Monica

Via _subdivisions_:

1. What’s one thing that made you happy today?

After spending hours on porting item #1 to our new software version, item #2 took about 15 minutes. Yay for learning curves! (Ok, also bug fixes -- it's a pre-release version. :-) )

2. What’s one thing that drove you crazy today?

Having my Mac seize an audio CD and refuse to eject. 45 minutes and half a dozen reboots later it finally coughed up. Sheesh! For future reference, the trick is to hold down the left mouse button while booting, but it has to be a wired mouse. Um, what?

(Number 3 was redacted for complete irrelevance.)

4. Is there a TV show you never miss? What is it?

Historically, Babylon 5 and, later, LOST (the last 10 minutes of which does not exist in my world, thankyouverymuch). Of shows currently on the air, The Big Bang Theory. Though an important distinction: B5 always got watched on broadcast night; the others get/got watched within the week.

5. How do you get to work?

I drive via local roads (no parkway, yay).

6. Rake in the fall, or leave ‘em ‘til after the thaw?

Rake in the fall. I left them till spring once, thinking they would just turn into mulch and cease to be a problem. That didn't work so well.

7. What’s your favorite cheese?

I like rich, soft cheeses of the Brie/Camembert/etc family. I've had some excellent specimens that I can never find again (nor remember the names of) after the encounter. Oh well.

8. Who’s your favorite muppet?

I haven't watched any muppets since I was a kid, but I remember thinking that Oscar the Grouch got a bum rap and was clearly misunderstood. :-)

It's been two days, but I'll still insert a spoiler warning here.

( Read more... )

Time will tell whether this is correct or utterly silly, but... I think I know what's going on with the apparent alternate timeline on LOST.

( spoilers, you betcha )

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

A recent mailing from my employer's department of reducing health-insurance costs (that's probably not their real name) offered some advice that seemed questionable to me. They suggested splitting pills -- not, they hastened to point out, that we should take half the dosage we need, but rather, we should get pills that are twice as strong as they need to be and then split them. They suggested that a stronger drug doesn't necessarily cost any (or much) more to fill, so you can fill your prescription half as often, saving you half the copay and them a lot on the balance. (Aside: what bright person decided that your cost, if insured, should be per month rather than per some volume? If I take a medicine twice as often as you do, why shouldn't I pay twice as much for it?)

I wonder how the pill-splitting scheme could actually be implemented legally and what doctor or pharmacist would go along with it. I find it hard to believe that a large company would advise its employees to commit insurance fraud (in a manner that's traceable), so there must be a way to do it, but I'm puzzled. (The company self-insures; maybe that's why it's ok?)

I was telling this to Dani last night, and commented that even if it's kosher I can't benefit from it for my prescriptions -- the medicine I take for glaucoma is in the form of eyedrops, and I don't know how to get double-sized drops. (Nor am I going to ask my ophthamologist to write a bogus prescription.) This, combined with some recent TV viewing, led us to wonder how big a drop is, anyway. We didn't have an internet connection to hand; Dani tried to work it out theoretically while I tried to work it out empirically. (Things often fall out that way with us.) A medicine that I take once a day (two drops) comes in a 2.5ml bottle and lasts about a month (maybe a little more). Viscosity matters, of course; this stuff is closer to water than to syrup. So I posited about 25 drops/ml for my medicine. (Google later suggested 20 drops/ml of water as an approximation.)

And that's when we turned our attention to the amount by which a character in the True Blood episode we'd just watched overdosed. The character had a quarter-ounce vial of an illegal substance (vampire blood) that he was supposed to take one drop of at a time. Wikipedia tells me that the viscosity of normal blood is about three times that of water. It has no data on vampire blood. Assuming (and I don't know if that's valid) that drop size is directly correlated with viscosity, this suggests that the character overdosed by a factor of approximately 46. Ouch. :-) (Yes, it did hurt.)

