Monica

Another in the "what were they thinking?" file: indirect fluorescent lighting reflected off of chartreuse/lime walls. Um, yeah. (John, you've got to see the demo when you get back! It's special.)

There is definitely too much ambient whitish light in our space. A coworker has already offered to help install a bead curtain if I produce one and promise not to implicate him. (To clarify: this was his suggestion, not mine.) Bead curtains don't come off-the-shelf in 9-foot lengths, though, so I don't know. Could be fun with the right beads, but it would have to be hand-made. Or we might be able to do something clever with thick-enough (or dense-enough) fabric. Or maybe some of each.

The distance between the top of the wall and the ceiling is 22 inches. The walls are 5 inches deep. Anchoring from the ceiling might be difficult. We ought to be able to do something interesting with this space, though.

I like the suggestion of the "cave" motif, including bats and phosphorescent moss (well, reasonable facsimiles). I wonder what we can do with this.

I'm betting that if I post this, I'll come back from Simchat Torah to some amusing suggestions. As you might infer, "tasteful" can be trumped by "fun". :-)

Erik has been more clingy than usual lately. I'm vaguely thinking "for about the last month"; I wonder if it's been since Pennsic. I didn't notice it immediately, if so. I wonder what it means. (He is especially clingy when I am working at the computer, alas.)

Last night Dani and I went to the Coldstone Creamery for the first time. (Yeah, we're slow -- but let it never be said that we are slaves to fashion. No, I don't think you were going to say that anyway.) The ice cream was good but maybe not as good as the price would suggest. We couldn't help thinking that while it would defeat their gimmick, a blender would speed up processing of the customer queue.

Seen at work: "Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

Today was our company's annual retreat, where we close the office and go do company-focus-building stuff in a secluded cabin or the like. It's a good idea, but I don't think we actually needed to go as far out of the city as we did this time. (This was a new location for us.) It took almost an hour to get there. I'm really glad I hitched a ride, because some of the signage was quite poor and I probably wouldn't have found the place on my own.

We actually have budget for conferences; I wonder what it would be most beneficial for me to attend. (I didn't get my act together for SIGDOC this year, which is happening as I write this.)

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

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

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

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

Welcome to LJ, osewalrus (aka hfeld_blog).

Last night's D&D game was fun (though long). The campaign will be ending soon, and that makes me sad even though it's necessary. Ralph set out, four years ago, to play out a particular story arc, and we're almost done. We've had some great moments, and we have some good story yet to come. I wonder what we'll do when it's all over.

We're nearly done watching Wonderfalls, a half-season TV show we borrowed on DVD. The first half-dozen episodes were wacky and quirky in a fun way, and on that basis we bought a copy for a friend as a gift. The last few episodes have been growing more dark and weird. While I know that the decision to kill it was made by episode #4 (that's all that aired), I'm not sure the outcome would have differed if the entire run had been allowed to air. But then, maybe something's coming in the last episode to tie it all up; we'll see.

From the "just shoot me now" department: We got a glimpse of the new time-tracking system we'll have to use at work starting in a couple weeks. The first sign that this would not meet our usual high standards for user interfaces came in the text shown in the desktop icon: "3270". Yup -- text-based COBOL system, no shortcuts, no UI brains. Whee.

One WallMart now requires employees to commit to work any shift, 24x7, or be fired (link from revlaniep). Got kids with specific day-care hours? Have a problem working on the sabbath? Tough noogies. I found this quote from the article ironic: "The officials who did know were attending a conference on diversity and could not be reached, he said." Diversity, huh?

When I arrived at my synagogue Sunday night for Shavuot, services were still going. (I had failed to make the beginning, so I was aiming for the late-night study.) The synagogue director intercepted me in the lobby. "I need to talk to you before you go in there." I was puzzled.

She told me that Steve Roth, a member of our congregation and the CEO of the company I've worked at for the last four years, died suddenly that afternoon. This is a real shock! The timing is especially sad as, after two or three decades in the field, he was about to see all his research and development efforts bear real fruit.

This news made me sad Sunday night, but I was able to somehow build a little fence around it and contain it for the duration of the evening. I'd occasionally wondered how hard it is to not mourn on a festival (or Shabbat); now I have some insight into that. Several of the people who stayed for torah study knew him, so I wasn't the only one struggling with this.

This morning during Yizkor (the memorial service said four times a year, including on Shavuot) it really hit me. My rabbi talked about him, and about the tragedy of the timing (among things, his son was being confirmed that night), and even though he didn't eulogize (he was talking more generally) I found it very hard to fight back tears. Steve was a colleague but not someone I actively considered a friend, but still, it hurts. I expect the funeral tomorrow to be a real challenge.

My manager called in the morning to give me the news. I had intended to save him the heartache of delivering the news by telling him I already knew, but something in his voice told me that he was about to deliver carefully-prepared words and I shouldn't derail him. So I didn't.

I managed to somehow set this aside for most of the day and evening, acknowledging the sadness without being affected by it. Tonight, as I read the day's email from work, it hit me again. This is not going to be easy.

Edit: Obituary.

One nice side-effect of our office move in a few months (just down the street) is that we'll have an entire floor -- and the corresponding restrooms -- to ourselves. This presumably means an end to the stench of hairspray from the mid-afternoon shellackings that someone on our floor goes for. Eww. Those people, and the ones who marinate in perfume, really need to develop a better understanding of what ventilation systems can and can't do.

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

I've just learned that my (physical) "out" box has a built-in router. The specific case here is expense reports. My manager doesn't know who processes them either, but apparently we don't need to. I just put the report in my outbox and the office daemons take it from there. Or something like that.

