Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
I spent last night in my local hospital for a sleep study. The guy who called to pre-register me sounded like he had been up for 48 consecutive hours.
They’ll have the results back to my doctor in two or three weeks. Take your time, guys! Don’t stay up late on my account!
I'd be happy to live anywhere else
Yesterday's Globe had an article (link will probably rot tomorrow) about how Allston, Massachusetts has been honored by inclusion in The Absolutely Worst Places To Live In America. The book—whose author, a Boston College alumnus, can speak of Allston from personal experience—refers to my neighboring neighborhood as “a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor” full of “faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms”.
This reminded me of the first two years of my marriage, when we lived in a basement apartment at the corner of Allston and Kelton streets. One morning we woke up to find a pool of vomit on the path leading to our door; judging from the residue along the outer wall and windowsills, it had come from someone living four stories up. Unfortunately, I was unable to rouse the perpetrator by pounding on his back door (at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning), so I left a note of complaint with the landlord, complete with a diagram of the splatter marks. (To be fair, the landlord was letting us have the apartment at below market value, which, considering what market value was back then, was a sorely needed favor.)
I guess if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.
A prayer and a legal declaration for Erev Yom Kippur
Excerpt from Tefillah Zakkah:
Knowing as I do that hardly anyone is a righteous person who has not sinned against another one, either financially or physically, in word or in deed—this makes my heart tremble within me, because Yom Kippur does not atone for interpersonal sins until the offender appeases the victim. Regarding this, my heart is broken within me and my bones shake, because not even death atones. Therefore, I offer prayer before You that You pity me, and give me favor, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes, and in the eyes of all humanity. So I hereby completely forgive anyone who has sinned against me, either physically or financially, or one who gossipped about me, or even lied about me. So too, anyone who harmed me physically or financially. And for every sin that one person can commit against another, except for money that I could collect in a court of law, and except for someone who sins against me and says “I will hurt him and he will forgive me”—except for these, I completely forgive; and let no one be punished on my account. And just as I forgive everyone, so too may You put my favor before everyone else, so that they will completely forgive me.
Born on the 9th of Av
We are pleased to announce the arrival of a new tax deduction. The vital statistics are as follows:
| Date/time of birth | August 3, 2006, 12:25 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time |
| Place of birth | St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts |
| Weight | 8 pounds, 6 ounces, 6 drams, 8 grains |
| Length | 20 inches |
| Head circumference | 1411/64 inches |
| Apgar scores | 8 and 9 |
The bris, God willing, will be at 6:00 p.m. this coming Thursday, August 10, at Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe, at 113 Washington St., Brighton MA. A light dinner and mincha/ma`ariv service will follow.
For the ride home from the synagogue, I suggested hanging a “JUST CIRCUMCISED” sign on the back of our minivan, but for some reason my wife vetoed the idea.
There is a Jewish tradition that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av, the fast day mourning the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish nation. Unfortunately, since I’m almost certainly not a descendant of King David, my son, despite his birthday, is almost certainly ineligible to be the Messiah.
He didn’t take the news very well.
A conversation with my wife
(Scene: Oak Square, Brighton, in 90° heat)
“Do you want me to push the stroller?”
“No, it’s OK, I’ll push the stroller.”
“But what will people think, seeing me just walking alongside my 8½-months-pregnant wife while she pushes a double stroller with two children?”
“Do I look pregnant?”
“No, that dress just makes you look fat.”
We're baaaack...
The switchover from Speakeasy to Verizon DSL is, thank God and Shannon, complete.
Unfortunately, paragraph 3, clause (j), of Verizon’s Acceptable Use Policy states that I may not use their DSL service “to damage the name or reputation of Verizon, its parent, affiliates and subsidiaries, or any third parties”, so I don’t think I can tell the whole story of why this took so long until I’m back at work.
They took the inter out of my internet
As previously noted, I am transferring my DSL service from Speakeasy ($70/month) to Verizon ($15/month). What I didn’t expect, when I made that fateful call to cancel my Speakeasy service, is there are a few (three? five? O Lord, when will it end?) days of lag between Speakeasy cutting me off and Verizon even starting to hook me up to its own systems.
After about two hours on the phone with Verizon’s tech-support department, its provisioning department, its sales department, and its those-that-tremble-as-if-they-were-mad department, we have finally heard from someone who sounds technically clueful, and she has convinced us that “it takes three to five days” is not phone-company shorthand for “three to five days after the order shows up in our in-box, some technician finds the time to come down to the central office and disconnect two cables”. So I can’t get too mad at Verizon for the delay.
But in the meantime, our house is off the Net. My wife and I can’t surf the Web from home; we can’t email from home. More importantly, we can’t manage our online bill payment from home, we can’t work on selling our car through Craigslist from home, and I can’t log in to work from home. How did people ever live this way?
