interlude: non-class stuff
First, thanks to "Mr. Fixer", as he is known on LJ, for calling and
talking me through my emacs issues (on the Mac). It turns out that
there are three ways to launch emacs (different emacses)
on this machine; one I didn't know about and the other two were
clashing over the .emacs file. For my own future reference: running
emacs from an xterm works, and so does running from the Mac shell
if I use the "-q" option to surpress the .emacs file. (Since the
.emacs file is for a different version, with settings for fonts and
colors that don't matter when running in a shell, that's fine.)
I discovered tonight (when trying to install a mouse driver
hakamadare clued me in about) that I don't know the
root password for my machine. Err, oops. I wonder how I can fix
that. (Maybe I'm lucky and the person I got the machine from
remembers.)
Wednesday night I joined Andrew and his family (sorry Andrew; I can
never get the user name right on the first try), mabfan,
and gnomi for dinner, conversation, and ice cream.
I had a good time. How can you not, when in a single evening you
can geek about halacha, science fiction, comics (that was mostly
mabfan, TV, and music? :-) Mabfan or Andrew, please
remind me of the name of that TV show you were so excited about
getting on DVD?
Much time was spent trying to find a way, within halacha, for
someone (I won't out you here) to read the new Harry Potter book on
Shabbat. (Some of my suggestions were rejected because they would
involve waiting until morning; apparently solutions that don't
involve starting by quarter past midnight aren't interesting.)
I hope you find a solution, but if not, I suspect a 22-hour delay
isn't fatal... :-)
Erik (one of my cats) is staying with a friend while I'm here, and
apparently he's very comfortable in her house. She can offer him
avian theatre (we don't get many birds visible from cat-accessible
windows), and he quickly established his place in the household.
Good, as he'll be going back for Pennsic in a couple weeks. :-)
I miss the cats, but knowing they're in good hands helps.
Never mind the academic stuff: I'm beginning to wonder if I would
have the physical stamina to attend this school if I lived in this
city. That's one steep hill! I'm staying in a dorm at the top of
the hill for this program (so no biggie), but the houses up here
are all in the multi-million-dollar range, so ordinary people don't
live here. (Actually, I wonder about the people who live in some
of the humongous houses up here. Are they insanely rich, or large
families or other groups? Some of these places look like they'd
easily be 10,000 square feet.)
There appear to be no vending machines on Hebrew College's campus.
How odd.
I've had a few instances of an odd style of encounter here, and I
wonder if it's a Boston thing or if I'm just unlucky. I have
asked people on the street (or in the T) what should be simple
questions (e.g. "which of these intersecting streets is Center?"
when there's no sign), and people who seem to be from around here
don't know. In the example I just gave, it was a group of students
who'd just gotten off a city bus. On the T, I asked someone who
seemed to be a regular T rider (based on overheard conversation)
"does this train go to Government Center" (a big stop), she said
she didn't know, and then she got on my train (after I got the
answer elsewhere) and rode it past that stop. There have
been a couple other cases, too. Is this a "don't wanna talk to
strangers" thing, or what?