Blog/August 2013/Aug 9th

Aug 9th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

First off: happy birthday to my father-in-law Victor, and also “רפואה שלימה”! Secondly: we saw our nephew off this week after a nice visit; now he’s at Daniela’s in New York. We hope to see him return soon! And finally, the weather has been really, really nice — and it looks like shabbat will stay nice. Hard to believe we’re in August already!

Before my nephew left, he and Sarah (and two other “kids”, one of Sarah’s friends and one of Chris’s) went to Eilat for a two-day trip. As you might expect, they had a blast. Sarah arranged their travel and lodging, and being a poor student she managed to get it done incredibly cheaply.

And again, before he left, we took him to the Jerusalem Wine Festival, which we look forward to attending each year. He had a great time (of course, so did we!) and we found some very nice wines with which we were not familiar. That evening also saw some of Jerusalem’s finest summer weather. Though entrance to the festival cost more than in previous years, the organizers didn’t see fit to print a catalog of the wines available as they had in past years. This greatly irritated my ḥevruta (who also looks forward to the festival each year). As he says, people who go there already like wine; they will have drunk a bit (or more than a bit) and will be much more receptive to buying the wine; so why make it more difficult than necessary for them to do so?

Esther has one more week of the MATI course, and we have just one more hour of free business-consultation left. It may be we can get more free hours, but in order to do so we need to officially open the business (with the attendant costs). It’s also not clear whether we can open up a corporation in order to satisfy the MATI requirements (actually, it’s the Immigration Ministry’s requirements) or whether we must open a sole-proprietorship. This latter has tax disadvantages because the USA and Israel do not have a tax-treaty regarding “social-security” (they do have one for income-tax). So a sole-proprietor gets taxed for social-security both here in Israel and in the USA. However, it is simpler and cheaper to open and run.

On the other hand, a sole-proprietorship provides none of the legal protections a corporation enjoys. Additionally, customers purchasing software or services are more likely to trust a “real company” rather than an individual. But a corporation pays corporate income-tax on its profits, whereas a sole-proprietorship pays no income-tax — the taxes are passed through to the owners as individuals. So though it is clear that we must have a corporation before we actually get to market, and it is possible to convert a sole-proprietorship to a corporation later on, it is not clear if we should start as a corporation or not. The question is not simple; we need to examine all its aspects and consult with the professionals.

In order to advance the cause, I’ve been putting together my (software) development plan. Not that I didn’t have one before, but I hadn’t gone into as much detail as necessary. In order to get a real plan together, I looked for “project management software” which I could use on Linux, and came across a Microsoft Project clone called ProjectLibre. So I did my initial plan using ProjectLibre, and everything was fine until I noticed that it doesn’t do “resource-leveling”. What that means is that if you assign a person to more than one job, and the jobs run simultaneously, the software won’t realize that the person can only work eight hours (or whatever) a day. So it had me working well over capacity, which meant I had to artificially assign dependencies — so that task “B” had to occur after task “A”, if I were assigned to both tasks. That’s very, very irritating, and it makes setting the proper task dependencies more difficult.

So I looked further and found TaskJuggler. This is a very sophisticated program which is more difficult to use than ProjectLibre. On the other hand, it does resource leveling, so I don’t have to insert incorrect dependencies just to make the schedule “work out”. Now I have a real project plan, and can see projected costs and can play “what if” scenarios.

We’re all looking forward to a quiet shabbat this week, with fine weather and great food! I’ll be manning the grill, Esther’s a whirlwind in the kitchen and Sarah’s trying to progress with the project which is due this coming week.

Back to our “normal” once again, B”H! Just four of us at the shabbat table this week. We’re doing:
red lentil soup, chicken on the grill, vegetable stir-fry, baked yams, rice, parve cholent, carrot kugel, zucchini kugel, salatim, and fruit.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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