Ok, fine -- what have you done with your science education lately? :-)

I've been watching a new show, Merlin, which started a few weeks ago. I've seen four episodes so far (one more is waiting for me on the Tivo) and have been enjoying it.

This is a very loose adaptation of the Arthurian legend with Merlin as the focal character. Not the old, powerful, wise Merlin, mind -- this is Merlin's early days, when he hasn't necessarily learned subtlety or good sense yet. Uther Pendragon is king and has a real problem with magic; Merlin comes to Camelot to apprentice to (be fostered by?) Gaius, the royal physician, and in the process meets Prince Arthur, with whom he seems to have something of a love-hate relationship. Because of the ban on magic Merlin has to hide his budding powers, though they slip out from time to time. Nimueh is an evil sorceress who has it in for Camelot, though we haven't yet been told why.

The show is well-written and generally well-acted. Effects are mixed but get the job done. This is an import of a BBC show (on network TV, who'd've thought?); the BBC has already broadcast 13 episodes and signed up for a second run, so even if this tanks here it should be possible to watch the BBC version directly eventually. (The first series is already out on DVD.) I hope it doesn't tank here; the show has promise. (These things are hard to predict, between a summer premiere and US audiences.)

There is a Tivo box sitting in my TV room, taunting me.

A coworker gave me his old Tivo (he upgraded). Tonight I hooked it up, sort of. If I use the S-video connection, it works but trumps my DVD player -- weird. (The DVD player is connected via component video, the red/white/yellow trio of plugs. I'm not sure why, other than its predecessor was.) If the Tivo's cable is connected I see the Tivo on "video 2"; if it's not I see the DVD player there.

Ok, fine, I figured -- I can use component video to connect the Tivo. I swapped out a VCR that was doing just that, so I expected to see the Tivo on "video 1" where the VCR had been. I half-do -- it's a black-and-white picture. Yes, I've swapped cables. Yes, I've checked that connections are tight. Right now it is connected via both component video and S-video, on "video 1" and "video 2", one black-and-white and one color.

Setting that aside, I figured I could at least try to set it up, and see if the IR connection to the digital converter box works. (A programmable device is considerably less useful if you can't change channels.) I told it I had cable, which is wrong but I thought that would be closest to "I have a box you have to deal with". It spent a while churning (most of that in phoning home), and then displayed a toll-free number and told me to call for support. Whee. :-) After 10 minutes on hold I gave up; I'll try again tomorrow.

Nothing is ever simple. :-)

Last year I bought an amplified antenna and a digital converter box in anticipation of the national switch to digital TV in February. Then Congress delayed it to June, which means my antenna warranty will expire a week before the switch. WQED switched on April 1 and I've been getting zilch on channel 13 since then, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong place. According to this list they might be on 38 now, but I'm not getting signal there either. (WQED's web site does not actually appear to have channel information.) I live 2 miles from WQED, but Pittsburgh is a hilly place.

I'm not sure if any other local station has made the switch. (Google is inconclusive.) I just checked signals tonight, and currently I am only getting 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC), 47 (Christian), and (weakly) a couple other UHF channels. (There were more signals the last time I did a survey.) So it's not clear whether the equipment I bought specifically for the DTV transition even works. (The antenna claims to be digital-capable.)

If you're in Pittsburgh and are receiving any stations digitally, which ones (station and channel number)?

If anyone has any debugging advice beyond waiting to see if everything goes dark in mid-June, I'm interested in hearing that.

(No, I'm not interested in subscribing to cable.)

Edit: Scanning is not dynamic; you need to explicitly have the converter box re-scan when channels are added/moved. Thanks, all.

Tonight/tomorrow is Shavuot, which is one of my favorite holidays thematically. I understand that both of our rabbis will be at the tikkun leil shavuot, late-night torah study, this year, which should be loads of fun. Tonight's dinner will be blintzes, and tomorrow's lunch will be cheesy noodles (featured cheeses this time are havarti, cheddar, and swiss, with others too). Mmm, dairy. :-) Chag sameach to those who celebrate, and happy Monday to the rest of you.

