This morning, as I walked past the cafeteria, I noticed that one of the options for today was “Stuffed Airline Chicken Breast”. I didn’t want to investigate further, but I wonder if they sold any?

Thursday night was Purim, and as always, services at Shir Hadash were fun. This year’s theme was “Sesame Street” (or perhaps I should say “Rehov Sumsum”); the Cantor wore an Elmo costume, and the Rabbi was Moishe Oofnik (though the costume looked exactly like Oscar the Grouch), and they used Sesame Street tunes throughout the service. I was amazed that there were some tunes that neither Diane nor I recognized immediately — I would have sworn that all of Sesame Street was graven indelibly in our brains, but I guess time heals all wounds.

I spent most of Thursday and too much of today working on my Sash project; the whole idea when I started this project was to come out with something which would save me time in entering and tracking trips on my Notes calendar by doing timezone conversions for me and putting all of the data on one screen. Well, it’s mostly working (finally) — time and date calculations are a pain — but I don’t think I’ll ever save one percent of the time I’ve spent writing the code. If I harden it a bit more, though, others can benefit — and I’ve definitely learned a lot in the process, and that was, of course, part of the idea.

Wine of the Day

The wine wasn’t very popular on my flight from Hartford to San Francisco last month; for some reason, no one wanted to drink much of it on a flight leaving at 7am. But the flight attendant didn’t want to have to repack it, so she gave bottles to many of us to take home. Normally, I would have gone for the white wine, but it was a Chardonnay, so I took the red instead, which was a 1999 Morandé Pionero, a Chilean Valle Central Merlot. We finally got around to drinking it this week, and were quite pleased (even though we had it with chicken and pasta, normally dishes which would take a white). I’d happily take another bottle, though, just between us, I’d rather buy it than take a 7am flight to get it!

It was nice and sunny all day today. I got to look at it while spending six hours on the phone attending teleconferences. But I’m not bummed — after the calls were over, I only had to walk out my front door to enjoy a bit of the day, instead of fighting New York traffic, driving to the airport hotel, and then waiting for a flight home tomorrow.

And, as it happens, today’s meetings were ones which worked well as a remote participant — that’s not always the case, and was the reason I was going to fly East before the great non-storm of 2001 made me change my plans.

The best single source of information I found was
Sources of Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Data, which points to the definitive (if unofficial) archive of time zone data and code. But to use any of that information, I’d’ve needed to write some C code, or at least have a C compiler, so I kept searching.

And I found The Worldwide Holiday & Festival Site, which has a very good page on the
Hebrew calendar, including the civil dates for all Jewish holidays (major, minor, and trivial) for the next few years. The site also has a world-wide calendar of holidays which could be useful in planning travel and meetings.

But that still wasn’t what I needed, so I kept looking, and found World Time from PawPrint.net, which is a wonderful and free Windows program to show the time anywhere in the world — this is very handy for me, since I’ve found myself calling people all over the world lately, and it’s embarassing to have to ask them what time it is (I’ve managed to avoid waking anyone so far, though).

Even better, World Time interacts with the Windows registry to display Windows’ idea of timezone information — and that was exactly what I needed, since my goal when I started this exploration was to be able to convert times that I see on airline schedules to a consistent timezone (UTC, most likely) so that I could enter them into my Lotus Notes calendar. So with that hint, I did some registry exploration and found where Windows keeps its time zone definitions (of course, it’s not the same place in Win9x and WinNT/2000), so with a little effort, I should be able to take advantage of that information and not have to come up with yet another way of asking users to identify timezones.

Not exciting, but at least I feel I accomplished something useful today. Tomorrow, I’ll spend at least half the day on conference calls, which limits my odds of doing much in the way of programming. Still, even that’s better than spending two days on airplanes.

…exercising at the Y this afternoon, because I gave blood this morning.

…flying to New York tomorrow, because it’s snowing like crazy there and my meetings will probably be postponed.

So far, so good!

Well, I was almost right

My meetings weren’t postponed, but they were converted from face-to-face to teleconferences. I still get to stay home, for which I am grateful.

And now for something completely different

The package delivery folks were busy at our house today — there were four packages when Diane got home. One was a surprise package of kitchen potholders from my Mom; the other three were expected — a 128MB memory card for my GPS, two Star Trek episodes for Jeffrey and a book for Diane, and the complete run of Monty Python’s Flying Circus for me. So we watched the first episode of Python, Whither Canada, which I probably enjoyed more than Jeffrey did, though he did seem to like the Funniest Joke in the World.