Category: Personal

More or less taking the day off. This morning, I bought supplies for the NYC trip:
* CD player to listen to music on the airplane
* Gloves, for New York weather
* Battery for cellphone
Hmmm…. coulda gotten good headphones and power adapter for the laptop instead. Didnt’ think of it.
Being Jewish, I’m exempt from the frenzy of rushing and shopping (talk to me before Passover). The fun is in browsing, without a tight deadline, to-do-lists, and consequences.
For folks who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry. And a happy vacation to all.

Didn’t get my act together to travel, which worked out well.
Attended a lovely Thanksgiving dinner party with fantastic food and interesting conversation, hung out with a friend in from out of town, can see the bottom of my email inbox, have a stocked fridge and an uncluttered house, caught up by phone with lots of family and friends, had a chance to give thoughtful responses to several book recommendations.
I’m imagining the sheer overwhelmedness of coming back from a weekend away to a messy house, an empty fridge, a thousand emails, and a dozen little stacked up unfulfilled obligations.
Worked out quite nicely.

This weekend, I’ve been staying with friends in Somerville, meeting their four-month old baby, who has a charming smile, squeaks like a mousie, and falls asleep to James Brown and Stevie Wonder.
Reading their their books (Emerson Among the Eccentrics).
Receiving visitors on the porch, in the 59 degrees damp chill, because our friends are deathly allergic to the resident cat. (Ah, Spring in New England).
In Jamaica Plain, getting a photo tour of a trip to Kyoto (elegant pictures of cherry blossoms, gardens, and temples; grisly tales of vengeance and treachery.)
For folks who don’t know, I lived in Somerville between 1987 and 1999.

This weekend, I’m clearing out 1200 messages in my inbox, accrued over the last 3 weeks, not counting spam and items already filed or deleted. One distributed start-up company, three non-profit affiliations, attempts to defeat the same bad law in several states, and three social/political mailing lists. All of this adds up to a truckload of mail, much of it interesting and relevant if not immediately urgent.
The “organize-yourself” books tell you to act upon or file each incoming message when it comes in.
Some messages are urgent — they relate to a current project or a customer and require an immediate response. When they come in, I think about them, make a decision, and put them away.
Other messages are less urgent. They’re about a conference in a month. They contain links to interesting-looking articles. They have an interesting-sounding conversational idea. They stay in the inbox.
I don’t have enough attention to think about every interesting idea that crosses my email box at the time.
What do you do? Do you have enough attention to deal with every piece of email every day? Are you bold enough to delete things that you didn’t have attention for that day?

Judith’s astonishing hand-dipped chocolate-covered strawberries. Judith keeps trying to attribute credit to the high quality of the choclate. As if the strawberries decided, on their own, to leap into a bowl of chocolate, which, on its own, decided to melt.
Hearing the four questions asked by Hannah, who is 2.5 years old, abominably mischievous, and clever.
Betsy’s question about personal expererience of Dayenu: which good things in life would we appreciate, even if they were not accompanied by other good things.
Dan observes that Haggadah has to tell you which team to root for. He notes that most of the Egyptian soldiers drowned in the Red Sea were probably conscripts.
Reading about the seder’s origins in the form of the Greco-Roman symposium, including multiple courses accompanied by wine, vegetable hors d’oevres, reclining posture, prepared questions, and counting things as a conversational gambit (Four Sons, Four Cups of Wine).
Judith quotes R. Nachman, via A Night of Questions. When you are about to leave Egypt — Any Egypt — do not stop to think: “but how will I make a living out there?” One who stops to “make provisions for the way” will never get out of egypt.
Learning the terms for male body parts in sign language, at varying levels of formality and politeness. (You had to be there).
Betsy’s skill at abbreviating with spirit.
Judith’s long and eventually successful quest for wine glasses; Dan’s long and eventually successful quest for the Passover food processor.
Cooking and schmoozing with Judith and Dan (the reason to have a good-sized kitchen with multiple countertops).
Will post if I remember more.
What about you?

“Whoever elaborates in telling the story of the exodus from Egypt is to be well-praised.”
The tradition of the seder is to retell the story, interpreting it in a some way that comes alive for the participants.
* political
* psychological
* dramatic
* exegetical
* musical
With cheap printing, photocopying, and now internet connections, there’s a new tradition of compiling custom Haggadahs.
Humans interpret and remake culture. That’s what we do to make life interesting and meaningful.
Except (under the current US legal scheme), where a few people have copyrights on the myths of our culture, can extend those copyrights forever, and can prosecute people who want to share and modify their culture.
Imagine if the Rabbis took a copyright on the Haggadah, and the copyright was extended forever.
Passover’s a festival of liberation.
Next year, free culture.
Have a happy and creative holiday.

for the first time, yesterday.
I’d always thought the $15 fee was a ripoff. But this year, it was cheaper and faster than getting my printer fixed or slogging over to Kinkos.
Worked just fine.

As you might have guessed from the topics of conversation, I’ve been working on a start-up in the social software space. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation in the public internet, using tools like weblogs and wikis. We’re bringing these to corporations behind the firewall.
The pattern of adoption feels like the early PC era — champions discover a new set of simple tools bring them to the workplace, under the radar of central IT and corporate purchasing.
The first version of the SocialText website is here.
The team is fantastic — some folks I’ve admired for years — smart, competent, experienced, nice people. The group is distributed — Ross and Pete in the Bay Area, Ed in Ann Arbor, and sometimes Greg in NY.
We stay in touch by phone, email, and IM, and collaborate largely by wiki, which is egregiously fun. It feels like improvising together on a whiteboard, except you’re not in the same place at the same time, you have a document draft when you’re done, and you’re building a knowledgebase as you go.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email (contact info in sidebar at right), and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it.

It was a good bat mitzvah. On Friday night, after dinner, the bat mitzvah girl spoke to mixed-seated-group in the Orthodox synagogue sanctuary, saying something meaningful about the weekly Torah portion, citing several medieval commentaries, and thanking her parents, friends, and teachers. Her mom gave a talk. The Rabbi ended his speech with the blessing that the girl should grow up to become “a leader in Israel.”
They didn’t say and do such things in Orthodox synagogues when I was bat mitvah age!
On Friday, we visited a small, beautiful reconsitituted wetland which holds storm waters and houses local creatures: ducks and herons and anhinga and swallows; turtles, frogs, and lounging alligators; citidwellers strolling on a boardwalk; young couples with children visiting grandma and grandpa; intent people with binoculars and the names of all the birds; intent people with military telescopes on tripods waiting for bobcats (they spotted one while we were there).
Had some travel-related misadventures involving lost rental car keys that ended well. The highlight was watching my parents cope with said misadventures with calmness, aplomb, assertiveness, creativity, and the occasional strategically effective tantrum in dealing with braindead people and processes at Budget Car Rental. My parents have matured tremendously in later adulthood.
Had a good time with various relatives, and returned to Austin without trouble (see airplane reading.)

Going to Florida for my neice’s Bat Mitzvah, and whirlwind Everglades trip with family.
Back Sunday.
– Adina