I recently bought an amplified indoor TV antenna, and I gave it a spin today. With some fiddling, I can get very good reception on most channels I care about and acceptable reception on the rest. (Some channels with less-than-acceptable reception are ones I don't care about. WPCB, I'm looking at you.) I'm also picking up some channels not on the list of Pittsburgh stations at Wikipedia. (Don't know what they are yet. My local newspaper doesn't list them either.) Currently the antenna is hooked up to one VCR; when I cancel the cable service I'll plug it into the splitter currently fed by the cable instead, but that's harder to get to so not optimal for testing.

Yesterday we ended up in a spontaneous game of Runebound with three other people. The game nominally supports up to six players, but with five I felt we were too resource-constrained, both in stat-boost chits (which you get for accumulating experience) and lower-level encounters (which you must defeat to gain the experience). I dropped out of the game when all the green (1-point) and yellow (2-point) encounters were gone, I had no money with which to buy equipment, and I could not yet survive a purple (3-point) encounter. No bootstrapping was possible unless a rare event were to occur, and in the meantime I'd just be twiddling my thumbs. I've played this game two or three times before without that happening to any player, but I can't remember if I've played with this many players before. (Oh, and this was not the four-hour game promised by the box. After I dropped out near the four-hour mark, the others played for another hour, maybe more.)

The weather has been uncharacteristically (for June) sweltering for the last couple days. We have central air on the second floor; we caved and turned it on on Friday. We have a huge window unit in the living room that we sometimes use to supplement, particularly if people are coming over or we're generating lots of heat (e.g. from cooking). Yesterday Dani turned it on for the gamers and it started making that noise appliances make when they're unhappy and want you to know from anywhere in the house. It was blowing air, but the air wasn't cool. I'm unclear on whether this means it's hungry and needs a freon refill (I'm guessing there's freon involved), or if it's something else. This unit came with the house, so it's not exactly new, but the window might be too big for the deprecated AC we took out of our bedroom when we bought the central unit. (We still have the window unit in the attic.) Well, nothing I can do about it for the next couple days, so no sense worrying about it.

Found by Dani: mykleenextissue.com, for vanity Kleenex boxes. Err, yeah. At least it's not for vanity Kleenex. Even so, I'm not sure "let out your creative juices" was the best choice of a slogan. I also note that -- as often happens -- their FAQ does not address my most-frequent questions, which in this case include "do you have customers?". :-)

Bill Walsh posted this and I now share:

I've mentioned before that my synagogue maintains a freezer of donated, cooked food to have on hand for houses of mourning, families where someone's sick, and similar acute cases of need. I think this is a great idea; if you're cooking anyway you can cook a little more to donate and help someone out. Yesterday I got email from the person who monitors this saying they're low on meat and pareve dishes, so tonight I'm roasting an oven-full of chicken to take over (less one meal's worth for ourselves this week), and tomorrow night I will make some vegetarian soup. I love being able to help in this way.

Speaking of soups, recently Dani and I were at a restaurant where I had a really fabulous butternut-squash soup. This one was dairy (I detected cream), and I couldn't identify all the spices. Web-surfing has led me to some promising recipes; I'm open to specific suggestions. I have now procured one butternut squash with which to experiment.

I'm about 40% of the way through the second book of His Dark Materials. I am pretty sure I know what the deal was with Grummon (the explorer Asriel went off in search of). So either I'm right or the author is being clever and has something up his sleeve. It feels pretty darn obvious, so I'm not ruling out the latter. (No, please don't tell me; I'll know on my own soon.)

The local SCA choir is singing at an event this weekend. I think we sounded really good at Monday's practice; I'm looking forward to the performance. We'll also be doing one piece jointly with our instrumental group, which is nifty. We haven't done that in years.

