View source for Blog/January 2023/Jan 27th

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What can I tell you? In a nutshell, we went back to work, upgraded our internet to “fiber”, and found more relatives.

Esther went in to work on Tuesday instead of Monday, which caused both of us to become confused as to what day it was. Maybe we need a secretary? I dealt with an occasional client who asked me “how things are going” on the project he’d told me to stop work on two months ago. So that was fun.

Over ''shabbat'' we’d heard from our friends that they’d upgraded to “fiber” internet (e.g. optical fiber instead of copper phone line). Since we hadn’t heard from the phone company that they’d started rolling out fiber to homes, I called them bright and early Sunday. On Monday they came and laid the optical cable and hooked us up to the (amazingly fast) Brave New World of Fiber™.

But (as you might imagine), I’ve got some complaints.

My first complaint is that you ''must'' use their router, and they lock it down so you can’t easily modify settings. Beyond that, the router has many fewer features than my previous one. To add insult to injury, you “lease” the router from them. 

Now, for most people, none of this is an issue. But as you know, I’ve got issues; which leads to my second complaint.

Because I house servers (mail, web, etc) at my home office, I need a “fixed IP address”. I got that from them. But I also need them to set up “reverse DNS”. I spent ''an hour'' on the phone with them, with three different “service” people, none of whom understood what I needed. One of them kept trying to tell me my router needed to have some setting changed, which of course was wrong. After all that, I still don’t have the rDNS set up. It’s going to be a long week ahead of me… 

Things:
* Prof. Hossenfelder discusses why climate change [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnVWUIhQ8dE won’t stop the “Gulf Stream”].
* The news is bad for you. [https://sarahhaider.substack.com/p/the-news-is-bad-for-you-stop-reading Stop reading it].
* A friend responds to Thomas Friedmans’s question [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1617197669365198854.html “Can Joe Biden save Israel”]. Thank you very much, we don’t need saving.
* Schneier on [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/01/bulk-surveillance-of-money-transfers.html bulk surveillance] of money transfers.

As for relatives, well we’ve found a couple more “Aaron” relatives and this week Jeremy did an analysis using my and my sister’s DNA matches with all these relatives, to figure out the most likely scenario for “who is my g-gpa?”. His analysis confirms what we already had surmised: that my g-gpa is one of a set of siblings we’ve identified (though it’s quite likely another sibling remains to be uncovered). Really amazing how much we’ve been able to uncover with DNA and a few family trees!

Our emergency-backup daughter, Dinah, has been threatening to give birth any moment now, for the past week or so, and Esther’s the assigned support-mom in lieu of her mom. So as the days stretch on, the likelihood Esther will suddenly be called to duty increases. It’s possible she’ll head out today, which will leave me to fix ''shabbat'' alone.

On that note, she decided one of the “Bread” book recipes sounded good, so I’m making rye-spelt loaves as our ''ḥalla'' this week. I even measured the flours using a scale! We’ll update you later on whether or not the recipe was worth the effort.

Once again, the weather was warmer than average. It’ll remain warmer than usual until Tuesday when, God willing, we’re supposed to get cold and rain. We need it!

This ''shabbat'', we’re supposed to have:<br>
homemade rye-spelt ''ḥalla'',
roasted chicken,
roasted potatoes,
roasted veggies,
various ''salatim'',
and chocolate-chip cookies<br>

Until next time,<br>
''shabbat shalom''!

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