Three words no sysadmin wants to hear
I’m in the middle of moving ropine.com services from the old G4 in our basement to a virtual server at OpenHosting. (Virtual hosting is cheap enough these days that a cheap virtual server plus a cheap DSL line costs less than the static-IP DSL line that we have now.)
The first thing I moved over was the email. In the past, I’ve turned up my nose at sendmail, because although it’s the traditional Unix MTA, it’s been a poster child for insecure code. But OpenHosting comes with sendmail already set up, and I was tired of all the effort it took to get my MTA and my spam filter and my IMAP server to make nice to one another, and I decided to take advantage of whatever my ISP and its Linux distribution had done to make my life easier. (I am coming to the realization, in my old age, that every hour spent administering my computer is an hour I don’t spend using it.) And besides, sendmail hadn’t had any embarrassing security holes in a while.
So imagine my delight to see an article on LWN.net that begins: “It’s been a while since we had a good sendmail vulnerability…but we need wait no longer. Sendmail 8.13.6 has just been released in response to a security issue which could lead to a remote root exploit.”
(“Remote root exploit” is security-geek shorthand for “a way for someone who doesn’t even have an account on your machine to connect to it and take it over”.)
Hopefully, if anyone has actually figured out a way to take advantage of this security hole, nobody has yet bothered to use it against me (and if they try now, it’s too late). But maybe I should go to the trouble of setting up qmail or postfix after all.
A tale out of school
In a previous life, I aspired to be a teacher of deaf children. I had to abandon that plan for financial reasons, but not before serving two terms as a student teacher and collecting a master’s degree in the subject. A recent posting by siderea on Avidity, Giftedness, and the Classroom reminded me of the most depressing experience from my graduate-school years.
For my first round of student teaching, I worked in a middle-school science class at a school for deaf children. One of the students who passed through that classroom was a girl I’ll call “Ellen”. Ellen had been born outside the United States; in her country of birth, she had spent a number of years in an oral school (one that only allowed communication through speech and lipreading), and when her family moved to the US, she was placed in a school that used sign language. Even compared with other deaf immigrants, her progress at picking up ASL was very slow.
But by God, she was avid. She would tell me stories in a rapid-fire sequence of signs that neither I nor her ASL-fluent classmates could understand. I would set up a game for us to play and she would be eager to play it, although her guesses as to the rules of the game did not always match my intentions. Meanwhile, the other three students in her class would pretty much sit there and wait to be told what to do. I recalled a comment by Maria Montessori in one of her books: mentally retarded children would only use her educational materials when prodded by a teacher, but children of normal intelligence would pick them up on their own initiative.
I was convinced that Ellen was a bright kid whose intelligence was being masked by a combination of deafness, a deprived educational background (of the sort that is very common among prelingually deaf children), and some kind of language processing disorder. At some point, I must have said something too positive about her to my supervising teacher, because he just went off about how I had to understand that she was retarded: maybe from some kind of organic defect, maybe just as a consequence of her upbringing, but it didn’t matter now because. She. Is. Retarded.
As proof of Ellen’s poor language skills, the teacher described an incident where another student was standing too close to her, and Ellen said “B/w” (I’m transcribing this in ASCII-Stokoe notation).
“That’s a sign,” I said. I had seen a Deaf adult use exactly that sign in exactly the same context.
“No,” the teacher said, “it’s not a sign, it’s a gesture.” And he went on about how he had studied ASL at a certain well-regarded deaf-ed program and knew the difference between a sign and a gesture, and he knew that if Ellen had been using proper ASL, she would have signed “pb/B"/fx”.
(Of course, I checked with Deaf ASL-fluent classmates later that day, and I was right. “pb/B"/fx” is the sort of sign you’d use to describe mailing a letter. Ellen had all sorts of trouble with ASL, but in this respect, she knew more than her teacher.)
I told the head of my deaf-ed program that I’d like to have a formal test of ASL fluency administered to Ellen, or at least videotape her telling one of her stories, so that someone who knew ASL backwards and forwards could analyze what was going on with her. No dice, said the professor. You can’t test a student without the principal’s permission.
So I went on to my next student-teaching assignment, and Ellen…she’s in her twenties now, so I assume she’s now out of high school and in a group home…for the mentally retarded.
I wonder how many kids like Ellen someone would encounter in a career of teaching deaf children. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t know.
Our pre-schooler contemplates weighty themes of Jewish philosophy
When told, on Friday afternoon, that he was not allowed to watch TV on Shabbat, The 3½-Year-old declared, “Hashem is a bad Hashem.” Pause. “But he brought us out of Egypt.”
