Now comes the hard part, trying to figure out what combinations will work. There are all sorts of things to worry about: similar Hebrew levels, similar levels of confidence in public speaking, big family versus small, whether you want to do a creative service or not, and so forth. I’m sure that no matter who we get paired with, both families will have to make some compromises, but in most cases, it shouldn’t be a big problem.

There were two families who might be hard to match up with, though. In one case, the father is a professional DJ and musician, and he plans to have a very elaborate party, and that doesn’t match up well with what we want. On the other hand, sharing a party with that family would certainly make for easy planning! Another parent might be even harder to work with — one of the questions was “if the kids are sharing a service, how can I keep the other family out of my pictures?” I thought about suggesting that cattle prods would be a good tool, but then I decided to keep my mouth shut.

The next few years are going to be interesting. And at the end of the time, not only will we have an official Jewish adult, but we’ll also have a teenager. Oy!

That business model is so last millenium!

We’ve been having near-shortages of electricity here in California for the past few days, and the utilities have had to buy power on the spot market to keep the lights on for us all. According to a story on KCBS radio, P G and E‘s John Nelson says the utility has been forced to pay 25 cents for a kilowatt but only allowed to charge customers 5 cents. The result has been a loss of almost $5 billion to the utility.

And here I thought it was only dot-com’s which thought that losing money on every transaction was a good idea.

Wine of the Day

1999 Buena Vista Sauvignon Blanc, $5.99 at Trader Joe’s. So good, we finished the bottle before the wine oxidized!

Speaking of the Federal Communications Commission, I was very pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they processed my upgrade; I took the test on Monday night, and the upgrade was in their database this morning, and if I read things correctly, the paper license is already in the mail. That is a far cry from the way Things Used To Be — these computers do make some tasks easier and faster, I guess.

I spent most of today reinstalling my Linux system at work; I wanted to boot up the Windows 2000 partition to check out a couple of things, but somehow, while I was playing with LILO, I managed to corrupt the partition, and then I followed up by making the Linux partition unbootable, too. So I decided to blow away everything on the machine and make it a pure Linux environment; now that I know what I’m doing, it went pretty smoothly, and I even figured out how to use linuxconf to get xdm to start up automatically (for some reason, the install sees the wrong video card — one which is disabled in the BIOS — and so it installs the non-graphic login handler). I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the system, but since IBM is serious about Linux, I should learn more about it.

Holiday Shopping Ideas

If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, may I suggest a visit to Archie McPhee for something tasteful or tasty. Or you might want to consider one of the fine items chosen for this year’s edition of Dave Barry’s Gift Guide, an annual holiday staple around these parts.