Jericho returns for a short second season (half-season?) next week. I really liked this show, so I'm glad to see it unharmed by the writers' strike. Whether it is harmed by its network is yet to be seen. (They cancelled it and then responded to a fan campaign.)

Assorted links (most sources lost, sorry):

Baby dos and don'ts. That the site is not in English really doesn't matter.

Surfing cat. It's not entirely clear to me that this is the cat's idea.

Joel on Software recommends Tripit for keeping track of the assorted confirmation numbers involved in travelling. Sounds useful especially for us infrequent travellers who don't have the routine down already.

Bruce Schneier on security versus privacy. Too many people think it's a zero-sum game; it's not.

Bookmarking (haven't finished reading yet): Rands in Repose on preparing presentations. It's odd: in most contexts public speaking is, ahem, not my strong suit. Really not my strong suit, even in fields I know very well. I get nervous and fumbly-mouthed. The exception? While I'm not as skilled at the mechanics yet as I'd like to be, giving sermons or divrei torah does not make me nervous.

I pass this on too late for voters in half the primaries in the country, but even so, there's a general election coming, so: jducoeur nails what's really important in choosing a candidate. (PA doesn't vote until late April. It's possible we won't actually be irrelevant this time, but we'll see how today turns out.)

George Bush v Mohammed ibn Tugluq by David Director Friedman, on whom the law binds.

I've noticed that when there is a great feline tussle in my house that leaves piles of hair around, the vast majority of the time the hair belongs to Baldur. I see several possibilities: (1) his greater surface area makes him more likely to be hit; (2) his hair just doesn't stay attached as well as the other cats'; (3) he gets picked on a lot (he's the biggest cat BTW); or (4) he has developed the "eject hair" escape technique. Hmm.

I missed the first episode of the new TV show "Pushing Daisies" but caught the second. Wacky! Surreal! Fun! The narration as commentary is a nice touch. Yeah, that it's written by the person who did "Wonderfalls" shows; I hope "Pushing Daisies" fares better. ("Wonderfalls" was great for about 8 or 9 episodes, then sucked for a couple more, and was then pulled after 13.) I'm also watching "Journeyman", about which I'm undecided.

We drove through the rockslide zone of Route 28 on the way to visit my parents today. No rockslides were in progress at the time, and it looked like last week's had been completely cleared. The news had said inbound lanes would be completely closed for the weekend, but we saw continuous traffic while we were driving outbound so we didn't look for an alternate path home. It turned out that one lane was open. That was fine for a Sunday, but I'll bet it sucks for commuters right now. That said, rockslides suck more.

Two Shabbatot ago a first-time (in our minyan) Israeli torah reader asked me to be his checker. I expressed concern that I wouldn't be able to keep up; he said he reads holy texts slowly. His "slow" was too fast for me. Then this past Shabbat a different reader asked me to check for him and I figured this wouldn't be a problem; I had just a bit of trouble keeping up. Both times I was checking from the new Plaut (oodles better than the old Plaut), and using a magnifying glass to be safe. I conclude that my problem is Plaut + magnifier, not necessarily me, and I should only check when I can do it from larger Hebrew text such as what Trope Trainer produces. (I'm not the only torah reader in our group who uses that software, and in fact I have been handed TT output to check from at times.)

Without saying anything about the merits of Al Gore's work, I do admit to being puzzled by how this is a peace issue. Of course, in political processes all bets of rationality are off, but still... isn't there a more appropriate category in which to consider his work?

I heard a cute story recently: One night at dinner the seven-year-old girl asks her parents "where did I come from?" Oh crap, the parents each think; we thought we had a few more years before we'd have to deal with this. They exchange glances and then fumble through a discussion of birds, bees, and what happens "when mommies and daddies love each other very much". The girl says "oh" and everyone sits in silence for a few minutes. Then she continues, "my friend Becky comes from Cleveland".