Monica

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.

Note to anonymous driver: if you're going to ignore your stop sign while coming so close to hitting a pedestrian that your car brushes clothing, you should at least have the decency not to glare at said pedestrian. It's times like this that I long for ammunition -- perhaps a paint gun in the coat pocket, since real projectiles would be problematic.

In the "people with too much time on their hands" department, Lego Rubik's Cube Solver (link from dyanearden).

What's with all the spam lately about cleaning one's colon? I didn't realize that our punctuation had become dirty. It's probably a secret plot by the commas.

"Take one pill every six hours". Right -- whom are they kidding? Try "take one pill when you get up and one at bedtime, and space the other two as proportionally as you can". I've got to believe that that level of flexibility exists for most things.

Now that it's cold, Erik has taken to sleeping on top of the bedroom radiator. I understand the appeal of direct heat, but I would have thought it would be more comfortable with a radiator cover. Less lumpy, for one thing. But he shuns the covered radiators, which make up the majority in the house, for that one -- even in the daytime, when there's no argument based on proximity of his people. (Well, person. They are unambiguously my cats, not our cats.) Embla, on the other hand, prefers the cushioned window seats over the radiators in the living room, and Baldur is probably too fat and lazy to try any of them.

The talmud says the Almighty wears t'fillin -- obviously metaphorically, though the discussion doesn't actually bring that out. The bulk of the discussion concerns the texts that are within them. The question of regular t'fillin vs. Rabbeinu Tam is not addressed. :-)

Giant Eagle normally uses blue plastic bags, which is helpful because the city mandates blue plastic bags for recycling and they're hard to find otherwise. During most of October Giant Eagle was using orange Halloween bags instead, and I depleted my stash of blue bags at the time. Now I find that they have switched to white "winter" bags, presumably for at least all of December. I have enough blue bags saved up, but I wish Giant Eagle hadn't abdicated its responsibility to the community. :-)

I've never tried soy milk before (is it supposed to be completely non-dairy?), but was attracted to the "Silk Nog" -- particularly by the implication of "eggnog", one of my vices, and the nutrition information (90 cal/serving vs 200-300 for the real thing). Verdict: inspired by eggnog, clearly different, will drink.

Current (baked) salmon optimization for simplicity times taste: put salmon filet on large piece of foil; mix equal parts sour cream and spicy brown mustard (the type of mustard is important) and spread over; seal salmon in foil and bake until done.

More food bits: matar paneer tonight because it's been too long; my turn to bake for the kiddush on Saturday (ginger cookies, maybe?); broccoli with garlic sauce for the choir dinner Monday. Maybe the veal-cranberry stew for Shabbat lunch? Don't know about Shabbat dinner yet; inspiration is invited to strike before tomorrow's trip to Kosher Mart.

Some researchers at Columbia are conducting "six degrees of separation" research using email. It looks like an interesting project, and they're doing all the right things privacy-wise, so I signed up to be a guinea pig. My first target is an air-traffic controller in Melbourne. I believe I have moved the chain closer, assuming the recipient of my forward decides to participate. I'm kind of weak on Australians. :-) More info here.

At Pennsic amergina gave me a copy of the Ashkenazi Haggadah, a renaissance haggadah manuscript (complete with obligatory wine stains). It's nifty! Particularly nifty is that I've been able to study parts of the evolution of this particular text without resorting to the English translation much. Yeah, it's a fixed domain and all that; I know to look for certain phrases and so on. It's still neat. I will also go through the English for a more careful look.

The latest Consumer's Reports has an article on identity theft that includes a phone number for opting out of pre-approved credit-card offers. I called and it turns out to be a wrong number. Assuming I didn't misdial (the person on the other end didn't actually know their number!), that's going to be a pain for the hotel on the other end of that toll-free number. (I'll try again tomorrow to make sure I didn't mis-dial, but I didn't want to call right back and get the same operator.)

