Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Somewhat more closeup, this is what my Palm Treo could make out:

Certainly not your usual fare!

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Wetware breakage, as son #3 broke his leg in school in a freak accident jumping off a chair. That was early on in the year...everything else happened since October.
• My laptop died unceremoniously a few weeks ago, prompting me to hurriedly purchase a replacement
• The replacement, of course, came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I tried, really honestly tried to upgrade to Ultimate "seamlessly" and "live", only to find out that it repeatedly broke installed programs over and over (one of which appears to be the Palm Desktop software that I'd use to synchronize my Treo with my laptop. Guess where all my pictures are?) There goes 3 weeks of productivity down the drain.
• We had more sewer backups--twice--nothing as bad as last year's dump, although there was still enough icky stuff to ruin a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps the line was clogged with all my lost productivity from the item above.
• Tonight, when I went to rent some movies to watch this evening, I found that the magnetic stripe on my credit card couldn't be read--FAIL--which was just icing on the cake following....
• The pièce de résistance: finishing it all off, our car decided to up and die on us twice in the last few weeks, this last time prompting us to realize that it's a sign from above to get a new car.

"Would you like some cheese with that whine?"

Of course, we did have our high points: son #1's wonderful Bar Mitzvah on Purim was wonderfully planned by my loving wife and executed by Son #1 himself. My sister gave birth to my second niece, Kaia. And we actually did have a wonderful family trip to Québec, Montréal and Ottawa this summer; partly business and partly pleasure (our first family vacation since 2003), and the high point of the end of the year was our annual fire-hazard known as Hanukkah:

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

(Yes, yes, I know it’s been a while since a posting; I’ve got a few in the queue, I promise.)

This evening the family and I went to Plum Beach, a little bit of beach right off of the Belt Parkway between exits 9 and 11.

It’s really kind of an interesting beach; there are nice views of Kingsborough Community College (behind the sailboat)

Sic transit gloria urbi.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Today, after yesterday's excitement, the wife and the boys went out today to an animal shelter and found and adopted our newest family member, Poogy the guinea pig:

Shafan, the bunny

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 7:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in June of 2004, we received from my son's school a guinea pig from the science department to care for the summer. We were trying out the whole "pet with kids" thing; Elana and I had had a guinea pig before who needed to be euthanized back in 1995, right before son #1 was born, and we weren't sure if kids and pets were going to work for us, so we gave it a try. "Buffie" came to us, and sons #1 through #3 were instantly enamored of Buffie. She learned quickly to squeak and beg for food every time the refrigerator door opened; she had us trained in no time.

In the fall of 2004, right before we moved to our new house, the school science department was being repainted, and we were told not to bring Buffie back in, so as not to expose her to construction dust, mess, and paint fumes, etc. One month led to the next ("Don't bring her back now, it's the holiday season." "Um, do you really still have her, we got another one.") We held on to Buffie throughout the 2004-2005 school year.

Come May of 2005, the original provider of Buffie felt that she should be returned to the school, or at least to the original provider. A short custody battle ensued, during which time the school gave the original donator a new guinea pig to replace Buffie, as we had become quite attached (read: "We'd rather fight than switch!") to our little critter.

When we inherited a bunny in June of 2006, Buffie was even accepting of the new interloper, in her own way.

Now, it's 3 years out, we didn't know how old Buffie was when we got her but she was at least 4 years old by our reckoning, and probably closer to 5 or 6, which is pretty old for a guinea pig. We had noticed lately that she had been slowing down, and not quite as hippity-hoppity as her next-cage neighbor.

This afternoon, after returning home from services at our synagogue, the boys found Buffie barely breathing, out in her cage the sun and fresh air. (As a special treat, we had put her out in the shade on our deck this morning, also to make room for lunch guests.) We brought her inside, where she looked up at all of us once, and then expired peacefully among her doting and adoring family. (It was somewhat uncomfortable explaining this to our 10 or so lunch guests. As you can imagine, it cast a pall upon the meal. Were the kids not among half-a-dozen of their friends, it would have been much harder.)

We buried her this evening, amidst a river of tears and good-byes from all of us.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

(I should have written this earlier; I guess lack of sleep is getting the better of me.)

Congratulations are due to Son #1, who competed this Sunday in the US national championships of the חידון התנ"ך (International Bible Contest) held at the Ramaz school in NYC.

He didn't place, but this was his first year competing, and he was the youngest participant from his school. The syllabus covered most of the books of Exodus, 1 Kings and 2 Kings, and parts of the books of Ezra and Nehemia. The contest consisted of two examinations (one 90-minute written test and one 40-minute written test), followed by a small presentation. The winners from the US will go on to the International Bible Contest in 2008 in Jerusalem, Israel.

Just getting to this point is a major accomplishment: out of hundreds of participants nationwide, around 150 were selected, covering both junior high school and high school divisions, in Hebrew and in English.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it wasn't quite like that, you hoser.

Elana presented a poster at the 2007 PAS conference in Toronto on Monday, and so we (all of us) went up. Sunday we spent driving hard from Brooklyn to Toronto, arriving in the evening and getting pizza for dinner.

Monday, while the conference went on (and Elana picked up her share of swag; only pediatricians' conferences would be giving away rubber duckies and stuffed giraffes in addition to the usual pens, bags and sticky note pads), the kids and I went to the CN Tower right next door to the convention center.

