Blog/November 2019/Nov 15th

November 15th

Comments or questions? Click here!

---

Israel Update: still no government. We’re in a war with “Palestinian Islamic Jihad”. The hot weather is finally over. Still no butter.

After all the kerfuffle surrounding my mom’s eye treatment from last week, we managed to get everything straightened out and she had her treatment this week. The doctor said her eyes’ situation had improved since the last treatment, which is good to hear!

I took my car in to the dealership because I’ve had the battery go flat a number of times in the past several months. I’ve replaced the battery, disabled the dome lights, made sure the headlights aren’t on… and still the battery went flat. When I measured the “parasitic current drain” (with my ammeter; you mean you don’t have one?) it was around 100mA when according to the specs I found it was supposed to be around 30mA. So something was clearly not right.

Backing up a bit: a few months ago, the car’s “immobilizer” broke apart, and I couldn’t start the car. So I got a person to disable it so I could start the car. He left the immobilizer hooked up so it would flash, thus fooling all the stupid thieves. Anyway, subsequently I started experiencing flat batteries.

Eventually, I disconnected the flashing part of the immobilizer and lo and behold! the current drain dropped to around 35mA. Returning to this week’s trip to the dealer: they tested my car for three hours, and couldn’t find anything wrong (now that I’d disabled the flashing stuff). And miracle of miracles! they didn’t charge me anything — that’s something I certainly didn’t expect. So with some trepidation, I left the dealership unconvinced that there was nothing wrong, but hoping that my surgery on the car rendered it fit for duty. We’ll see.

On the way back from the dealer, Esther told me to stop by a big supermarket near where I was to check to see if they had any butter. The store was huge, as were some of the customers; but there was literally no butter at all, only something which was a “butter spread”. I’m very disappointed in my government’s choices…

Stuff & nonsense:

• What’s the cause of the spike in anti-Semitic attacks in NYC?
• Amazon started offering free shipping to Israel on select products. Probably not the products I actually want.
• It took a research study to show that owning a dog makes you feel less lonely. How do I sign up to get funds for idiotic research projects? I’ve got a million ideas!
• Apple just released the new 16” MacbookPro. They finally got around to fixing all the egregious problems of the past several iterations, and you can get it starting at $2,500. Not available in the Holy Land, yet.
• Python overtakes Java to become the second most popular programming language on “GitHub”. “8th” is #75,643.

Speaking of 8th, I made a slipstream release to restore 64-bit Android and to make a few fixes. I know you’re fascinated by that information.

Regarding the ongoing war with Islamic Jihad: it seems that “cease-fire” is a term they don’t honor, since they’ve broken two of them so far. Their fellow terrorists, Hamas, don’t like them much and aren’t getting involved yet. In the meantime, the IAF is decapitating their leadership with pinpoint missile strikes. If we can keep Hamas out of it, this round should end rather soon. insh’allah.

The weather is supposed to drop 10 degrees from what it was all week, down to below-normal temps for this time of year. We’re all looking forward to an actual end of summer!

We’re going to have a quiet shabbat, featuring:
ḥalla, baked chicken, orange soup, veggie chilli, rice, various salatim, and marble cake.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

---

Top: Blog

Prev: Nov 8th

Next: Nov 22nd

---