Someone at my synagogue is organizing match-ups between people seeking places to have holiday meals and people with extra spaces. I think this is a wonderful idea, and need to figure out which meals I can volunteer to host extra people for. In general I would like to be inviting random people for Shabbat and Yom Tov meals fairly often, particularly those who won't have people to share the days with otherwise, but I'm shy. So this is great -- I can say "up to N people for this meal" and someone else will make introductions. (For these particular holidays, there's also the extra twist of early vs. late services. If I'm going to the early service, matching me up with people going to the late one would pose a challenge.)

And on a more somber note... A good friend is in a lot of pain after a miscarriage a few days ago. I won't publicly name her, but healing thoughts sent her way would be most welcome.

A recent newspaper article described a (local) fire that started because "the occupant's lit cigarette burned a hole through the hose in her oxygen tank". Excuse me, but some people are just too stupid to live. (She did live; I hope the only damage she did was to her own property.)

Friday night the 20s/30s group at my synagogue had a dinner before the service, and then after the service a couple invited us to their house (across the street) to continue schmoozing. I stopped by for a bit; it's been interesting to get to know some of the people who are approximately my age, as opposed to 10-20 years older.

At the gathering I encountered a (new to me, old in reality) game on the Password theme. The rules were gone, and I'm sure we weren't playing it right (I suspect it's meant for teams), but it was cute. The deal is that you have a hand-held gizmo that provides a supply of words (on a cardboard disk inside); when it's your turn you try to elicit the word with the usual restrictions about what you can and can't say, and when you get it you advance to the next word and hand the gizmo to the next person. Now, concurrent with all of this is a not-very-predictable timer, and when it goes off the person holding the gizmo loses. It was cute, and I can envision ways to do it as a team game.

Even though you're unlimited in the length of your clues, and can also pantamime, I found myself playing in "25 Words or Less" mode. "Cinderalla" was "glass slipper fairy tale" (which I could shorten by 1-2 words with more planning), "lapel" was "jacket part" + pointing to the relevant position on my (unjacketed) chest, and so on.

Ever since my computer melted down in April and got its new motherboard, I've been having intermittent problems with peripherals. I'd been trying to collect enough data to deduce a pattern, but the warranty expires next week and no pattern has emerged yet. So I took it back to CompUSA, where it will presumably take them several days to determine what, if anything, is wrong. I'm betting that things other than the motherboard got fried when the fan died, but not catastrophically -- so they weren't caught in April. Joy.

So I am currently using our backup machine, which we got originally (cheap, used, minimal hardware) so Dani could set it up as a Linux box. Never succeeded at that, but it's useful to have a spare machine sometimes. However, things have changed since I last used this machine; Dani had in the meantime set it up with VPN to talk to the machines at work, which was completely incompatable with plain old ordinary internet access. (I'm sure that's not a requirement of VPN, but he doesn't know how to configure it and I've never seen it before.) He's not currently using it, though, so I blew it away and reinstalled all the network drivers and now it's fine.

Does anyone reading this remember how to remap the keyboard under Win98? It's been too long.

Having spent a chunk of the afternoon futzing with computers, I'm behind on my friends list. I'll try to catch up soon.

The story about the elephant is the funniest thing I've read in days.

I have a new front-runner in the "deceptive marketing" category. Today I examined a bag of Glenny's Soy Crisps, which proudly proclaims "10 grams pure soy protein" and "only 65 calories per serving". However, it is not 10 grams of protein per serving. (The bag contains two servings, so it's 5g protein per 65 calories.)

Yesterday I came into the office to find a keyboard tray peeking out from beneath my desk. I wondered how long it had been there without my noticing; it was possible to push it back well out of sight, so it could have been there for a long time. The mystery was solved when someone walked into my office later and found me, not my office-mate, sitting at my desk. Apparently he'd installed it the previous night, but in the wrong place. I suppose that beats the alternative outcomes. :-) (No, I don't want a keyboard tray; my arms aren't long enough to use one with proper posture.)

