Sfirat Ha'Omer Reminder Mailing-List
What's this all about?
I'm assuming you know what Sfirat Ha'Omer is. If you don't, you might
want to start out at one of these sites from
ou.org or
virtual jerusalem -- but this mailing
list is probably not going to be of much interest to you...
Assuming you do know what Sfirat Ha'Omer is, you probably know the
feeling: you're in Schul friday night, you're just about to start
Aleinu, when suddenly everyone around you starts singing "Hinnenni
muchan u'mezumen..."; and you're not sure -- did you count last night?
You're pretty sure that you did -- you do daven Ma'ariv every
night -- but did you remember the sfira last night...?
If you're like me, though, you probably do read your email every
day. At least once a day ;) .
If any of this sounds familiar to you, then you are the perfect candidate
for signing up for this list! Subscribers to this list will receive a
reminder every week day during the Omer, reminding them what day of the omer
it is. I assume that the subscribers care about counting every day -- I assume
that the overwhelming majority of the time they do remember to count,
and don't need any reminders. But just for those rare occasions when
they do happen to forget, having a reminder is always helpful.
Because I trust that our subscribers do usually count, the email isn't
even sent out in the evening -- it is sent out only on the morning
of each day (Jeruslaem time). In my own experience, I've found that
when I get a reminder before having davened Ma'ariv, I usually just
discard the reminder, because I am planning to daven later. Only once
I've had the opportunity to forget, do I need the reminder!
What about my privacy?
With so much spam mail going around these days, you may be a little
hesitant about signing up to a mailing list. I am aware of this, and
am taking all the steps I can in order to ensure that by subscribing
to the mailing list, your privacy will not be compromised in any way.
The list of subscribers is not visible to anyone besides the mailing
list's owner (in our case, me) -- not even to the other subscribers to
the list! However, the site through which I'm running the list is not
a commercial site, and therefore makes no guarantees to me, either.
But my impression is that it's a pretty serious site. I will not give
your email to any third party; I will not send any emails to you,
besides emails pertaining to the topic of the mailing list. And if at
any time you should feel that you do not want to be part of the
mailing list anymore, you can just unsubscribe; every email you will
receive through the mailing list will have the information explaining
how to unsubscribe in the email's footer.
Disclaimer
This is a "best effort" project. I cannot guarantee that the emails will
be sent out on time, or even be sent out at all; I definitely cannot
guarantee that the servers will provide uninterrupted service; I
cannot guarantee that the information in the emails is correct -- bugs
do happen. If you notice any mistakes -- please let me know! I can,
however, guarantee that I will try to do my best to make this list
helpul, without its becoming annoying.
Questions, Comments, Suggestions...
If you have any questions, feel free to
send them in. I'll try to
answer them. If you have any comments, complaints, ideas for future
developments, things you would like to see added to this
project -- please let me know! I don't promise to get back to you, but
I will try to take all requests and comments into consideration!
About this project
My name is Dov Feldstern,
and I'm a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
studying Physics and Computer Science. The idea for this
project developed in stages, starting quite a few years ago. I once
came across W. M. Feldman's book, Rabbinical Mathematics and
Astronomy, and it looked interesting. I decided to try to implement
the algorithms (the book is not presented as algorithms, but they can
be gleaned from the information provided), and write a little Hebrew
calendar program. I was writing in Visual Basic at the time. I did
start out, and implemented the basic algorithms, though the program
never really developed into much.
A few years later, when I started the army, two things happened: first
of all, this was the first time that I started out almost every day by
logging into my computer. And secondly, I was introduced to the Python
programming language, and to the Unix/Linux environment in general.
One thing that the Unix culture encourages, is the writing of little
scripts for doing all kinds of little tasks for you. So I decided to
write a little script (in python, of course) which would run every
time I logged in to my computer, and display a little message
reminding me of the omer, when relevant. The script was based on the
algorithms I had written based on Feldman's book. And it really
helped! Especially during night shifts, when sometimes things were a
little hectic and you couldn't always be sure of getting to daven,
having a little window pop up reminding you to count the omer could be
really useful.
So when I started studying at the university, I naturally brought the
script along with me, and installed it there, too. Of course, every
year when sfira came around, little improvements were made to the
script -- but the basic functionality remained unchanged.
And then last year I got the idea of starting a mailing list! It's the
natural thing -- after all, most of us today are quite networked, and
we usually read our email every day. Getting a little reminder each
morning by email could certainly help for the odd time when we forgot
to count sfira the night before. By the time I thought of it last
year, it was too late to implement the idea, in terms of the technical
aspects. And there was also the problem of having a server connected
to the interent 24 hours-a-day that would host the project. But a few
weeks ago I happend to come across polarhome.com's web site, signed up
for it, created the mailing list (with Zoltan's help) -- and the
project is now underway!
I hope you find it helpful!
Acknowledgments
This project wouldn't be here without the support of:
- The program which calculates the dates and sends out the emails is
written in Python.
- As mentioned above, the algorithms on which the program is based are
based on W. M. Feldman's Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy, and
on Gauss' Formula, as presented in האינציקלופדיה
העברית, כרך כ"א, עמ' 351.
- The mailing list is managed by Mailman
-- an opensource mailing list project project (also, incidentally, written
in python).
- This web page and the mailing list are hosted for free by
polarhome.com.
