Last night, I went to the Shir Hadash Men’s Club meeting. The main topic was a demonstration of the right way to carve a turkey (Diane’s comment when she saw that in the temple e-mail: “At last, a useful program at Men’s Club!”), but after that, we had an informal seminar in applied probability. I almost left the seminar with a failing grade, but the last hand made up for the rest of the evening, and I finished with a 13% profit on my admission fee — or to put it differently, I won a full forty cents. If only the stock market were as kind!

Food Safety Department

The pecan pie is done; I think I want to refrigerate it overnight, but I’m not sure — I usually make it on Thanksgiving proper, but this year, we planned ahead for a change, and now I don’t know what to do!

So I asked the oracle for advice. Actually, I asked Google (using the new Google Toolbar that Joel recommended today) this question: What pies should be refrigerated? Google replied with pointers to dozens of pages, including the USDA and the Ohio State University Food Safety pages, and the consensus was clear: refrigerate pies containing eggs. And I did. I’ve had food poisoning once; I don’t want to repeat the experience.

Half a clue, half a clue, half a clue onward!

I got a response of sorts to my letter to Hilton Hotels complaining about being awakened at 7:15am on a Sunday to take a “customer satisfaction survey”. The response came from the survey firm, not Hilton:

Dear Mr. Singer:

We are very sorry for the inconvenience of our call at 7am on a Sunday
morning. Unfortunately, the call to you was supposed to be dialed at
9:15am and was instead programmed for dialing at 9:15am Central Time.
It is never our intent to wake someone up to conduct a customer
satisfaction study … especially not at 7am! We have followed up with
the interviewer who miscoded the call time and informed him of the
ramifications of the error.

Again, we sincerely apologize for this. Because of this issue, we will
remove you from any future dialing on the Hilton customer satisfaction
study.

Sincerely,

Gwen Amador
M/A/R/C Research
Account Manager
949.719.1004

c: Linda Immer
Hilton Hotels Corporation

I wonder if I’ll also get a response from Hilton. Probably not; that would require someone at Hilton being awake. But I’ll wait a few days to give them a chance before answering this letter. Politely, of course.

Congratulations on homeownership, Garrett. Your wallet will never be the same.

And it’s great to see that Kaycee is doing better — it doesn’t look like she’s on the keyboard in person yet, but that can’t be far away.

Things I Learned Today

I’ve been a moderately happy IE user since moving to Win98; today, Joel‘s
review of Netscape 6 taught me two very useful IE features — features which are especially useful to reduce my mousing and keying:

• Hit Alt-D to jump to the
  “Address” line with the whole address pre-selected (makes it easy to type a new URI).

• Hit Ctrl-Enter to enclose whatever you’ve typed on the “Address” line between
  "http&58;//www&46;"; and
  “.com” (so
  “cnn” becomes
  “http://www.cnn.com“), avoiding any conflict with locally-defined names.

Thanks, Joel!

And I also learned that Manila is very eager to turn things which look like URIs into links — I tried many tricks to avoid having it make “http://www.” into a link and finally gave up. Sorry for any confusion. And thanks to Al and Andrea for hacking at the problem — I never would have considered putting a backslash inside the “http://www.” string, which was the trick — I guess that breaks it up enough to get Manila to stop special-casing it.

I can stop watching CNN….

I subscribed my pager to their President-Elect alert, which will send out a one-time e-mail when the next president has been determined. So I guess I can expect my pager to go off at noon EST on 20 January.