Which six
When you're a senior, moving out of your home of 43 years to go to a new place is traumatic. Besides the horrors of unpacking untold numbers of boxes, there's the new place itself, with a different layout and different keys than those to which you've become accustomed. The new building has a secure entrance, where guests enter your apartment number, causing the phone in the apartment to ring. When I buzzed the apartment today, she answered the phone, then, thinking I was phoning from home, began to complain about all manner of things. After about a minute of talking non-stop, the security system cut off the call. I buzzed again.
"Why did you hang up on me?" came her immediate response to the ringing phone. When I explained that I was calling from the lobby, and asked to be let in, she couldn't remember how to do it.
I reminded her she needed to press the number "6" on her keypad. I waited perhaps 10 seconds, and when the door still didn't open, I asked her again to press the 6. Her response?.... [see title of post]
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Woohoo
What a day! My mom's move is complete. I didn't kill her. And I got my first customer for my new service, less than a week after creating a website. I asked how they found me (I can't find the site using Google search). They told me my site came up as the #1 MATCH ON PAGE 1 of results using Yahoo Search!
I'll have more to say on that matter later, but first, I need to find me some "professional" graphics for the website and link exchanges. Anybody want to work on their portfolio by offering very inexpensive (a.k.a. "barter") artwork to enhance the site?
What a day! My mom's move is complete. I didn't kill her. And I got my first customer for my new service, less than a week after creating a website. I asked how they found me (I can't find the site using Google search). They told me my site came up as the #1 MATCH ON PAGE 1 of results using Yahoo Search!
I'll have more to say on that matter later, but first, I need to find me some "professional" graphics for the website and link exchanges. Anybody want to work on their portfolio by offering very inexpensive (a.k.a. "barter") artwork to enhance the site?
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Coming soon to a screen near you
Over three years in the making, and soon to be released to the public. Read about it here.
Over three years in the making, and soon to be released to the public. Read about it here.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Ticked off
I've been reading ongoing news coverage of the London terrorist bombings. It ticks me off to see articles where the journalist says in effect: "these guys are really amateur. If they wanted to inflict the most damage, they should have exploded their device in the open, where shrapnel would affect the most people - not in the confined space of a subway car, where only a relatively few people absorb the entire effects of the blast".
So what comes next... probably a similarly inexperienced bomber will improve on the death toll by following the reporter's advice. Gee, thanks alot!
I've been reading ongoing news coverage of the London terrorist bombings. It ticks me off to see articles where the journalist says in effect: "these guys are really amateur. If they wanted to inflict the most damage, they should have exploded their device in the open, where shrapnel would affect the most people - not in the confined space of a subway car, where only a relatively few people absorb the entire effects of the blast".
So what comes next... probably a similarly inexperienced bomber will improve on the death toll by following the reporter's advice. Gee, thanks alot!
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Shocked and dismayed
I often wonder whether I have false memories of my youth. There are events I remember vividly despite being assured they never happened. Some of these I know with my brain cannot be true - like being able to float across my living room from one couch to another without touching the floor... even if I had used one couch as a trampoline, I doubt it would have been possible to accomplish this feat. Yet even today, I have vivid memories of doing it. There have been other examples of this through the years. Today, I was confronted by disturbing evidence related to one such incident.
Forty years ago last June, I celebrated my Bar Mitzvah. It was a lavish affair, with a guest list that included more of my parents' friends and business associates than people I knew personally. Thankfully, my parents had hired photographers and a camera crew to take photographs and 8mm silent-movie footage of the event. Some years later, the 8mm film was transfered to VHS tape, with a dubbing of my Haftorah as background. That film contained staged sequences where I pretended to be drunk, losing the envelopes containing the monetary gifts - and then my younger sister appeared on the scene to scoop up the dropped envelopes, disappearing into the sunset as she counted her ill-gotten gains.
From that moment on, I have no recollection of ever seeing those envelopes again. I remember discussing it with my dad - and clearly remember being chastised for misplacing those envelopes. I never saw a penny of my Bar Mitzvah gelt.
Fast forward to this afternoon. My father died almost a year ago, and my mother is in the midst of preparing to move from her home. She's trying to get rid of as much stuff as she can, and today, she dropped off a box of Bar Mitzvah trinkets. Unused place cards, napkins, matchbooks, invitations, and reply cards had been lovingly preserved by my father, and were presented to me to do as I wish. And then I saw the envelopes. Those missing envelopes from forty years ago. Each one bore the name of the donor, and the amount of the enclosed gift - the notations made in my father's distinctive handwriting. There were also telegrams from those that could not attend, as well as the bills from the caterers, and the hand-written to-the-penny accounting of expenses that my father was famous for.
