Blog/November 2014/Nov 7th

November 7th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

It was a trying week on a number of fronts. Technical issues with 8th. Internet connectivity problems. Frustrating web-sites. Changing accountants. Terrorist activity. But ultimately, I think, we managed to overcome most of the challenges.

The terrorist activity manifested itself in what I think is a change in strategy. Unfortunately, a rather smart change. Our cousins have decided to use vehicles to run over innocent bystanders. The Arabs maintain that the drivers “lost control” of their vehicles, but this loss of control always seems to happen near concentrations of pedestrians, and the vehicles always seem to careen directly into the pedestrians. Odd, that. In any event, our government has shown its usual lack of energetic response, though it does seem to at least be trying to do something. Not enough, nor the right thing, but at least something.

Ah. well. Now that the US officially has a lame-duck presidency and a Congress which supposedly supports Israel, perhaps the overwhelming pressures placed by that administration on ours will subside. One can hope, anyway.

We switched our company’s accounting services to a different firm, for a number of reasons. It was a difficult decision for us, but we are hopeful that our company will soon be involved in making money, and we need to have someone on-board who knows more about international commerce and taxation as it applies to us and our somewhat unique situation. So we are still in the process of switching over, but the majority of that work has been done.

Among the things we needed for accounting purposes was a particular report from one of our insurance companies. So I went to their web-site and tried to get the information from it. But try as I might, I couldn’t manage to get the web-site to actually give me the report I wanted when I pressed the appropriate button. I figured it must be a problem using Google Chrome on that site; so I tried Firefox and Safari, to no avail. Frustrated, I started a virtual machine with Windows and ran Internet Explorer. That got farther, but still didn’t succeed. So I asked the company’s tech-support for help…

The person who responded told me that I had to use Internet Explorer. I said I was already doing that, to no avail. She told me I needed special settings in order to access the site, and sent them to me. So I put in the special settings; after which the site refused to load at all. Even more frustrated, I contacted our agent and asked him for the reports. He laughed and said we should never try to use the company’s web-site… and the next day, he sent us the reports we needed.

Last week, our DSL router hiccuped and became unresponsive. I had to do a factory reset on it, which restored it to limping functionality. Our connection would cease working fairly often, requiring us to reset the wifi connection on our laptops. Very frustrating, and also making it very difficult to work. So since this is the second router we had received from Bezeq (the first didn’t work at all), I decided to get a non-Bezeq router. This is not for the faint of heart…

Long story short, we got the router yesterday and I spent quite a while getting it up and running. It seems to work better than the other one, though only time will tell. The one oddity is that I cannot “see” my ronware.org website from inside my LAN! You all can see it just fine, from outside; but the router decides to make any reference to my website point to the router itself, from inside. I have a workaround, but it’s a clunky kludge.

8th development encountered some issues; the main among them being that unlike all the other platforms we support, iOS has much stricter memory access control. I noticed it because I was very happy to see the iOS version of 8th running nicely in the iOS simulator. Then, after I finally figured out how to deploy a native version on an iPad I found out that it didn’t work at all. Disaster! After rummaging around for a day and getting depressed, I finally decided to try a different tack. Success! So ultimately the forces of Light supplanted the forces of Darkness, and we have 8th running on all the supported platforms. Now we just need to finish up some loose ends before our next beta release, the one going to the “wider world”.

And finally, Sarah’s class had a “end of year” film presentation. Though Sarah’s film wasn’t represented (because it was not completed, due to the summer war), we got to see her classmate’s offering — a number of them either filmed or edited by Sarah. It was interesting to see the maturation of these young artists’ techniques, to see how they’ve progressed over the past couple years. Very interesting films.

This week we’ve got a full house of guests, mostly for meals. My ḥevruta’s daughter will be dining with us. Dinah and her brother will also be with us. So we’ll try to fulfill their expectations with:
carrot ginger soup, roast beef, roasted chicken, roasted veggies, veggie shepherd’s pie, rice, salatim, tuna salad, and something chocolatey and sticky.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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