Blog/June 2017/Jun 30th

June 30th

There’s so much to talk about this week!

First, I want to register a formal complaint against my daughters, who were lax in their duties and didn’t get me an appropriate Father’s Day gift. For shame!

Second, a shout-out to Esther for explaining why nobody understands me. She says, “You speak in Forth and vim”. To which my response is,

   point yours what-is?
   :q!

A Jewish aside: in Lakewood, N.J., a bunch of “Ḥareidi” Jews were arrested for welfare-fraud. I’m very happy to report that the local Rabbinic Council came out and condemned such theft. Obviously, theft is theft and according to halakha it’s not permitted. But above and beyond that specific violation, “religious Jews” who engage in such actions actually desecrate God’s name, in public. That’s a very severe prohibition. Such a desecration leads to increased anti-Jewish feeling amongst the non-Jewish population, which is never a good thing for the Jews. Some of my co-religionists need to spend some more time studying halakha in terms of practical observance of our Law.

Anyway.

It’s been a really tough week for CNN. As you know, I’m not a Trump fan-boy, but it turns out he was vindicated in his assessment of CNN’s honesty and accuracy. Read more about this saga in American Pravda part II. I have a feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg. None of which justifies Trump the Barbarian’s crass, boorish behavior, however.

In regional news: California has issued its own travel ban list. After complaining about Trump’s. And if you know any Canadians, you had best not anger them! Apparently, Canadians hold most of the records for sniping. Who knew, eh?

In technical news: there’s been some serious cyber-attacks carried out using leaked NSA tools. This is only going to get worse, so try to be prepared. You might want to set up an emergency “Live Linux” USB-key with persistent storage so you can recover from a screwed-up system. You might also decide you want to make your own VPN, though that’s quite a lot of work and probably pointless for most people.

What you definitely won’t want to do is to rely on Microsoft for your security. In particular, given how their sample code for how to encrypt a file is wrong, and bad, and badly-wrong!

In 8th news: this week I added something that has not existed in 8th, ever: local variables. I’d never added them, because I could never think of a good way to do so without negatively impacting 8th’s performance. But this week, as a result of some verbal wrangling on a newsgroup, I had a dream! In my dream, locals were incorporated into 8th in such an elegant way, that everyone who only heard of it applauded — even if they didn’t know what “locals” meant. And so it came to pass.

The weather was standard hot-summer, but with warm nights rather than the usual cool. We’re hoping for some improvement this coming week…

Shabbat, shabbat! We’re going to try for a quiet and appropriately A/C’ed shabbat, with:
brisket, levivot gezer (carrot croquettes), levivot selek (beet croquettes), grilled vegetables, pea salad, tuna salad, kohlrabi salad, various salatim, fruit, and desserts.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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