A new member of the District 101 Toastmasters team has volunteered to take over the back-end code I wrote; we spent much of this evening getting all of the necessary prerequisites set up on his machine (things like a current version of Python, MySQL, and the like).

It took a long time, with lots of head-scratching on my part. One of the hardest parts was installing Python packages. It was easy to find out what packages had to be installed, but some of them (for example, the Python bindings to the MySQL database) are referenced by one name (MySQLdb) but have to be installed by another (mysqlclient). It’s not terribly difficult to find the right name, but it requires searching, and I found myself wishing I’d documented what really needs to be installed.

I had – three years ago. And it’s on GitHub. I’d just forgotten about it until after we’d fought our way through the installation process.

Maybe I’ll remember next time.

Yesterday’s beautiful April weather fooled us after all; it was raining lightly when I went out to pick up the newspapers, which were sitting on the driveway, unbagged. They weren’t so wet that they needed to be replaced, but I was annoyed nonetheless.

The rain stopped in time for us to take our usual Sunday post-Farmers’ Market walk through Los Gatos; there were fewer people to maneuver past on the sidewalk than usual, which was nice.

One of my Toastmasters friends, Sherman Zell, passed away this week at the age of 86; he was active and busy until two weeks ago. We watched some of his memorial service via livestream from Temple Emanu-El in San Jose; fittingly enough, Sherman had honchoed the installation of the bimah and live-streaming technology there. He’d used that project as the final step for his Distinguished Toastmaster award, and I am very happy that I was one of the people he asked to serve on his DTM advisory committee. May Sherman’s memory be a blessing to all who knew him – he was a hell of a guy.

We saw six plays today; the first was Blithe Spirit at City Lights. It was a lot of fun, and Madame Arcati (played by City Lights’ Artistic Executive Director, Lisa Mallette) stole the show. It’s playing until April 23, and I recommend it.

The other five plays were part of Silicon Valley Shakespeare‘s annual 48-Hour Play Festival (co-produced with Foothill College’s drama department). Teams of actors are assigned to a director and writer; they had to create, produce, and perform a short (5-10 minute) play based on a randomly-chosen time period and Shakespeare play. The process started at 7pm on Friday night and the curtain went up at 7pm on Sunday.

All five of the plays were fun and there was a clear winner in the audience vote: “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Two of Us”, based on The Comedy of Errors and set in the Old West. There were gun battles, audience participation, and spurs – great fun.