Tonight was an On the Mark practice. Jenn has decided to leave the group due to an attack of life. It's unfortunate, but I understand. I don't want anyone to burn out. Ray is staying, so we'll juggle some parts around and things will be ok.

Tonight's episode of Enterprise, "Cogenitor", had a dreadful preview. It was also one of the best episodes of the show to date. That was an extremely pleasant surprise. (Ok, I saw every key plot point well ahead of schedule, but that didn't hurt the show, as it turned out. Now we just have to wait and see if they actually follow through on this in future episodes.)

Embla lay down in my lap while I was watching the show tonight. She's never done that before. Yay! It took five and a half years, but she's finally comfortable enough to actually settle down in my lap, rather than just walking across it and then scampering away. Progress. :-)

I called Barnes & Noble a few days ago to pre-order a DVD being released next week. The conversation was kind of funny:

Me: Can I pre-order a DVD, or do I have to just show up on release day and take my chances?
Him: We usually get plenty, but you can pre-order. What do you want?
Me: [name]
Him: Ooh, I want that!
Me: It's coming out on December 17.
Him: Really?! (clicking in background) What special features does it have?
Me: Tell you what; how about if you use your computer to process my order, and I'll use mine to get the product details from Amazon for you.
Him: Deal!

I then proceeded to read to him from the description while he was typing up my order. I think I know what order he processed next.


Yesterday's dire weather warnings did not come to pass. Even so, turnout at the SCA meeting last night was low, and a meeting I wasn't going to go to anyway (at my synagogue) was cancelled. This morning everything was perfectly fine (no new ice layer), though turnout at morning minyan was low. Weird -- the threat of weather is sufficient to keep people at home; actual weather is not required.

My part assignment for next week's Shabbat evening service came today. The rabbi gave me the part with the most Hebrew; that's not surprising. :-) (I have Barchu through Sh'ma. I could do it in my sleep, but won't.) I haven't heard who is giving the sermon, but I infer that it's not me.

I might be in town this weekend after all, which means I can go to my own synagogue for services and have another week with the new experimental siddur (prayer book). And then I could go to Ralph and Lori's wonderful party Saturday night.

Attention Pittsburgh drivers: It's snow. You saw it last year. You dealt with it last year. Remember?

It took almost three times as long as usual for me to get home yesterday, and that was before the snow started sticking to the roads. I also passed three minor accidents. Whee.

I don't object to cautious drivers. I do object to the ones who do stupid things like block intersections (making it worse for everyone) or occupy two lanes or -- I am not making this up -- try to back up the length of a block on a one-way street instead of going around.


Friday on the way home from work Dani's car was grazed by a bus. It took out the driver-side mirror but did no other apparent damage. Saturn wouldn't talk to Dani until Monday, so he's been driving around with the thing taped together so he won't lose any pieces (some of which are connected by wires).

On Monday he called and they asked him if the plastic casing is black or the same color as his car (which is, technically, blackberry -- it looks black except in sunlight, when it shows as dark purple). It's painted, so he has to wait for them to order the part. Black he could have had right away. Now usually guys complain that it's a "girl thing" to insist that such things match, but you know, I would have taken the black. We don't get that many sunny days in Pittsburgh anyway; who'd notice? :-)

Apparently bus drivers get into enough accidents that this is down to a routine. Dani said the driver got out, took out a shrink-wrapped camera, broke the seal, took two pictures (one of the mirror and one of Dani's license plate), handed over a sheet of paper with the driver's basic information, and left. This was a tour bus, not PAT, by the way, so there's no way Dani is ever going to collect anything from these guys.


We got a weird series of wrong-number calls last night. ( Read more... )

Drivers of school buses should set better examples. A couple days ago I watched a school bus be the third vehicle in a line of traffic that was running a red light. Sheesh. (In case you're wondering, no I was not at the head of that line. I was at the head of the line of traffic that had a green light but couldn't safely move.)

