A coworker is currently helping to train a bloodhound for police work. She is not in the law-enforcement business; she happens to run an animal sanctuary when she's not being a software geek, and somehow that apparently led to this. How cool. (Also sounds like a lot of work; she's training with the dog every morning and evening for the next ( Read more... )

I'll be leading services tomorrow night (and Saturday morning) at my synagogue, including reading torah. (Both the rabbis are away.) I'm looking forward to it. One small monkey wrench was thrown at me -- last week we switched to a new siddur for Friday nights, an interim prayerbook based on the forthcoming Mishkan T'filah. (MT is out, but our ( Read more... )

There's a parlor game going around that calls for the poster to list three things he has done that he doesn't think any of his readers have done. I think I must be too boring; I can't think of three (that would also be interesting enough to post).
I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing ( Read more... )

Words that are often misused #1: "periodic". To be meaningful, this word needs to be accompanied by some indication of the period. "Daily" is "periodic", but probably not what is meant in a recipe's direction to "stir periodically ( Read more... )

I used to think I wanted the internet in my brain, but I've
reconsidered.

The phone rang around 8:30 this morning. That was early enough to be
plausibly important, so I answered. The caller butchered my name (my
last name doesn't even have several of those morphemes); my
suspicion that it was a junk call was soon confirmed.

She was calling ( Read more... )

(Not dead, just busy. :-) )

Term heard at work: heinosity, as in "the heinosity of this bug is higher than the heinosity of the bad interface fixing it would introduce". I know that "heinousness" is already a word (at least in some dictionaries), but this version is more striking, perhaps by analogy with "bogosity ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

The trip to Toronto was relatively benign. As I mentioned earlier, we ( Read more... )

New word: bloggerrea. I'd been wondering why sometimes an update causes the RSS feed to spew old entries. Pretty annoying.
Clever, in that "uh-oh" sort of way: one piece of spam-sending malware installs its own anti-virus programbecause it doesn't want all your other viruses slowing it down ( Read more... )

One of the things that's hard about learning English from the outside (and, I presume, hard about other languages) is how much of common usage is idiom and analogy. This thought came to mind during a meeting today with exchanges like the following (in fairly rapid succession):
( silliness ahead )