Blog/October 2020/Oct 9th

Oct 9th

We had a (mostly) quiet week, with very high temperatures (peaking at 37.5C one day) which made eating lunch in the sukka a somewhat sweaty affair.

It was (mostly) quiet, because our next-door neighbors didn’t let one day go by without having guests — despite the gov’t directives forbidding such gatherings. This particular neighbor is loud anyway, and has a number of small children (one of whom is practicing to be a car alarm: she cries at all hours of the day and night, with much gusto).

That would have been enough (as we say, “dayyenu!”, but then one day a truck with loudspeakers rolled into the neighborhood as we were about to have our evening meal. Blaring out of the truck was “Jewish music” at 110dB. Then the people in the truck called out specific families by name, and started asking them questions about the holiday. The best we can figure is that it was brought in for some kid’s birthday. Most annoying.

Other than those issues, it was actually very quiet. Esther unfortunately did have to work (tax season stops for no man!). I mostly avoided actual work, though I did have a couple of issues to resolve for one of my clients. All in all, I did very little.

A few things:

What happens if Trump or Biden dies before Jan 20th?
Glenn Greenwald asks: If Democrats honestly believe Trump is a fascist dictator, why are they praying for his speedy recovery? Good question.
Dave Rubin watched the VP debate so you wouldn’t have to.
For some reason nobody can fathom, Welsh history is Black history. Yes, Wales is 99.4% White, and there are more Asians than Blacks there…
Did Pioneer Venus find phosphine first?

I’ve been looking for an alternative to the Firefox web browser which I’ve been using almost exclusively for quite a long time. While I like a lot of its features, it’s incredibly memory and CPU intensive, and I suspect it has “hung” my machine on more than one occasion. So I came across a review of the Vivaldi browser, and decided to try it.

First off: the install was super smooth. It was able to scoop up my Firefox information seamlessly. That’s all good. It seems to use less memory and CPU than Firefox, which is also good. It’s got some interesting features, like “tab stacks” — which means related tabs can be put in a stack so they take less room. So far, I’m liking the experience quite a bit. I’ll let you know if I encounter any serious gotchas.

I’ve been looking for a good way to properly merge GEDCOM files; those are the most commonly used genealogical data files, which all systems support. I’m interested in this because I’m maintaining a few versions of my family tree, and want to be able to easily incorporate updated information from other people’s trees. It turns out there aren’t any really good GEDCOM merging tools available to the commoner.

So I’m writing one in 8th. Along the way, I’m dealing with some interesting problems. First of all, “normalization of names”: meaning, making sure that “Mueller” and “Müller” are considered the same, and that “Smith, Joseph” and “Joseph Smith” are likewise considered the same. It’s not a trivial issue, since the programs generating GEDCOM don’t necessarily convert the users’ input into a canonical form.

More interestingly, I’ve expanded my date-parsing so that “CA 1984” and “Jan 1984” will match. I’m still working on the fuzzy date-parsing, it’s another non-trivial problem.

Once again it’s shabbat and yom-ṭov this week! The three of us will dine in the comfort of our home this time. The menu includes:
homemade sourdough knot rolls, fine wine, baked salmon, sweet and sour salmon (it was a really big salmon), orzo, chicken salad, baked eggplant, various salatim, fresh mango, and banana cake.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom and ḥag sameaḥ!

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