that being the only explanation for smoke that then came to mind). Once I was willing to move at all I had to grope around quite a bit to find my glasses (I was unwilling to open the door or move my feet much until I found them). Fortunately they seem undamaged. We found Dani's glasses in the back seat. Yup, airbags pack a punch, but it beats the alternative.

Auto glass is amazing stuff. The windshield was completely shattered (tiny little pieces), but held entirely in place.

This afternoon I was in a meeting when someone else said the room was shaking. I hadn't noticed but did after she pointed it out. I figured it was a large truck rumbling by outside; she said it felt like an earthquake ("but smaller", I said). Who knew that a magnitude-5.0 earthquake on the border of Ontario and Quebec could be felt in Pittsburgh?

The coworker, it turns out, used to live practically on top of the San Andreas fault and is sensitized.

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

For certain commodities I have no brand loyalty and buy based on price or convenience. Thus, I recently bought a package of Scott Super Mega bathroom tissue, because with the coupon I had it was the cheapest per square inch and not known to be bad.

The rolls are huge -- too large to fit on a standard dispenser. Fail. But wait, they anticipated that and packaged an extender for your dispenser with the paper. This allows me to mount the rolls, but it's a little awkward and I don't plan to use that extender after the immediate need is gone.

Bigger is not always better, guys. Had Scott settled for rolls that comply with the standard interface, I'd be as likely as not to buy their product in the future. Now, however, they have acquired a small black mark; I will remember that it was Scott but might, in the future, not be able to remember if it was Ultra or Mega or Jumbo or Decadent or whatever, so better safe than sorry and I'll buy something else.

Is the chore of changing the roll really so distasteful that this is necessary for some segment of the market? (Do I really want to know the answer to that question?)

Quote of the day #1: "My parents visited a planet without bilateral symmetry and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt" (from

bitsy_legend and Fred).

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

Last Monday, our choir had its annual pot-luck dinner, once again hosted by the people who used to host practice, back when their daughter (who's in the choir) still lived with them. That hasn't been true for a while, but they like hosting us anyway. We don't get to see as much of them as we used to, so I'm glad.

Tuesday night was Dani's company's holiday party. They have picked up another of my former coworkers, so there was one more person I knew. Oddest moment: a coworker asks where he knows me from, we both draw blanks, and then he asks if I work at [my company], where he interviewed a few years ago. Wow. Yeah, he looks vaguely familiar so I probably did interview him, but do most people remember individual interviewers for jobs they didn't get, years later?

Wednesday was a meeting at my synagogue. Nothing exciting, but it took a chunk of time. I learned that people were happy with the class I gave a couple weeks ago.

Thursday night was spent doing all the stuff that didn't get done the previous few nights, plus cooking for Shabbat.

Shabbat afternoon we had a guest, a relatively new member who has become very active quickly. We spent the afternoon talking. This summer will be thirty years since her bat mitzvah, so she'd like to chant torah for the second time, with which I will help her.

Saturday night we attended two parties, a pre-Chanukkah party held by fellow congregants (lovely, lots of music, but very crowded) and the annual party held by

ralphmelton and

lorimelton, very pleasant and less crowded than usual but with plenty of interesting conversation.

Sunday was the first night of Chanukkah. It's a minor holiday despite the fuss some make over it, but a holiday nonetheless. We were invited out for dinner, which was nice.

Monday night was choir practice.

It's all been good stuff, but this little introvert wants to ignore the world for a little while now. :-) Imagine what things would be like if I had a big holiday coming up or something! But on the positive side, a lot of my coworkers are already on vacation, tomorrow even more will be, and Thursday should be a glorious day to get work done. (Current theatrical offerings do not seem particularly interesting, so the Thursday-night movie might be in danger.)

I am strongly considering taking all of next week off, just because. There have been some stressful things at work lately so I could use the break, and it turns out that Dani has use-it-or-lose-it vacation time so he'll be taking next week off.

I bought a new calendar today and, to my surprise, among the candle-lighting times on each page it lists Pittsburgh. (Usually we don't make the cut.) While looking at this I noticed that sunset in September is moving by about 12 minutes per week, but that in March it only moves by about 8 minutes a week. Shouldn't it be symmetrical? (The delta for sunrise and sunset changes over the course of the year, with the widest swings being at equnoxes and the smallest ones at solstices. I grok that; I don't grok that they don't match.)

Friday night I saw something unusual at services: a man lit candles and a woman made kiddush and there was no special occasion dictating that. For all that egalitarianism is a core principle in my movement, I don't think I have ever seen a woman make kiddush in our sanctuary before, unless there were special circumstances (sisterhood service, a bat mitzvah, etc). Gee, maybe there's hope that someday I will be offered that honor after all. (There's still another barrier: there is a strong meme of giving that pair of honors to a couple. This was violated this week, too.)

Yesterday morning after services our newest rabbi (hmm, I need a shorthand notation for him -- the others are "senior rabbi" and "associate rabbi") talked with the group about adult education. He wanted to know what we want to learn, when we want to learn it, and how we want to learn it. It was a good discussion; I wish im luck in distilling down feedback that, in aggregate, meant "all of it". :-) He seemed a little surprised by the idea that, actually, we'd love to learn on Shabbat -- ideally right after services, but late afternoon leading into havdalah would be acceptable to some. I hope that idea bears fruit. (Of course, he was asking the group of people who self-selected to stay around after services for the discussion... but every option doesn't need to appeal to every congregant, only to a critical mass. And we also discussed the idea of giving the same class multiple times, in different kinds of timeslots -- a teacher's dream, but for some reason we don't tend to do it.)

At the end of the discussion he said something interesting, so after it broke up I asked him "did you just imply that you're available for individual study?" and he said yes. Heh. I'll be in touch.

Short takes:

I assume that everyone has by now seen Jon Stewart on election hypocrisy. You might not have seen Language Log's discourse analysis on Karl Rove.

(I have not posted about the election; it's not because I don't care, but because there's so much as to overwhelm and lots of other people are already posting good, thoughtful pieces.)

I recently found myself in a discussion about internet discussions and used the phrase on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. I later went looking for the cartoon; it shouldn't surprise me that it has a Wikipedia entry, but it did surprise me a little that Google suggested the phrase after I'd typed only "on the internet". That real-time search-guessing thing is good sometimes. (I also went looking for a recipe for a dish I ate last night at Ali Baba's, and when I'd typed only "mujdara" it offered two completions, "recipe" and "calories".)

Speaking (sort of) of internet discoveries, this article from Real Live Preacher taught me about the Caganer, a figure we don't often see in nativity scenes these days but apparently quite normal in times past.

This article on using the internet for identity theft (link from Raven) didn't have anything new for me, but it's a good summary to give to people just getting started. It did remind me how annoying I find the canned security questions used by most banks -- things like "mother's maiden name" and "city of your birth" were way too easy to crack even before the net was ubiquitious. (And the ones that aren't tend to be non-deterministic, like "favorite color".) Fortunately, in most cases your bank doesn't really care about the answer; it's just a password. So lying adds security at little cost, assuming you can remember the lie. (What do you mean my first pet wasn't named "as375m~@z"? :-) )

Monica

two vignettes from my day

election mechanics (not about the US)

Interesting judicial reasoning

present

a signage mystery

supermoon

sometimes the traditional methods are best

text and subtext

commerce

my day in court

so much for good inentions

"7 things" #2

parlor game: let's talk about...

busy

earthquake

the end of a perfect record

link round-up

accident

"I didn't care for that car anyway", said the fox

earthquake

random bits

marketing gone wrong

random bits

busy week

weekend bits

Expand Cut Tags

Syndicate