Last week Erik spent the day at the vet's for an ultrasound (everything looks good, they said; awaiting formal report). When I picked him up, the person at the desk asked me to sign a photo release. It turns out that this was their day to take photos of staff members for their web site, and since my vet had made a special trip just to be there for this ultrasound, she asked that Erik join her in the picture. :-) (No, it's not on the web site yet.)

Thanks to those who gave me DTV advice. I had the wrong mental model for the converter box: I was thinking of it as a passive device, like an antenna, when it is more like a cable box. I don't think I'd realized before today that I will have to always set the channel on the box and not the VCR. That makes recording shows more of a hassle, but I watch little-enough TV that it probably won't be a big hassle. Still, one of the reasons I've never been interested in higher levels of cable service (except for B5's TNT year) is that the box displaces the tuner in my VCR, making recording more error-prone. Of course, VCRs themselves are on the way out at this point, so perhaps I should be looking for a DVR that does not involve a subscription service. (Again, don't watch enough TV to justify paying for a service.) I want to be able to program something and mostly forget about it until I'm ready to watch accumulated shows.

We saw Star Trek this weekend. If you don't think about the plot or the science too hard it's a good movie -- which is pretty much the calibration I expect from Trek. I wonder if the reset will lead to more TV shows or if it's just a movie franchise at this point.

Speaking of movies, thanks to osewalrus for passing on I'm a Marvel / I'm a DC (YouTube).

A seasonal note: a different kind of Omer calendar. Y'see, Jews are supposed to count the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot, each night. Sometimes it's hard to remember, so people have come up with various reminder schemes. This one builds on the near-universal motivational properties of chocolate. :-) (Some commenters compare it to a chocolate Advent calendar. Advent calendars are completely outside my experience; sounds like I missed out on something tasty as a kid.)

Seen in passing, a useful-looking URL to have on hand: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

Finally (below the cut due to image size) a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. I didn't particularly expect to find it on Language Log, but I'm glad they posted it so I could see it.
( Read more... )

A geek perspective on the papal conclave (from dglenn).

MIT's time-traveller convention (from arib).

Remember those rebates I'm due from CompUSA and HP? I got a ding letter from HP, saying I didn't qualify because I didn't send it in in time. I called their 800 number and said "I disagree with that", the rep put me on hold for about ten minutes, and then the rep told me "ok, you should have your check in three weeks". Notably absent from this exchange is the part where the rep says "why do you disagree?" and I support my position. I suppose they could have spent those ten minutes pulling the original envelope from a file and looking at the postmark (um, no), or their database could be so slow and awkward that it took them that long to look up a previously-entered field. Or, maybe they simply roll over and comply in the face of any customer challenge. That might be cheaper than anything else. (Now if CompUSA would just cough up... I am so never doing this again!)

Why does just about every Trek series do at least one mirror-universe episode, and why are they almost always so embarrassing to watch? ("Mirror, Mirror" from the original series is the only exception that comes to mind.) Somebody must like these, right? I mean yeah, ok, it's a chance to do warped things to established characters without consequences, and with scantily-clad women, but for me (a straight woman who likes the baddies to at least not be stupid), that's not enough. Oh well. With luck they'll only waste one more episode of Enterprise on this. They had an opportunity to do good stuff with their few remaining episodes, after all.

Note to future self: kosher-for-Pesach yogurt is runnier than usual. I have no idea why. Next year we might skip that.

Shavuot was good. More about that later.

One of the other people on that cantors'/etc list turns out to be worship chair at her own congregation and a year ahead of me in the Sh'liach K'hilah program. It's been interesting to compare notes with her, and she's given me some good information about the SK program. Last year's class was 17 people, she said; this year's is bigger, though she doesn't know how big. So it sounds like a fairly intimate experience, which I like.

She also warned me that the air conditioning in the classrooms is set for "arctic", and there is no internet access in the dorm but there is in the library. That's managable.

I got an information packet from the program in the mail a couple days ago, including a class schedule. Sounds like good stuff. I will assume that the word "chugim", which appears daily, corresponds to "SIG" or "BOF" -- subgroups on specialized topics. (I can imagine four ways to spell "chug" in Hebrew, and I'm too lazy to try them all in the dictionary.)

My professional world is getting a little bit smaller: two past coworkers will be joining my company soon. Nifty.

I heard an ad today from Subway for "low-fat" and "Atkins-friendly" sandwiches. I presume this represents union, not intersection. I'm not sure what the options are for fulfilling both criteria in a sandwich/salad context. My dentist, in whose office I heard this, didn't know either.

A man is suing the Atkins people for his heart problems, saying he needed angioplasty to clear his arteries -- and is asking for $15,000. Usually these suits ask for a heck of a lot more than that; it makes me wonder what the figure is based on.

I've been needing a new pair of non-casual shoes for a while. ("Non-casual": shoes you can wear with skirts, like for Shabbat.) I went to the higher-end store in Squirrel Hill a while back and ended up buying something I ought not have (I went looking for flats and let the clerk talk me into a slight heel). Today I noticed a PayLess in the same mall as my dentist's office, and I believe I've solved my problem for $12.99. I know what I'm doing in the future... (I try to support independent businesses over chains when I can, but they've got to work with me here.)

I watched the season finale of Enterprise. I thought they had promised a complete story in one season. Technically they might have, but I'll bet they address this ending next season...

Off to the annual congregational meeting and, technically, the end of my board tenure.

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.)

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. :-)

Tonight's episode of Enterprise had some good character bits. I'd rate it pretty high, except for one little plot problem.

( possible spoilers for last two episodes )

A few nights ago, at something like 3am, we got a phone call from someone who blathered at our answering machine -- in some language we couldn't quite identify. (It had phonemes that sounded vaguely like Japanese, but I don't think it actually was Japanese.) Then the next day, sometime while we were at work, he called again, same deal. You'd think that the English message on the machine would provide a hint about languages comprehended here, but I guess not. I wonder who he was and what he wanted -- and whether he had any idea what time it was when he called the first time.

What was the deal with Enterprise this week? The two crew members off in a shuttle see wreckage from a ship that's not theirs and they think it's the Enterprise? Aren't there some distinctive markings involved? And weren't they motivated to investigate? I just plain did not get the initial premise of this episode... (I still don't know if this show is actually worth watching; it's had a few very good shows and many that didn't speak to me but weren't actively bad. This was possibly the most disappointing to date, though the stupid alien-pregnancy thing a while back is also a contender.)

As part of the grand shuffling of stuff in our house, we're investigating central A/C for the second floor. We figure enough will drift down to the first floor on its own, and a window unit in the living room can supplement when needed, and running ducts is invasive. (We have radiators.) If we just do the second floor, they can put the hardware in the attic and run only short bursts of ducts. It sounds like a cunning plan; I wonder if it will turn out to be a cunning operation when it's done.

You know, one of the errors in our property assessment this year is that they think we have central air, but that's not why we're doing this. :-)

I thought the last two episodes of Enterprise were very good. (That's "Terra Nova" and "The Andorian Incident".) TN had some major science flaws, but the storytelling was good and I was able to see past them. I hope these two are indicators of what is to come.

I figured out part of why Dani has such disdain for the modern Trek shows. (I don't know what he thought about the original series, or if he even watched it.) He thinks Star Trek is science fiction. I think it fails miserably as SF but that it is good *fantasy*. In this case the magical elements just happen to have names like "dilithium" and "anti-matter" and "phase shift", that's all.