Doubt's Log

This week I was Yom Kippur, and Pam and I went to services at Beth Shalom. The basic gist of the holiday is this is when we ask forgiveness directly to god. Some prayers explain the process; "On Rosh Hashsanah it is written, On yom Kippur is is sealed". The first torah portion read is about the sacrafice when the jews has The Temple. Now that we don't, we just read the passages for the same effect.

At services I saw a number of differences from the synagoge I grew up at. The first was the extended use of gestures. They would point to the torah at a certain point in a certain prayer. They would do the hand gestures at the candle lighting prayer. Its intresting to me how these gestures go from making sense in a context to more abstract symbolic things outside if that orginial context. The candle prayer is a great example. In this case it was to show that you felt the warmth of the candle. However an entire congragation doing it for candles a room away has a strange effect.

The sermon was also good. The rabbi talked dabout the different types of fear the weak causes in the strong. He also went into a psalm about the anger that was caused by people doing horible acts in god's name. The psalm went from anger to self reflection. "Will I make the same mistake?"

Microsoft is trying to build a wordwide authentication system. It's a noble and cool goal. What gets done with such a system is a different matter I guess.

I wish there was wisdom to be had. I want there to be a correct path through a mess. I have no answers for Isreal and I have none for the US, but I remeber the burn, the need to get the task done at whatever cost is needed.

The strangest thing is how much air travel means to this country, how much can change without it. There is a very old lesson about not know what the value of something is till you no longer have it. One person on #uiuc said that he applauded when the first plane landed again in chicago's O'Hare airport.

The first was nicely strange... involving a twisted 16th birthday of a set of twins, one boy one girl.

Bastard is a fun rpg type anime. It's claim to fame is it's use of of rock bands for spell, character and place names. You to can see MegaDeath.

The first event of the week was Jawadk's group collaberation event. It was pretty depressing in some of the lessons that could be taken away from it. The one good lesson learned or need to learn is that I need to be flexable and not get depressed. I need to focus on the positive and move on.

The next major event of the week was the company meeting. Other people have comments about that, but it seemed to be a place to see everything the company is working on come together. Some of it was cool some of it was okay. The Talisker WinCE release looked cool. The pland for eHome looked positive. It reinvegrated my enthusiasm for an XBOX slightly. The football title looked really cool. It was intresting that ballmer felt it was important enough to mention that the right way to go after Linux is rebuild the Ms developer communities. I suspect this is going to be a difficult thing. I should give some more thought to this in a different entry.

Friday I had off, but I went in and did my playtest for Munch's Odyssey. This was the first time we got to see some of the videos for the game. It was an amazing difference... The game suddenly seemed funner. Some day I should really get into the building process of such a game. As a deep play game tester, I've seen bits and peices which I thought alone weren't great, and now finally that I can start to see the whole package I'm much more impressed.

Friday Night was Misha's birthday party. I drank a shot of everclear. Didn't do much other then give me a scrachy throat. Misha had a high school friend in town from new york, Crystal. Crystal's friends came to the party and went skinny dipping in misha's pool.

Saturday was pretty cool. We went to Morgan's parents place on Whidbey Island. There we ate fresh crab and went on thier sailboat. Cool folks. Morgan made some logan berry pies (which she does professionally). It was good.