I don’t know what it’s been about this past week, but it’s been one damn thing after another, and so I’m glad it’s over.

We said good-bye to a co-op at work today, so I had lunch at Good Luck instead of trying the cafeteria — yesterday, even though I went into the servery three times, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to eat and wound up driving down the hill to Baja Fresh. So I was happy not to even have to consider the cafeteria today.

It was the Family Service at Shir Hadash tonight, so we helped with the Oneg (Diane is officially on the committee; Jeffrey and I help a bit, too). There was also the New Member picnic beforehand, but we decided to skip it and have dinner at home so we wouldn’t have to rush to set up. That, and we wouldn’t be competing with a large batch of yellowjackets for the food.

Tomorrow, we go to San Jose Rep to see Side Man, and Jeffrey goes to the Creative Playshop program that they host. I’m looking forward to the play, even if it does contain “Adult Language”.

The laptop continues to accrete software; I even got the X-10 Home Control software to work on it, though it requires a trick: the 32-bit communication module doesn’t work on Windows 2000, but the 16-bit one does, so you have to rename things to fool the system.

And I got a sign that next week may be looking up — my upgrade came through on Monday’s flight to Boston. Perhaps there’s hope!

Shabbat Shalom!

Yesterday’s evil spell continued until well past midnight; none of us could sleep at all well (Jeffrey knocked on our door at 1am to tell us he couldn’t sleep — we got him back to bed and then I think he did drift off), probably because of the unexpected humidity. If I’d been mentally awake as well as physically so, I would have turned on the air conditioner, but I didn’t think of it.

But the humidity has broken, at least for now, so I’m hopeful.

Despite the lack of sleep, today was a better and more productive day for me. I remembered to bring my briefcase and laptop in to work, and I installed every networking device I could find (a token ring card, two Ethernets, two modems, and a wireless LAN) to make sure they all worked, and they did. So then I spent the rest of the morning putting on yet more of the pile of software to be installed on the new machine.

There must be an easier way.

Today was one of those days. The morning was somewhat frantic, mostly at my urging — I wanted Jeffrey to practice his spelling before going to school, and that made for a very rushed end-of-morning. He made it with seconds to spare, and then I walked back home, got into the car, and drove to work, ready to battle my Windows 2000 installation.

At which point I discovered I’d carefully forgotten to put my briefcase and my exercise clothes in the car, so I didn’t have my laptop, and so I wasn’t going to make any progress on Windows 2000 today.

I should have taken that as a hint and gone home. But I knew there were other things I could accomplish at work, so I stayed.

Well, I did get my desk partially clean, dumping weeks worth of trade rags and filing the receipts for my last expense account.

But I think my level of incompetence was contagious today — even the good folks in the mailroom were infected; I gave them a fax to send to England, and they faxed it to me at my eFax number instead (which was the “from” fax number on the note). Fortunately, I saw the fax arrive a few minutes later and quickly had them send it to the right number, but I’ve never seen them do anything like that before!

The rest of the day passed in much the same way. I left early, hopefully before I caused any permanent damage or ticked anyone off for life — my mood was as bad as my productivity today.

So after dinner, I went to Fry’s to buy a 10/100 switch for my home LAN and a 6-pack of Diet Coke for my office. How hard could it be? Finding the switch was easy; there was only one person ahead of me at the register; things were looking up. But then the cashier couldn’t find the rebate form — it took two people to find it (it was misfiled). And the Diet Coke rang up at the wrong price, and I was irritated enough to make them void the sale and do it again (Fry’s doesn’t have cash registers you can see, so you can’t tell what price you’ve been charged until you get the receipt; by that time, they’ve put in your credit card, and so they have to void the sale if there’s a problem (even though you haven’t signed the receipt)), even though it was not a signficant amount of money.

But the switch seems to work. So now when I have to copy files among the various computers at the house, it should be quicker. Will I ever save as much time as I spent buying the switch? Probably not, but at least I don’t have to be ashamed of my slow 10-megabit home network anymore, at least not until my friends have Gigabit Ethernet.

None of you have Gigabit Ethernet, do you?

Well, I had my MRI; results are due in two days (but I’m not going to hold my breath — last time, it took over a week). It was slightly less fun than last time; I guess the novelty wore off quickly. The only really bad part was needing to scratch and not being able to do so except between scans — as far as room went, I think I’ve been in tighter middle seats on airplanes — and the MRI place wasn’t trying to serve me lousy food.

I continue to build up my “new” laptop from work; it’s so much fun re-installing Microsoft Office and the service packs on yet another machine. I’ve gotten better at it; this time, I wrote down my serial number so that I didn’t have to fire up Word to get it before installing service pack 2a. I should have downloaded more of the software I need yesterday while at work instead of doing it from home — downloading 430MB takes a while.

And Hebrew School started today. Jeffrey is as thrilled about going as I was when I was his age. And he gets just as much choice in the matter as I did. I think his class (and teacher) is far better than what I had, but I just don’t think it’s ever going to be on the top of his list of things to do. Not unless they start reading Hebrew comic books instead of the Siddur, anyway.

And we continued to watch Casablanca at home. By the time we’ve had dinner, gone out for a walk, and Jeffrey’s done his homework, we don’t have much time before his bedtime, so we’re watching it in half-hour bursts. I’m sure that that does not do justice to the film, but it’s still awfully good — I find it hard to believe that I’ve never seen the whole thing before now.

Once we finish with the disk, I think we’re going to cancel our NetFlix subscription. The idea of being able to hold onto films as long as necessary is a good one; so is the concept of being able to turn over discs as quickly as we like. But in practice, I find that we watch an average of one to two discs a month; that makes the effective price somewhere between $10 and $20 per disc — and we can’t always get the movie we want when we want it. For us, I think it’s going to be more cost-effective and perhaps less hassle to buy the discs we want to keep and rent from a local merchant when we know we’ll have time to watch the disc, instead of pre-ordering by mail. I’m sure there are people whose viewing patterns are a perfect fit for NetFlix, but it doesn’t seem to match ours.

Web and Society, anyone?

I’m now co-chair of the Web and Society track for WWW10, next May in Hong Kong. My opposite number and I are working on the official Call for Participation on our track, but I thought I’d put out an unoffical notice here. Contact me if you’re interested.