21-Jan-2000 Lost Preferences
I've swum a kilometer a day every weekday this week. The pace clock hasn't been replaced yet, so I haven't been watching how long it's taken. Sometimes I succeed in looking at the little clock on the wall when I start and stop, and can tell that it's about 27 and a half minutes for 1050 meters, say. That puts me close to my 25 minutes for the 1K, the pace which is my 20 minutes for 32 lengths preliminary target.
On my way to work from swimming I stopped at Strymish's. That's The Mobile Book Fair, or The New England Mobile Book Fair if you want to be fancy. It's a huge, architecturally chaotic place in an ugly green cinder block building on an industrial street. The parking lot is normally jam packed (especially in December, which you'll note it isn't any more) and impossible to get out of because of the heavy traffic. Haha! I've beaten the system. The residential street between the JCC and the Highlands post office is parallel to the street the Book Fair's parking lot is on. If I park on Winchester at the corner of Columbia I can walk down, cross the parking lot, and avoid the whole mess, and not be any farther from the entrance than the other corner of the parking lot anyway. So if the building is ugly and the parking is difficult, why go there? Because it's full of books, that's why. The logo is a lighthouse on a stack of books. The T-shirts they sell have the logo on them, and under it “I was just looking for one book”. There are huge stacks of current books on pallets next to the checkouts, wooden bookcases with books arranged by subject and by publisher like the stacks in a library but closer together, and rooms and rooms full of remainders. If a book has a price sticker on it that says “net”, that's the price, and it's probably a deeply discounted remainder price. If it doesn't say net, it'll be 20% below publisher's price. I went looking for a programming book, Refactoring, that Diane Patterson said her husband recommended highly. It wasn't among the programming books, but a clerk found a copy for me among the extra stock. At 20% less than Amazon's price, and no waiting for delivery.
Our computer was in the shop yesterday. It didn't want to start up on Tuesday night. I got it booted from a CD, and it came up normally later that night. Wedensday night, though, it didn't start at all. Thursday morning I found a Mac repair place in the yellow pages, came home from swimming in the morning and called, and brought it over. They had it ready today. Unfortunately my Netscape bookmarks all got lost in the process of recovering the disk. Outside of that and reentering registration codes for a couple of programs there seems to be no harm done.
The choir sung at evening services tonight, 20th century music (that doesn't sound dated yet, does it) by Lazar Weiner. What I should do is put up another page with a glossary of Judaic stuff so I can say, “for Shabbat Shirah” and let you look that up or not. Every year about this time we do a joint service with the Temple Ohavei Shalom choir from Brookline, alternating venues. Besides the regular liturgical things the two cantors did a duet of an art song in Yiddish by Weiner. When they rehearsed it before the service I could only catch a few words at random. It turned out that there was a program for the service with a translation of the song. With that I could catch enough words to follow along. The idea was that as three hassidim sang the sacred song of the Turkish rabbis Abraham was reminiscing with the three angels who had visited him to foretell Isaac's birth -- a strange musical mixing of thousands of years of tradition.
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