The last time I visited my friend Leonard Zubkoff, he gave me a batch of CD’s back from when he was doing professional recording of filk groups. Being all-too-busy, I never had a chance to listen to them all, which was a shame, since I never had a chance to tell him how good they all. I recently started listening to “Masquerading as Human”, by a three women acapella Filk group called “The Duras Sisters”.

It’s 20 minutes into the hour, which means if I start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer now on my TiVO, I won’t run out of show when I fast forward past all of the commercials. (TV networks of the world, shudder in fear; the Tivo changes everything.) My initial observation from watching the intro “teaser”…. if you’re going to try to have the “potential slayer” from Hong Kong try to speak Cantonese, either don’t bother, or dub her over with someone who can actually speak the language properly….

This past week has has been amazingly insane, so I haven’t had the chance to read LJ at all. Things aren’t better in that regard, although I have been making progress on some of the items on my todo list…. but I needed a break, so I took some time off and read through seven days worth of LJ entries all at once. One of the things which really struck me after doing all of this reading is how much so many of the entries relate to feelings, concerns, in my own life.

Sacred the body God has created, temple of Spirit that dwells deep inside. Cherish each person; nurture relation. Treat flesh as holy, that love may abide. Bodies are varied, made in all sizes, pale, full of color, both fragile and strong. Holy the difference, gift of the Maker, so let us honor each story and song. Love respects persons, bodies and boundaries. Love does not batter, neglect or abuse. Love touches gently, never coercing.

Wow. Twice this past week, someone has asked me if I’ve lost weight, and commented that I looked a lot better. I have lost 20 pounds in the last couple of months, and I have lost about two inches in the waistline, but I didn’t think that I my looks had actually changed that much, or that the weight loss was noticeable.

Whee!!

Last night, I flew back from Israel, leaving from Tel Aviv at 1am, and arriving in JFK at 6:30am, and by 10:30am I was back home. Woo hoo! Now I just need to exercise, shower, and then repack so I can drive down to Cape Code. Diocesan Council is having an off-site meeting/retreat tonight and Saturday. With any luck, I won’t even need to drink a lot of Coffee to keep myself awake; I seem to have gotten enough sleep on the plane, and after being in Israel for only three days, it appears I didn’t have enough time to completely time shift.

So I’m in Tel Aviv, to give a presentation for IBM Israel. Richard Stallman was also supposed to show up, but he left a one line message saying he couldn’t make it for some reason (although he would show up in Haifa the following day). This has the conference organizers in a bit of a frenzy. Unfortunately I won’t have much opportunity to do any sight-seeing. Due to corporate security restrictions, I’m not allowed to do any sight-seeing, and technically I’m not supposed to go to any restaurants other than the hotel one.

I just spent 3 hours at the Episcopal Diocese fighting with MS Exchange 5.5.

Imagine if you will a program whose error reporting capabilities are roughly the equivalent of Kerberos V5, except you don’t get source you can figure out what it’s upset about….

I’d switch them over to Linux, except that the staff are all addicted to the e-mail/calendar integration which MS Exchange provides. Sigh….

1. It is a really good idea to label kitchen containers
2. 10X confectioner’s sugar and flour can look very similar when you’re in a hurry
3. However, confectioner’s sugar is not an adequate substitute for flour when making banana bread…

For various reasons, I’ve had to deal with a large number of Microsoft systems (and Microsoft problems) a lot recently. And of course, it’s been frustating as all hell. But after having fighting through a large number of different problems, I’ve come to some conclusions about how and why it’s been so frustrating to me. The fundamental problem is that there are no real diagnostic tools which are avilable. Under Linux, if something strange happens, I can look at the various syslog files, or look at a ps listing to see what a process is doing, or in an extreme case, use lsof or strace to see what’s going on.