This week’s Torah portion was Beshalach, which tells the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, including the crossing of the Red Sea. The Torah reading includes the Song of the Sea (Mi Chamocha), which was sung by the women after the escape; it is one of the only two readings where the congregation traditionally rises (the other is the Ten Commandments). One of our members has chanted this portion for many years (it’s her birthday portion), and she did so again today.

After services, we went to Mountain View to see Theaterworks‘s production of Ali Viterbi’s In Every Generation, which follows a Los Angeles family through three Seders, in 2019, 1954, and 2050, as well as showing them soon after the Exodus in 1416BCE. The play was a bit uneven – it took me a little while to figure out who was who (I guess it would have helped to read the program first), but once I got the characters and their relationships sorted out, I enjoyed it, and hearing the women in the cast sing the Song of the Sea as part of the play just after hearing it at Temple was an interesting coincidence. I’m not sure how much I would have gotten out of the play if I weren’t Jewish – there wasn’t a lot of explanation!

We came home just before the rains hit and I finished our taxes, despite a bug in TurboTax which caused the IRS to reject my submission at first. I had some “non-qualified compensation” which is reported on a W-2 form. In past years, it’s been treated like any other W-2 (salary) income; this year, the IRS changed the processing to move that kind of income to a different spot on the return, which confused me when I reviewed the numbers until I figured it out. TurboTax got that part right, but it also duplicated the income on the W-2 it submitted to the IRS, so the numbers didn’t add up and the return bounced. Fortunately, I was not the first one to run into the problem and the TurboTax forum suggested a work-around – go into the W-2 and delete the bogus number, then resubmit. It worked, and I’m done!

We got the last estimates we expect to need for our solar system today; now I have to take the data the various contractors gave us and put them into a spreadsheet so we can see them all on one screen and can compare apples to apples. For example, each contractor made a different projection of future PG&E rate increases (all of which are probably too low!), and no two bids specify the same amount of power generation.

This evening was Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song. We watched the livestream from Shir Hadash; there were lots of familiar melodies, and the choir sounded very good.

After that, we watched a matched set of “what if” videos on YouTube: “2001: A Space Odyssey” Directed by George Lucas? and its mate, “Star Wars” directed by Stanley Kubrick?. Lots of fun.

We finished the evening by watching some Randy Rainbow videos. Two of them (Lida Rose and Pink Glasses) were non-political, but we liked them anyway. :-)

Shabbat Shalom!

My experiment with OBS at the Silver Tongued Cats was a success, with no technical glitches, much to my amazement. Some of the attendees liked the way I swapped between showing a slide or showing myself; others said they would have preferred the Zoom way of putting the slide in the background.

I’ll probably experiment some more in future speeches; putting myself side-by-side with the slide might be interesting; so might putting an inset of myself on the slide.

I also basically finished our taxes; tomorrow, we’ll go through them together in detail so Diane can make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes.

I’m giving a talk at the Silver Tongued Cats tomorrow morning with tips about how to avoid getting stalled. I’d written most of it already, but I needed to add a couple of more photos to the talk, set it up so I could use OBS instead of PowerPoint to do the presenting, and test to make sure everything would work right on Zoom.

So, of course, I spent much of the afternoon trying (and failing) to figure out how to use a Linux machine to play Blu-ray discs and be able to see the menus on the disc. Playing a disc was pretty easy – all I had to do was install MakeMKV (for Blu-Ray access) and VLC (to actually play the media), which I’ve done many times. But when I told VLC to show me the menus, I got error messages claiming that Java was not available, even though I had installed it. And when I was finally able to persuade the system that Java was indeed there, VLC crashed.

I updated the Linux system. No improvement. I downloaded the source code for the failing component (libbluray2) and tried to compile it, only to discover I was missing a lot of pre-requisite tools. I downloaded them and got yet more error messages during compilation – something about the compiler no longer supporting old syntax for the Java programs.

I finally gave up, which was the smartest thing I’d done all afternoon.

Then I added the missing photos to the presentation and tested everything. It took all of 20 minutes.

I have another tip to add to the presentation.

We went on our usual Tuesday walk on the Los Gatos Creek Trail in Campbell; it was a bit on the chilly side, but pleasant enough, and the first trees are starting to blossom.

We stopped in the Pruneyard for a warm drink and I noticed that the Blue Mercury store was closed and being packed up, despite having a “Now Hiring” sign still in the window. A truck came by just after I took this photo and removed all of the exterior signage.

I’m giving a speech at the Silver Tongued Cats on Thursday, and I started working on it this evening. I want to use a few slides during the speech; I don’t like the way Zoom adjusts the window when you start and stop screen sharing, so I’m going to try to use OBS Studio so I can switch between slides and my camera freely. It seems fairly simple….