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{{bheadernew|Dec 6th|http://ronware.org/devar/vayigash5774.pdf}}

Hi, again!

Rain, rain!  Please come again and stay a while!  We had our first good rain here this week, B”H.  The miracle of ''ḥannuka'' this year was that there was no rain ''during'' the eight days, at least not here in our neck of the desert.  That’s changed now, and the forecast claims we’ll have cold and wet weather for the next week.  Good!  We need the moisture.

Our ''ḥannuka'' was calm and pleasant, B”H.  Truth be told, we didn’t do anything unusually creative.  We did make our yearly mistake of eating [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufganiyah ''sufganiyot''].  I never really did care for them, but it seems that in recent years the store-bought ones have less and less filling — which is the only good part of the ''sufganiya'' in my humble opinion.

Daniela and Jeremy have both been sick; we wish them both a speedy recovery (רפואה שלימה)!  Sarah’s been involved with other people’s films this week, to her frustration.  Esther’s been working on some knitting projects and produced a fine scarf for me and a pretty hat and some slippers for Sarah.  I’m not sure what exactly her current project is going to be — it looks like a woolen noose.  

I’ve been very, very busy whipping [http://aaron-tech.com/8th.html 8th] into shape for the upcoming “beta test”, which I’m planning to begin towards the end of next week.  Because it needs to be able to do “real work” and not be a “toy”, I’m putting in a lot of effort to make it as stable as I can before I send it out for tests.  This week I finished adding lots of new functionality to it, including a [https://www.sqlite.org/ SQL database], transparent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic “arbitrary precision math”]  and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression “regular expressions”], to name a few major features.  Now I need to get it stabilized as much as possible before the release.

Besides that, we got some feedback from our business-consultant’s assistant.  A very nice, sharp young guy, who is particularly intrigued by the “marketing possibilities” of my [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ronware.zemanim&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm9yZy5yb253YXJlLnplbWFuaW0iXQ ''zemanim''] application.  What he keeps coming back to is that we have a “clientele” already, who are a fairly well-defined group.  He wants us to come up with something, some sort of tie-in, which would be appropriate to market to them.  For example, Judaica suppliers or something.  Once I release the 8th beta, I’ll do some fixing up of ''zemanim'', since there were some open bugs and also because Sarah found a number of things to improve.  But I don’t quite know how I would add a “tie-in” to my (free) product, without getting my users angry at me.  Any ideas?

Next week is Sarah’s birthday, don’t you know?  You mean she didn’t tell you?  Well, it is; and we’re pondering how to celebrate.  Black-tie event?  Vacation in Monaco?  Or maybe just a good, down-home meal.  Yeah, I’m thinking the latter is what’ll happen.

Sarah’s friend RivQua is staying with us this ''shabbat''.  We’ve also got some friends of ours coming for dinner. We’ll serve up:
<br>
lentil soup,
roasted brisket,
“un-stuffed cabbage”,
green beans,
cauliflower ''kugel'',
roasted potatoes,
vegetarian ''cholent'',
''salatim'',
strawberries and cream
and chocolate-chip cookies.

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

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