Last night was Temple Sinai's annual meeting. Doing back-to-back meetings for two different congregations led to exercises in comparative anthropology. Tree didn't really give a "state of the congregation" talk; Sinai did but they painted a picture that's a tad more optimistic than the facts really support. (Nothing untoward, mind -- just PR spin.) I wonder which is worse -- no info or sanitized info.

This Shabbat it's my turn to bake for the kiddush. I wimped out; you can get these "instant cookies" that you just break apart and stick on ungreased cookie sheets. I'm not usually that much of a slug.

Much to my annoyance, I learned today that the java compiler isn't as smart as I thought it was. Suppose your class has a method that returns an instance of your class. Suppose you subclass that and want to override this method to return an instance of the subclass. If Base.fn() returns a Base and Derived.fn() returns a Derived, you would think that the compiler would be able to tell, given code such as "Derived d = Derived.fn()", that it should use the overload that returns a Derived and not try to return a Base, right? You'd think so, and I'm told the spec says so (though I haven't checked), but apparently you'd be wrong. Bah.

We watched the season finale for "West Wing" tonight. Some interesting developments, some disappointments. The end of the CJ story was particularly annoying to me. But overall, I'm enjoying this show. We've only been watching it for a couple months. (We encountered it for the first time over Pesach.) I haven't gotten around to the season finale of "Enterprise" yet.

Dani is talking semi-seriously about buying the first season of "West Wing" on DVD. This must mean he's thinknig about getting a DVD player -- which must mean that he's inclined toward that TV upgrade. The (new) TV room is currently under some construction, but that should be done soon. Then we can do furniture.

Our D&D party (in Ralph's game) has some down time between now and the next session. Real Soon Now I need to figure out how my character is spending it. I'm really enjoying being in a D&D campaign again; it had been a long, long time (12 years or so). I like to think that I'm a better player now than I was then, just due to general maturity, though I don't actually know that.

Many of the charitable organizations out there send you doo-dads in hopes of guilt-tripping you into giving them money. I generally dislike this tactic; I want them to spend my donation on the cause in question, not in making little stuffed panda dolls or t-shirts or whatever. Usually the stuff they send is junk and thus counter-productive: I'm much more likely to give them money if they don't send me this stuff. (I'll forgive return-address labels, as they cost basically nothing and are even useful sometimes, but more expensive stuff is a lose.)

Today I was surprised to recieve something non-trivial, useful, and actually relevant to the interests of the organization in question: Mesorah (aka Artscroll) sent me a copy of Pirke Avot, Hebrew and interlinear English, unabridged. (Some other publishing company out there likes to send you the first chapters of books, by contrast.) I actually don't have a complete bilingual Pirke Avot, and I'd been meaning to fix that, so I can use this. And I'll send them a donation as a result.

This morning, as our guest was getting ready to leave, he asked about construction that would get in his way. I said I didn't think there was any, but I had the morning paper so I said I would check the "this week in construction" page to make sure.

I don't know whether to be amused or frightened by that concept, or by the fact that I think of it in such a matter-of-fact way.

When a road turns into a construction zone for months on end, like the Boulevard of the Allies is now, I wonder if the owners of the billboards along it can charge more to advertisers. After all, the linger time is longer. And because it's a major commuting artery, I don't think they're getting significantly fewer impressions than under normal traffic conditions.

I spent years thinking that the sign "left turn signal" was a command, not an advisory. Probably because I grew up in Pittsburgh, where people don't use turn signals. Eventually I realized that not all road signs contain verbs. (Consider "end road work". :-) )

The parking lot I use at work is *under* the Birmingham bridge. For the last several days there have been large construction-type vehicles doing who-knows-what under the bridge (the effect is blocked-off parking spaces). I hope that's preventative maintenance, rather than "oh, we should have fixed this years ago" maintenance.

Man, I hope that what I just saw go by in the hallway was a wig and not dye. Because if it's dye, it's going to stay that color for a very long time...

What's the "background radiation" level of anthrax, anyway? In other words, if these same pools of people had been tested a year ago for exposure, how many would have tested positive?