I assume that there are some types of traffic that the router doesn't know how to handle, but that's what the "in" box is for.

Our landlord has installed combination locks on the restroom doors, as a security measure. Um. You already have to pass a security guard, or swipe a card, to get into the building. And if they were going to use locks anyway, wouldn't it be more secure to use those same cards instead of distributing a combination by word of mouth? (Every sys-admin known to man knows how well the shared password works over time.) Eh, whatever -- my memory for short sequences of otherwise-useless numbers is pretty good, so it doesn't harm me personally. It just seems a little odd to do it that way.

Was the Nick Berg video a fabrication? (Link from metahacker.) I can't tell if this is a case of conspiracy theories gone wild or something real, and I'm not qualified to evaluate things like Jordanian accents, but the point about the blood could be telling. (I have only second-hand information on the amount of blood, having neither the stomach nor the inclination to watch the video.)

The fine art of systems development (largish cartoon), courtesy of ommkarja.

Fun quotes from a chemistry class focusing on explosives, from anisodragnfly. My favorite: "This [fireball] should be four times bigger, but you should be okay where you are."

Seen on CNN:

Happy birthday lorimelton! We just returned from a celebratory dinner.

RoboHelp is probably not the doc tool for me, but I've got another 14 days on my evaluation copy to decide. It becomes increasingly clear that if I want to improve the feature set for my documentation, I'm going to need to venture into the land of DocBook. I hope they've got one well-documented, simple example somewhere in all of that information.

I am taking advantage of everyone else's holiday to banish the marketing-ish overview in my doc set to its own doc set (named "marketing"), so I can replace it with one more suitable to a technical audience that has already bought the product. I haven't really deleted anything, so anyone who wants to take over the new document and make it even more marketing-ish is free to do so. In fact, I encourage it. I think my change will be a fait accompli before the proponent of the marketing-uber-allis approach notices. Bwahaha.

There was no choir practice last night, so we went out to Chaya for dinner. (I might have cooked if I had remembered tonight's outing, or if I had found out before 8:15 that there was no choir.) Mmm, good sushi and a chef who understands the directive "kosher species only". It's rare that I can order a platter instead of a-la-carte at a sushi bar. We saw a couple of my coworkers, though they didn't notice me until Dani asked who I was waving to and I named names. Then we went home and watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. "The Long Twilight Struggle" just gets better every time I see it.

Tomorrow night we're going to see RotK. Should be fun.

It's National Send Your Porn to DGlenn week. Happy to help, dglenn. :-)

According to an article in Ha'Aretz, 18% of Israelis live below the poverty line. The story lacks a key piece of data, though: the number of those who are willfully unemployed, like some of the right-wing folks who argue that men should spend their lives studying instead of supporting their large families. Has the real poverty rate actually changed?

I'm pleasantly surprised by this season of Enterprise (so far). There have been some stupid bits, but they are doing a competent job of telling a story over the course of several episodes instead of Trek's usual single-episode resolution with reset button. I hope they can keep it up. I hope they already have the ending written and that it's plausible.

Alas, it was not such a happy week for West Wing.

You know there's something wrong with a suite of software demos and test code when it's faster to write a new application (albeit a small one) than to get an existing one to run. Fooey. We're supposed to be doing a better job with maintenance. (I didn't care about the application per se; I needed to see a couple specific features in action, for documentation purposes.)

I was pleasantly surprised to get my fish for free tonight at Giant Eagle. They have a policy that the first improperly-scanned item is free, but I did not experience a scanner error. I experienced an error in programming the register that generated the label for the fish. (That'll teach me not to look at the package they hand me before putting it in the cart, I guess.) That apparently counted. I wasn't trying to get groceries for free; I just wanted to not be charged double the posted price. But I'll take it. :-)

Dani's sister and her husband visited last night on their way from DC to Toronto. The husband is an extraordinarily picky customer; had I remembered this, I would not have suggested a restaurant that we'd like to be able to return to. :-) But it all worked out and the waitress we had was amazingly good (and flexible). I presume they got off ok this morning, as we did not receive distressed calls at work asking for clarification on the directions out of the city. (On the way in they set aside our directions for something they thought would work better; it set them back about an hour.) So either they got off ok or they were too embarrassed to ask for help.

I was reminded tonight that a lot of conversation works only because of shared references. My friend Yaakov was explaining this to me once in the context of allusions to Saturday-morning cartoons: since he has been an Orthodox Jew all his life, he has never seen Saturday-morning cartoons. He just doesn't have that shared experience. Similarly, those who are geeky about computers, or D&D, or science, or whatever can make cracks that only similar geeks will understand. This came to mind tonight when Dani made a very funny, very obscure comment that only music-history geeks will get, and I realized that we do this sort of thing much more often than we might think.

(Ok, I'll try to explain it. He was talking about some goofy-sounding accounting principles (that is, I say they're goofy and he says they're not), and I made a comment about red ink. He said that writing a number in red signifies that it has two-thirds the stated value, kind of like Canadian money. Certain medieval music was written in both black and red notes, where the color of the note alters its value. Black notes are bigger.)

I returned to work yesterday to find that the HR folks wanted to move me and my office-mate to a different office. (They have a new hire they really want to put in our space. And after we finally got the white-noise generator! Well, I guess he'll need it...) So they moved people out of a different office (I require a cave) and moved us into it today. I think both of the people who got bumped got worse space than what they got kicked out of; I hope they don't hold it against us. We didn't initiate this, after all, but we're now in better space than we were.