Andrew Greene

As you may have noticed, I'm trying to wrap up a bunch of my long-standing projects, such as the siddur and my setting of Kabbalat Shabbat, the Psalms and other texts that introduce the Friday night service. ( Moderately lengthy details behind a cut tag to spare your friends page. In the end, though, ... ) I really like the new setting. It's a shade under 2 minutes and here's an MP3 of the computer playing it on the piano. [This recording is missing the incipit Mizmor shir l'yom ha-Shabbat, if you're going to listen to it with the text in front of you. Just be sure the text you use has all the verses.]

Played some Sevendeck games tonight with rikchik and some other friends. We refined some of the rules for "Seven and Seven" and renamed "Attack!" as "Monoculture"; we also got some action shots --- excuse me, "action" shots --- which I'll use to update the website.

Earlier in the day we placed the production order, which came to 66 decks. That's more than we'd originally expected, so we're quite pleased. Thanks to everyone who ordered; I'll let you know when the printer tells us they've shipped.

So, I've had the galleys for about two weeks now. I've distributed most of them, and feedback is starting to come in.

And.... oy.

Of course, you always expect there to be more things to fix than you expected, even when you take into account that there will be more things to fix than you expected. But then there are more things to fix than even that. I had been hoping to publish in late January; now I'm hoping by Purim.

Looking on the positive side, I have been getting lots of wonderful and useful feedback -- corrections of my errors (both embarrassingly egregious and subtle) and suggestions for improvements that I didn't see. I have been getting encouragement from people I respect to press forward, that I really have created something useful and new and worth the extra effort to make it ready to share more widely.

And there are problems, of course. Some margins got shifted in the imposition step, and some of the colors are not quite what I had expected (CMYK notwithstanding). But I can fix those.

And the books feel beautiful. I am very very pleased, even though there's still quite a bit of work ahead.

You may recall rikchik's post about the "Seven Ordered Suits."

Well, now you too can order them. We're almost done with the design work on the Sevendeck, and more information is on our website.

We'll be taking pre-orders through the end of November, and placing the production order on 1 Dec.

I want to apologize for the tone of my "lunch with co-workers" post last week. Reading Joel's blog post got me fired up with one of those "Yes! I'm not the only one who feels this is important!" feelings, and I shared while still overenthusiastic at finding a fellow traveler.

But I think I came across as smug and know-it-all. I was proselytizing. And, as several of you pointed out here on LJ and over there on FB,

I was wrong.

So, sorry for those noses that I put out of joint.

There once was a man who would balk
Whenever we asked him to talk.
We thought it was queer,
'Til he said, "My idea
Is to hide that I come from New York."

Sock Cops
Huggable Hangers
Black & Decker Power Scrubber with the Bristle Brush (great for grout!)
Melitta coffee cone

Today, Joel on Software asks:

Do you like your job?

Do you enjoy the people you work with?

Would you want to have lunch with them? Every day? [...] I like to think that we just enjoy eating together because we genuinely like each other and like spending time together. If you can’t imagine eating lunch every day with your coworkers, I hate to break it to you: you might not like them. Is it OK to spend most of your waking hours with people you don’t like?

I find this interesting because I've considered it a sine qua non for my entire career -- I will not work for a team that doesn't have lunch (mostly) together most days. That kind of camaraderie is critical, in my opinion, to the formation of a team that pulls together in crunch periods.

When I was at Bitstream, in fact, we had a strict policy: No work-related conversation at the lunch table. This was great not only because it gave us a "safe zone" when things were stressful, but more importantly because it gave us a chance to get to know one another as people and not just as job roles. We'd discuss the latest production at the Huntington or the ART; we'd discuss what our kids were up to; we'd discuss books we'd read or the Red Sox or our various choirs.

And even though I've been gone from Bitstream for about 18 months now, we still get together regularly for dinner to catch up on those same things.

Joel is right. If you're not enjoying lunch with your co-workers, why not?

I felt the urge to create a miniature crossword puzzle. So here's a little something to enjoy while you wait on the long long lines tomorrow.

In AcrossLite (puz) format or as a PDF

Happy Election Day!

I figured out how to solve most of my color frustrations with the PDF for my siddur, and I finished the other details, and I've made the ZIP file. Tomorrow, I order galley proofs!

A few weeks ago we saw "The Shabbat Siddur Companion" by Rabbi Harvey Belovski (ISBN 1-56871210-3) at the Israel Book Shop. It's the major parts of the Arvit, Shacharit, and Musaf service, in Hebrew and English, with a PowerPoint-style summary in the margin and brief but clear stage directions and contextualizing footnotes. It's a puffy hardcover. We felt that it was the right balance between completeness and accessibility for Tani to use as a Shabbat siddur. Even though it's pitched as something to accompany a real siddur and not a replacement (because it's not complete, I guess), what it really is is a pretty good introductory siddur.

And Tani is quite happy to use it, and I recommend it to anyone in a similar situation.

I've been spending the last week or so coming up for air and returning to my normally overscheduled madness. So here's a status update on my various things:

• We're almost ready to start taking orders for the Sevendeck. (That's the deck of cards that rikchik and I have been working on; there are several games that you can play with it.) I've started to make the website real -- for example, there are now rules for three games.

• I'm almost ready to order the galley proofs of my siddur. I spent most of today knocking off items on my punch list; what remains is to finalize the cover (here's a mockup of what it'll look like, I think. Feedback welcome!) and then place the order for the galleys. I'm hoping to have proofing done by Dec/Jan and to start taking orders around early December for delivery around March.

( And a few less interesting items, cut for length )

So I've been thinking. How many disastrous decisions have been made by presidents hoping to win a Nobel Peace Prize? But now, Obama has his. Sure, he'll still have to worry about the verdict of history, but just imagine....