The kids enjoyed jumping on the vertigo-inducing glass floor (at 342 m. above ground), much to the horror of others who just wouldn't step on the floor (yes, I did go on it):

On Tuesday, we ended up going to see the marvelous horseshoe falls on the Canadian side of the falls.

Any lasting effects? Well, son #3 now goes around telling the joke:
"How do you Canadians spell Canada? C eh N eh D eh"
I guess you had to be there.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Phew! I've spent the entire week playing catch-up.

For the first time since August 2003, I took a short vacation with my family. Just a short trip to Connecticut to see Mystic Seaport, with a short trip up to Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI,

Digression: it really is a cool synagogue; it isn’t terribly large—our synagogue here in Brooklyn is about the same size (maybe a little larger) but it wasn't built in the 1700’s, and doesn’t have its balcony finished yet. Plus, they have a 500+ year old Torah scroll given to them as a gift from the Jewish community of Amsterdam that is displayed quite nicely in a glass case....

On Sunday night, I got a frantic call from a client who just converted over to using CommuniGate Pro for their mail server. It appears that the stock spam filters that they provide just don't cut the mustard. Luckily, one of my cohorts found a spamassassin conduit for CGP that appears to have stemmed the onslaught of unsolicited mail. Of course, once that was working, it uncovered yet another problem, having to do with the fact that some email from one machine wasn't making it from a qmail install on one branch of a firewall arm to another, exacerbated by the fact that I have not yet set up separate bind views , and that there is NATing going on to allow external hosts to reach the CGP machine. (The solution to that is to use qmail’s smtproutes function to point to an internal address for the CGP machine.)

Now I have to find the time to begin the architecture work for my most recent project, LTR.com, a new-and-improved dating website being started up by my acquaintance David Siegel, which I’ve put off all week...

whine whine whine

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday morning, I brought my youngest son into the covenant of Abraham, our forefather—in other words, we gave him a b'rit milah (ritual circumcision).

No, I’m uninterested in hearing your tirade about circumcision: male circumcision is not the same thing as female circumcision, aka female genital mutilation either in quantity or quality. Moreover, we don’t do it because we want to make a health statement—although there are undoubtedly health benefits (that site is not exactly non-partisan, by the way)—we (in our family) do it because it is incumbent upon us to do so from our religious perspective. In other words: God said so.

People asked me about his name quite a bit (Daniel Noadyah, in Hebrew דניאל נועדי-ה—tradition has us not write the final two letters together because they spell a name of God.) so I thought I'd write about it some. This is more or less a distillation of my discussion of it at the little “feast” we had after the circumcision on Wednesday. (Times are relative to Wednedsay; remember this.)

Continue reading "Daniel Noadyah, this little one, may he grow." »

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife and I had our fourth (!) son last night, July 25 2006. Mother and baby are doing fine, after what was the longest 41 out of 40 week gestation we've gone through.

In accordance with Jewish tradition, the boy will receive his name at his circumcision ('brit milah') next Wednesday. (Since he was born after dark on Tuesday, and the Jewish calendar marks days as beginning roughly at sundown, Tuesday evening after about 2130 EDT in New York City is Jewish Wednesday.)

Older brothers Amram, Levi and Eliezer are really excited about their new sibling. No, really: because of (or perhaps in spite of) our best efforts, the brothers are a very tight-knit group and are anxious to bring in yet another "Altz-MAN" (said while banging the chest with the fist and a primal, gorilla-grunt)

One traditionally does not invite others to a brit milah since it carries an "obligation" to attend this important Mitzvah. Instead, if you want, you can find below information about the wheres and whens...

Continue reading "41 Weeks in the Making, Our Newest Baby Is Here!" »

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So this afternoon, after getting a haircut for me and the two older boys, we pull into our driveway, and son #2 asks me “Why is Buffy [our pet guinea pig] out on the porch?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
I get out of the car, look up onto our porch, and lo! and behold! there is a bunny rabbit in a cage. It's 90° F outside, I look into the cage and find a bunny, his water bottle (! on the floor of the cage!), and some food, sitting on our front porch.

What to do?

Well, it turns out that the day before, when walking home from synagogue, we happened to see this very bunny sitting on the front step of the house at the corner of our block—my children and wife remember this—and so after getting everyone inside, my oldest son and I trot on down to the neighbors’ house to find out why their bunny is on our front step...

Continue reading "It's a boy? It's a girl? It's a BUNNY!" »

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

My cousin, Eric Rose, had, about 4 weeks ago, a horrible skiing accident in Vermont, not too too far from his home there.

He broke his back (!), was medevac'ed to Dartmouth, and thence to the Magee rehab center in Philadelphia (near his parents and my family).

He broke his lower two thoracic vertebrae (T11/T12) and has permanent spinal cord injury. He's going to be wheelchair-bound for the foreseeable future.

He's hoping for release on April 20th (so he'll be spending the first two nights of Passover in the hospital, it sounds like) and for a speedy return to Vermont thereafter.

There are people sponsoring a bike-a-thon to help raise money to help Eric (figuratively) get back on his feet.

My heart goes out to Eric, his saintly wife Chris and their son David.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)