It is now painfully obvious to me that the envelopes were never actually lost. But I now have to wonder whether I received the money and just forgot (would you, as a thirteen year old forget receiving what amounted to 10-year's worth of allowance in a single day?) or whether my father chose to keep this money from me so that I wouldn't just fritter it away.
I guess I'll never know for sure.
I often wonder whether I have false memories of my youth. There are events I remember vividly despite being assured they never happened. Some of these I know with my brain cannot be true - like being able to float across my living room from one couch to another without touching the floor... even if I had used one couch as a trampoline, I doubt it would have been possible to accomplish this feat. Yet even today, I have vivid memories of doing it. There have been other examples of this through the years. Today, I was confronted by disturbing evidence related to one such incident.
Forty years ago last June, I celebrated my Bar Mitzvah. It was a lavish affair, with a guest list that included more of my parents' friends and business associates than people I knew personally. Thankfully, my parents had hired photographers and a camera crew to take photographs and 8mm silent-movie footage of the event. Some years later, the 8mm film was transfered to VHS tape, with a dubbing of my Haftorah as background. That film contained staged sequences where I pretended to be drunk, losing the envelopes containing the monetary gifts - and then my younger sister appeared on the scene to scoop up the dropped envelopes, disappearing into the sunset as she counted her ill-gotten gains.
From that moment on, I have no recollection of ever seeing those envelopes again. I remember discussing it with my dad - and clearly remember being chastised for misplacing those envelopes. I never saw a penny of my Bar Mitzvah gelt.
Fast forward to this afternoon. My father died almost a year ago, and my mother is in the midst of preparing to move from her home. She's trying to get rid of as much stuff as she can, and today, she dropped off a box of Bar Mitzvah trinkets. Unused place cards, napkins, matchbooks, invitations, and reply cards had been lovingly preserved by my father, and were presented to me to do as I wish. And then I saw the envelopes. Those missing envelopes from forty years ago. Each one bore the name of the donor, and the amount of the enclosed gift - the notations made in my father's distinctive handwriting. There were also telegrams from those that could not attend, as well as the bills from the caterers, and the hand-written to-the-penny accounting of expenses that my father was famous for.
It is now painfully obvious to me that the envelopes were never actually lost. But I now have to wonder whether I received the money and just forgot (would you, as a thirteen year old forget receiving what amounted to 10-year's worth of allowance in a single day?) or whether my father chose to keep this money from me so that I wouldn't just fritter it away.
I guess I'll never know for sure.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Mourning is over
July 3rd would normally be celebrated as my parents' anniversary. Instead, by sheer coincidence of the Jewish calendar, today marks the end of the official mourning period for my father. By the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of his death will come on Tamuz 25 - which is one month from today. The official mourning period for a father/mother is one-month shy of a full year. Normally, that entails eleven months, but because of the Jewish leap year (which adds an entire month to the calendar), I've actually been mourning for twelve months on the Jewish calendar.
As a commemoration, I will be visiting the grave site this morning. Though the official mourning period ends today, my father will not soon be forgotten.
July 3rd would normally be celebrated as my parents' anniversary. Instead, by sheer coincidence of the Jewish calendar, today marks the end of the official mourning period for my father. By the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of his death will come on Tamuz 25 - which is one month from today. The official mourning period for a father/mother is one-month shy of a full year. Normally, that entails eleven months, but because of the Jewish leap year (which adds an entire month to the calendar), I've actually been mourning for twelve months on the Jewish calendar.
As a commemoration, I will be visiting the grave site this morning. Though the official mourning period ends today, my father will not soon be forgotten.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
I've been really busy
Some may have noticed I'm not posting much lately. It's because I've been very busy finalizing my pet project, and have started negotiating with web-hosting and site design firms to get me online as soon as I give the final go-ahead for my new product. A number of factors have been conspiring lately to slow me down, not the least of which was a car accident that made sitting at my computer a very uncomfortable proposition. With my lower back pain more or less gone, I can once again put a full-day's work into this project without feeling like I need to get up and lie down for awhile. There have been other technical complications, but I have been steadily working through them one-by-one.
I'm finding that the data entry requirements associated with this project are far more time-consuming that I had imagined they would be. I am now working on some sort of mechanism that will allow potential "customers" to earn credits by helping with data entry.
Some may have noticed I'm not posting much lately. It's because I've been very busy finalizing my pet project, and have started negotiating with web-hosting and site design firms to get me online as soon as I give the final go-ahead for my new product. A number of factors have been conspiring lately to slow me down, not the least of which was a car accident that made sitting at my computer a very uncomfortable proposition. With my lower back pain more or less gone, I can once again put a full-day's work into this project without feeling like I need to get up and lie down for awhile. There have been other technical complications, but I have been steadily working through them one-by-one.
I'm finding that the data entry requirements associated with this project are far more time-consuming that I had imagined they would be. I am now working on some sort of mechanism that will allow potential "customers" to earn credits by helping with data entry.