View source for Blog/December 2012/Dec 28th

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{{bheadernew|Dec 28th|http://ronware.org/devar/vayechi5773.pdf}}

Hi, again!

It's been another intense week; lots of work without much of a break.  The political scene here took yet another unexpected turn, this time around looks to be quite interesting.  The weather has been cold but nice and we are looking at a cooling trend into the coming week.

But first, a health update!  This week, Jeremy underwent an operation, as I mentioned last week.  B"H, he's doing well and seems to be getting better very quickly.  According to his father, my daughter Daniela "is doing a great job nursing Jeremy back to health".  So kudos to Daniela! On the other hand, she got sick and is now trying to fight off a cold while taking care of him.  And Jeremy's father was back in the hospital this week because of an infection from a previous surgery,  and we are very concerned about that.  So the "refua sheleima" (speedy recovery) list now includes: Daniela (דניאלה רות), Jeremy (ירמיהו יצחק) and Richard (שמואל בן יהושע).  Yikes!

Two of Jeremy's siblings will be spending ''shabbat'' with us, along with my nephew Chris who just completed his "[http://www.birthrightisrael.com/Pages/Default.aspx Birthright]" trip.  He had "the best time, ever".  So we're hoping to continue his having a "best time" while he stays with us for the next two weeks.  

Sarah's been working long hours at school.  Though she's only got three days a week of classes, they give a lot of homework.  The kind of homework which involves a lot of time.  So our paths barely cross, and we're all very tired all week long.  Thank God for ''shabbat''!

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the political scene here took an unexpected turn this week.  Netanyahu [http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=6850 attacked Naftali Bennett], the leader of the [http://baityehudi.org.il/englp/ Jewish Home] party -- considered to be a "right wing" party, and also considered by the punditocracy to be a natural ally of Netanyahu's [https://www.likud.org.il/en/ Likud] party.  Of course, those of us who are ''really'' on the "right wing" of the Israeli political scene have been saying for years that Netanyahu is not at all on "our side" of the fence.  But the really unexpected thing was not that he attacked Bennett -- since he has a long history of attacking the right-wing of his own party.  The real surprise is that the public reaction has been very strongly in favor of Bennett and against Netanyahu.

The upshot is that Likud has been slipping in the polls, while [http://www.timesofisrael.com/likud-beytenu-declines-to-33-seats-in-latest-poll/ Jewish Home has been gaining].  Even more surprising is that the "Jewish Home", which is essentially a party of the "Nationalist Religious" in Israel, has been gaining lots of traction with ''secular'' young Israelis.  This has got to be very worrying to the left-leaning Likud leadership, since it means that as of now Jewish Home is the third largest party, and will wield considerable clout in the next government.  And my favorite party, "[https://www.facebook.com/otzmatoisrael Otsma LeYisrael]" looks like it will take three seats (up from two currently).  Of course, there's almost a month until the elections -- anything can (and will) happen!  By the way, can anyone explain to me why my party doesn't have a proper website with English, Russian and French pages?  They would make even greater inroads if they properly reached the immigrant communities here.  '''NOTE:''' it turns out there [https://www.facebook.com/OtzmaLeyisrael is an English page], for what it's worth.

Last week [http://ronware.org/wiki/Blog/December_2012/Dec_21st I mentioned] that I migrated my laptop from "kubuntu" to "Mint".  This week I did some further "migration" within Mint, moving from the default [http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ Cinnamon] desktop to the much lighter-weight [http://www.xfce.org/ XFCE] desktop (not to be confused with [http://xkcd.com/ XKCD]).  I said last week that Mint was faster than kubuntu; and XFCE is much faster than pretty much any other comparable desktop.  Since I work primarily on laptops with limited resources, using a lighter-weight desktop means everything else I do gets more resources and runs faster.  That's the sort of thing that makes me happy... I'm pretty easy to please.

I had seen XFCE before, and it always looked ugly to me.  That's because I didn't know that it can be "tweaked" to look very different from the default.  Once I saw how it ''could'' be set up, and saw that it was so much more responsive than either [http://www.kde.org/ KDE] (kubuntu) or Cinnamon (default on Mint), my mind was made up.  Now I have a really fast setup, which makes me ''really'' happy.  Next week I'll give a more point-by-point comparison of the major desktops on Linux, just so you can make an informed decision when you abandon Windows ...


This ''shabbat'' will be a loud and noisy one, B"H!  Our nephew and two of Jeremy's siblings will be rounding out the guest list.  I hope we'll have enough food:
baked salmon,
crispy-baked chicken,
baby rosemary-potatoes,
carrot ''kugel'',
chicken soup,
meatballs with rice,
black-bean salad,
roasted zucchini,
spicy eggplant,
''ḥumus'',
radish salad,
egg salad,
chocolate pie and
apple muffins

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

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