Blog/September 2009/Sep 4th

Sep 4th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Another full week. This time, Sarah got her bagrut scores back -- and we were very pleased with her results (so was she). 93 in math... when she was barely taught math back in the US, is a simply amazing score. Her classes this year are mostly Judaic studies of various kinds, and she's got a lot of them -- but we are sure she'll do well, B"H.

Daniela has been getting back into her studies as well, and she's taking a huge load. But her computer seized up this week, and then the water went off in her building, and the "body conditioning" class was painful... so we wish her an easier time next week. Parental advice: don't worry, you'll be ok.

This coming week, Esther will be undergoing some abdominal surgery. So I'll be working from home to take care of her. Nothing too complex, but it's never fun to have holes cut in you. If you keep her in mind for a refuah shelema, she would appreciate it. Because of the timing with the surgery and hospital stay, I don't know if I'll be able to put out the "blog" next week, so don't be concerned if it doesn't appear. It's also not the best timing, since Rosh Hashana is just one week after the surgery, but you do what you have to do.

I've been given a difficult research task at work involving low-level hardware detection, which will be an important part of our product line going forward. The catch: my code has to work equally well on Mac, Windows and Linux. But then, that's the kind of stuff I like to work on. Not to worry, they keep me mostly busy with the other work I've been doing so I don't have a lot of time to work on this "most important" project.

Today we harvested olives from our two trees. Here's a picture of the raw olives. Quite a few, though one of the trees didn't produce much. Here's a picture of the olives after washing, separation of tithes and cleaning. We'll change the water for the next four days, then soak them in a brine for several weeks. Maybe we'll be able to eat some during sukkot, but I'm not sure of that.

Geek/tech news:

• The Vim editor proved its worth this week, when I was asked to correct typos in a lot of files. My boss suggested I write a perl script to do this, to which I replied that I could do it more easily with my editor. Ten minutes later, I was done -- and he was astounded. The moral of the story is not that vim is so great, but rather: "pick a powerful tool and learn to use it really well".
• Scam of the century: "global warming"! The scientific illiterati who try to shape public opinion (and spend our money) ignore the effect of the sun on global warming. I refer you to a user of my Reva Forth for a quite technical analysis of planetary warming. We may not agree on a lot of topics, but we do on this one. My only complaint regarding his analysis is I don't see any discussion of the 40TW (est.) or so of nucleotide heating of the Earth. Maybe it's insignificant overall, but it would be good to mention it. In any case, that thermonuclear bomb in the heavens is by far the most significant contributor to Earth's overall thermal cycle.

Arab (and fellow travelers) propaganda:

• According to the "Palestinian Authority's top cleric", Jews have no history in Jerusalem. I guess the entire "Temple" thing escaped his notice, as well as the explicit references in his very own quran to Solomon's Temple? How exactly are we supposed to make peace with these numskulls?
• You keep hearing about the terrible suffering Gazans. How Israel is preventing food and other necessities from entering their stricken city. Well, here from "Palestine Today" (in Arabic) is a series of pictures taken this Ramadan showing the starving Arabs in Gaza (the caption reads: "holy month of Ramadan atmosphere in the cities and villages in the Gaza Strip". Notice how scrawny they are? How little food is available in the shuq? A cynical person might they are in more danger from obesity than from Israeli "aggression". Yeah, that's right; the Arabs play the West like suckers. By the way, Google Translate is a very useful tool for reading what they say in Arabic, which is NOT what they say in English!
• One small point in the ongoing saga of the "displacement" of the Arab squatters in East Jerusalem. The very neighborhood in question was mostly Jewish until those fun-loving, "partners for peace" started their massacres in the 20's and 30's. Must have been they knew the modern State of Israel would be formed, so they were upset about the occupation-to-be. Or maybe they're just a pack of murderous bastards?
• And to cap off the scandalous Scandinavian "diplomacy" of the past two weeks, Norway has decided to divest itself of Elbit stock. Good! May they sink even further into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

Obamanation:

• Only 4% of Israelis think Obama is pro-Israel. Shocking! What the hell are those 4% smoking?
• Iran, Israel and Obama
• Dangerous delusions of the fanatic Left

"Settlements"

• Go, Kashriel!

Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!

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