Warming up for “can Superman beat up the Hulk?”
The Seven-Year-Old asked me if an AT-TE walker is bigger than an Oliphaunt.
Self-promotion dept.
A short story of mine, “Very Truly Yours”, has been published in the (semi-pro) webzine Polu Texni. Seven thousand words is apparently a bit long for the Web, so they broke it into four parts: I II III IV.
After reading the first half of the story, Michael A. Burstein, an actual award-winning professional SF writer, said “the idea behind the story is fascinating… the voice of the first person protagonist is compelling, and… I am now eager for Part III and the resolution”. I hope he is not disappointed.
Thanks to Dawn Albright for publishing me, thanks to Michael for the kind words, and thanks to all the folks at the old Critical Mass writers’ workshop for showing me where previous drafts of the story went wrong.
Sic transit gloria startup
My employer just laid off a bunch of people. I, thank God and Adam Smith, did not get the axe, but there are good engineers (and sales people and so on) who are pounding the pavement now.
I told a friend of mine who was laid off that despite all the bad economic news, the job market is better in IT than it is in the general economy, and better than it was after the first dot-com bubble popped. Please help prove me right; if you have any leads for software jobs in the Boston area, let me know and I will pass them along to the appropriate folks.
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?
