Puke: The Final Frontier

Well, it happened, finally. One of my daughters puked on me last night. Now I know I am a bit squeamish, but I thought I handled myself well. My wife gave me a hard time for wanting to clean everything ASAP, though. :-)

Do you go to message boards?

I had a conversation with a friend on Monday and she confided that she'd never been to a community site (message board, chat room, etc.). I'm not talking illicit stuff here, but the kind of thing you might find at Maplewood Online's forum, for example. I was shocked, as I've been an avid message boarder since 1996 or so, and I've worked in businesses where that was the bread-and-butter. Am I the weirdo or is she? OK, OK, I know I am a weirdo, but I mean specifically with regard to this topic.

New techmology from our non-friends in Redmond

Well, MS finally released Wallop, and it looks pretty cool. I'm still waiting on my invite, hopefully coming from my friend Jeremy, but from what I've seen and what my friend Alantells me, it looks like a nice next-gen hybrid of Flickr and some other cool social networking stuff. I don't think it's groundbreaking, but it looks awfully polished, in a good way.

http://www.wallop.com

Flooring update

By the grace of Hashem, it looks like we won't need to replace any of the hardwood floors, just refinish them. However, it's still going to cost an arm and a leg and maybe a finger on the other arm too. Maybe techmology isn't all it's cracked up to be. The floor guy gets to inhale polyurethane AND make money?! Wow.

Chicken or loose change? You decide.

It's that time of year again. Kaporos is afoot and we're faced with the age-old (well, maybe just a hundred or so years old) dilemma of whether to use a chicken or the spare change we find around the house.

For those of you unfamiliar, as part of the 10 days of repentance between (and including) Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews are to engage in a pretty curious ritual. It's called kaporos, or in my family, "zoys challie foosie."

Here's a pic, it tells way more than a thousand words: Chicken head face!

So, anyone out there use a chicken--other than barseff?

Dealing with contractors, 21st century style

So we just bought an old house in the suburbs, and we're refinishing the floors. The previous owners had the brilliant idea of carpeting the whole house, which is verboeten in our Yuppie milieu.
So the floor guy--Is there a fancier term for him? Hardwood Re-engineerer perhaps? Floor pie baker?--says that the wood under the carpet doesn't look so good at first glance. Great, I'm thinking, and I'll have to shlep back out here today again to see each spot that looks like it's in need of replacement. While that dreadful thought was still lingering in my head, he says, "when I find a bad spot, I'll take a digital pic and e-mail it to you for your thoughts." Now granted, this is not a state of the art concept, but we're talking about a contractor here. They may be one of the last bastions of ludditic (ludditudinal?) behavior in the professional world. I was pleased as fruit punch. Needless to say, though, I hope not to get an e-mail from him today!

Introduction to my blog: Irreverence on technology, Judaism and a bunch of other carp (maybe whitefish, too).

So, I've finally dipped my toes into the cool blue waters of blogdom.

I realized that I spent too much time on message boards, perfecting my answers, but there's no sense of permanence, and of course the best reason to post is to impress your Internet friends, right? Well, I figured that now I can post and get some props...and they won't go away when the post leaves the first page of the board!

I plan on posting mostly about technology and its impact on our personal and business lives, which are closer than ever before. I also hope to touch on Jewish stuff as well, plus sports, travel, cooking Hungary, New York, Miami...

Now what happens?

Using techmology to ask for forgiveness

An old friend asked a similar question back in the late 90s, when e-mail was not yet ubiquitous. Now that e-mail is just one of many techmological methods to communicate, I'd like to revisit it.

The basic idea is, "how legitimate is asking forgiveness of your friends before Yom Kippur via e-mail, IM, text message?" Is there a hierarchy of acceptability? E-mail without a reply yes, text message with a reply yes, but IM without a reply no? How do you do it?