He has to decide whether or not to invade Pakistan after the Taliban complete their takeover, and he looks around the situation room at Secretary Clinton, General Jones, and Admiral Mullen, and he says, "I already have my Nobel Prize. Screw it --- blast the bastards to hell!"

He gets Netanyahu and Abbas in a room together and says, "Listen, guys, I already have a Nobel Prize. You guys want yours, you gotta figure this one out."

Oh, and about that nice gesture of donating the $1.4M to charity --- my guess is that it would be illegal for him to keep it anyway. And I hope for his sake the medal itself isn't worth more than $200.

Just a quick and separate note that I thought yesterday's puzzle by Natan Last was a lot of fun. Lots of lively entries, a bunch of really clever clues, and really no dead spots.

Shemini Atzeret was lovely. ( Details )

So I took y'all's advice and added the positive lifecycle events to my siddur. That's put me about a month behind schedule, *sigh*, but now the additional pages are done and I'm pretty happy with them. Now I'm down to a few more evenings of detail work and I have to design the cover and I can get the galleys printed.

Hadran alach, Chazarat Ha-Melech, v'hadrach alan We shall return to you, "The Return of the King", and you shall return to us.

Yes, after eight months, we have just arrived at the end of "The Lord of the Rings" as a bedtime serial. It feels like we should make a siyyum, as we do when completing an order of the Talmud.

Overall, it was a day of meaningful reflection and prayer. As I did last year, I used my great-grandfather's machzor for kol nidre; Tani noticed that it was German but I didn't get a chance to explain the background.

( Cut for length )

Quote of the day: Teo Dagi, in his dvar Torah this morning, observed:

After all that, Jonah gets to Nineveh and does the least he can get away with and still fulfill God's command: "Forty days and Nineveh is overturned!"

That's not a prophecy, that's a tweet.

For those who are interested, I've finished the machzor for Yom Kippur for Alissa.

Links to the one-page and booklet versions on Acrobat.com

Links to the one-page and booklet versions on Greenehouse.com

The blog "Davar Acher" has an interesting review of Tolkien's translation of Jonah. The megillah of Jonah, of course, is one of the main portions of the Yom Kippur liturgy. I recommend this review, which ends most powerfully with a discussion of the book's final verse:

These people are stupid and ignorant and evil and despised, yet even they would have been forgiven had they only repented. What’s stopping you?

Still scrambling to get everything done in time. Here's my current text for the vidui. The rest of the Amidah will be taken from the Rosh Hashanah machzor that I posted last week.

Suggestions for improvements very very welcome. [Note: If you're reading this on Facebook, please come to the original at my LiveJournal blog so the comments are all in one thread.]

I hope to get it formatted after Shabbat, since Sunday will be sukkah-building day.

( Sorry, God -- behind the cut )

First, an amusing note about the puzzle, then a few gripes. ( Spoilers for 9/25/09 NYT )

This morning at dropoff, Tani's class whiteboard had the following question: "This is the season of teshuvah, which really means 'turning'. Can you think of something that turns?"

The kids had written in a nice variety of answers. Leaves, steering wheels, merry-go-rounds. Tani wrote:

am
to
ma

His teacher and I looked at him quizzically. He explained, "You can turn the word 'am' around to make the word 'ma'."

That's my boy!

My NPL friend Tyler Hinman posted an interesting puzzle by Renfield on his blog. I got completely caught up in a variation on it, which I'll share here because I couldn't solve it and I'm interested in seeing if it can be solved.

You have a 7x7 grid which you must populate such that you can, by a king's tour, traverse the alphabet from A to Z.

In Renfield's version, you are allowed to use nonsense entries but they score 0; real words score their length minus two. Your goal is to get the highest score possible.

In my variant, you are not allowed to use nonsense entries (but you are allowed to use anything with dictionary nature, so for example common abbreviations like Hg, MLK, and VW are perfectly reasonable) and your goal is simply to get it all to fit in a 7x7 with complete interconnection.

Your goal is to have the lowest score possible: you get 5 points for each unchecked letter and 1 point for each "extra" letter beyond the 26.

My best effort so far, which does not even meet the minimum requirements, ( behind the cut )

It's got the one extra letter on top, so it doesn't fit in 7x7, and it does not have overall connectivity. Not to mention a few more questionable words than I'd like.

I know several of you out there can do better.

New Year's wish for better than flipped eggs eaten by king. (6, 5)

At my website I've posted the final PDFs of the machzor for a beginning reader (in both reader's and printer's spreads) and a "scorecard" to help the kids keep track of the 100 shofar blasts. Feel free to pass that link around to anyplace where it might be useful. And stay tuned; I plan to do another beginning-reader machzor for Yom Kippur.

May all of you be written and sealed for a good year!

Alissa has started reading. Very simple books, but still: yay!

And it means that when she comes to synagogue this weekend, during the musaf amidah when everyone is reading silently for fifteen minutes, we have a chance for her to not be bored. She's very motivated, especially about tefillot, and so I thought that it would be a worthwhile exercise to try to write a simple translation of the Musaf Amidah for Rosh Ha-shanah that adopts the repetitive style and simple vocabulary of a children's book, but that captures the essence of each of the berachot.

So, here it is. Comments and suggestions for improvements are welcome.

( Large thing behind the cut )

In the car on Friday, Tani and Alissa were pretending to be Jedis.

Alissa: I predict that the Jedi Temple will be destroyed.
Tani: Well, nothing lasts forever.
Alissa: Bonds of love do. They're eternal.
Tani: Not once both people have died.
Alissa: Uh huh. Their children remember that they loved each other.
Tani: Well, eventually, all living things in the universe will die.