There are only 65 shopping days until Rosh Hashana, so we are starting to get serious about High Holiday preparation at Shir Hadash. My responsibility for the past few years has been to prepare the invitations for the people who are asked to give a reading or lead a prayer at the service – in a typical year, there are well over 100 slots, each of which requires a customized email, most with an attached cue sheet for the reading.

Naturally, I wrote code to simplify the process; it’s been changed a lot over the years to accommodate changes in membership management systems, but most of it has survived pretty well.

Until this year. I may be away during critical parts of the process, so I wanted to move the code from my laptop to a server so that other people can run it. I thought it would be easy to do – copying my code was trivial, but I needed to install a few Python packages that the code uses – easily done, of course.

When I ran the code, I got an error message from the package that reads Excel spreadsheets, xlrd. It said it couldn’t read a .XLSX spreadsheet, which was odd, because it always had read them before.

I did a bit of Googling and discovered that the author had removed support for .XLSX spreadsheets some time ago and that the package was now unsupported. I probably could have just installed an older version and continued, but I knew that was not a long-term solution.

The GitHub page for xlrd suggests using openpyxl, so I installed it. Its interface is very different from that of xlrd; it’s also easier to understand, but it still requires effort to make the necessary changes.

I wonder how many other programs I have that depend on xlrd?

Shabbat Shalom!

Today was my first day not being a Toastmasters officer in a decade, so of course I celebrated by going to two Toastmasters meetings: my own club’s, where I was Table Topics Master, and Toastrix, the club I used to mentor, where I was a guest.

At my club, the theme was “Immigration Dreams” and there was only one project, a panel discussion with the moderator (from the Czech Republic) and three other panelists (from Taiwan, India, and England). They told about their experiences coming to America and California (they all had DMV stories!) and adjusting to the US – it was a very interesting session and the time flew by.

The theme inspired my questions, like asking one of our US-born members what “immigrant-centric” food stores he liked (he picked two of my favorites, International Food Bazaar and India Cash and Carry), or asking one of our immigrants what he first thought of American food (that one didn’t work out quite as well – he’d come to the US at age 7!).

Toastrix also had only one speech at their meeting, about the opportunities the speaker had had when studied abroad for a year in college – the college wasn’t well-organized to help, and when she returned, they offered her a job helping other students go abroad! I was happy to see that the club has been doing well, despite the pandemic; I hope to visit them in person again.

And that was about it for today, other than continuing to excavate; there are flat surfaces visible that hadn’t seen the light of day for many moons, like much of the kitchen desk. Yesterday, it was piled high with newspapers and clipped-out recipes; today, there are several square feet that have nothing on them (the rest of the desk is covered with a computer, pads of paper, a handie-talkie, pens, and cables – but most of that belongs on the desk). Another step in the right direction; there are more to come, and I hope they’re equally uninteresting.