Blog/May 2012/May 18th

May 18th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

What's new with us this week? Glad you asked!

• Placed our order for the birkhonim ("bentchers") for the wedding, will get them next week
• Unloaded all the sheseq from our tree -- several large bags of fruit
• Released a new version of my zemanim application
• Started laying groundwork for other Android projects
• Sarah's started applying to schools

Of course that's not everything...

We ordered the birkhonim from a large print-house in Jerusalem. Someone I work with told me that most other places in Jerusalem actually have this company do the printing, so we should just go to them directly. Indeed, their prices are mostly better than the others, and their selection of styles is incredible. One thing to be aware of is that they have a size limitation on how large the printing block (called a glufa in Hebrew) can be; for the birkhonim we chose, that leaves more "white-space" than we wanted, but so be it. We hope Daniela and Jeremy will enjoy their birkhonim for many, many years to come!

Little-known fact: Israel ranks number two in the world in sheseq production, behind Japan and in front of Brazil. Guess what? A sheseq tree can produce an awful lot of fruit, and the fruit spoils quickly. So this week we denuded our tree of its harvest, took the ma`aseroth uterumoth and then spent several hours peeling and canning the delicate fruit. Besides those four jars of canned fruit, we've also got some bags of freshly frozen, which we'll use -- maybe in ice-cream? Sounds good to me!

The zemanim application has gone through its second release. This time around, I included some new features (weekly list of zemanim, automatic detection of location) as well as various and sundry bug-fixes. Now the application is stable, at last count almost sixty users -- so it's time to move on to my other projects. Unfortunately, at this point I can't reveal details of those other projects, but to say that they'll take up a lot of my spare time (such as it is). Probably it's going to be quite a while before I release either of them (unless I can get funding to stay home and work on them, which is rather unlikely).

Sarah's started applying to schools, and found out that her bagrut scores are not what actually count, but rather a "weighted bagrut score", which takes into account what "level" of study the score was for. In a wrinkle which only proves my long-held theory that academic "achievements" are often fictitious, her actual average of about 85 was magically transformed to a 99 by the weighting. I guess that's OK, in that it makes sense that the subjects one takes at a higher level should count more; but in her case, the school did odd things with her "points", giving her a higher score than she should have had. Not that she's complaining about that, you understand ...

What else? Well, this week I finished major changes to our software at work, and my changes were deployed. So far, no major problems were found in my changes -- B"H! But the systems we have developed are far too complicated, and are prone to unexpected interactions... something the techies amongst you will appreciate.

Apart from that, the weather's been pleasant; hot yesterday, but tomorrow it's supposed to get almost cold. That means: 23C on shabbat, dropping to 21C by Monday with a chance of rain. Yikes!

And going around the bend again:

• What, exactly, is a secular yeshiva? Good Lord!
• Reminding me of my time working at Microsoft
• This just ain't funny, but this is

One of Sarah's friends is staying with us this shabbat, a former resident of Maale Adummim. She and we will enjoy: chicken vegetable soup, sweet 'n sour salmon, grilled kebab, grilled chicken, oven-fried potatoes, chard and mushroom pashtida, roasted peppers, roasted eggplants, sweet-potato salad, egg salad, teḥina, salat petitim (Israeli couscous salad), tomato salad, and sheseq pie.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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