Blog/July 2016/Jul 29th

July 29th (See this week's devar torah)

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We still had a full-house this week! The house-guests seem to be enjoying their vacation, and particularly like the shopping in some of the more upscale malls in Jerusalem. Esther’s father seems to have mostly recovered from his cough, and is enjoying the relaxation.

Daniela and Jeremy returned late last Friday, only a few hours before shabbat, from their Japanese adventure. They had an exciting and interesting time, and realized that Japan is a really foreign place. They also said that we (in the West) could learn a lot from Japanese society. I don’t know about that…

Sarah worked this week, editing a film. She also got a job on a real set for real money. She’s still doing work the editing as far as I know. And hopefully she'll get paid for the real work— which is a welcome change from the usual student-work. She also sent in her resume for the first time, for an interesting job with a well-known Israeli film-maker. We’ll see what comes of that, but we wish her success!

It’s been difficult for me to accomplish a lot with all the commotion in the house, but progress has been made nevertheless. We’re in discussions with an entrepreneur in Singapore who is very interested in working with us long-term and promoting our product. Hopefully that will also result in some near-term projects, we’ll see. In any event, that was a positive development this week.

I have spent as much time as possible trying to get ready for the next release of “8th”, which will have a new licensing model: fixed-price with paid updates, rather than subscription model. We’re doing this based on feedback from (quite a lot of) people who see the subscription model as a form of “planned obsolescence” — though it’s nothing of the sort. Potential customers’ opinions matter, so we’re making changes. B”H the changes will result in a more robust income stream!

<rant>
As someone who takes security seriously, I use ad-blockers in my browser, and have done for years. In the past few months, more and more web-sites are detecting that your browser blocks ads, and pop-up a notice telling you that you must disable the ad-blocker in order to view the site.

This is rude as well as irresponsible. There have been many cases of “ads” which insert malware (e.g. “bad programs”) into your computer. That is because the “ads” come from sites other than the site you are visiting, and so neither the site you’re visiting nor you have any control over the content served. Therefore, blocking ads is a prudent measure in terms of browsing security.

The latest site to adopt ad-block-detection is the “National Review”. I like to read their content because it is usually well written as well as informative. But now they randomly use ad-block-detection to ruin my day. I wrote to them to complain, and of course have heard nothing back. A shame, they’ve lost a fairly faithful reader.

Ad-block-detection: Just Say No!
</rant>

This shabbat: my father-in-law will be elsewhere, so we only have my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two girls with us. The seven of us will dine upon:
grilled pargiot, roast beef, baked yams, stir-fried veggies with tofu, roasted eggplant with teḥina, garlic green-beans, rice, salatim, banana cake, and ḥalvah.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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