Blog/November 2011/Nov 18th

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

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Hi, again!

Winter seems to have come upon us here in the Land. Temperatures in the teens (centigrade), rain all around the country and even some snow in the Ḥermon. More snow is forecast there, and blustery weather is likely until at least Monday. After a bit more than four years here, we've grown unaccustomed to the chill -- so out come the wool and down and the room heaters!

Amidst a particularly powerful storm, we took Sarah to the airport this week -- starting her off on her vacation to the USA. Unfortunately for her, she had a fever the day before the trip, and was feeling sick and just 'under the weather'. But she was not willing to delay the trip, and arrived safely in the US, B"H. She spent time with her friends in PA, and is spending shabbat with Daniela in NYC. Then sometime next week she'll be heading for Seattle to be with her grandma and more of her friends. So far, she reports being in a bit of 'shock' at what America's like -- her conversion to Israeli-hood is pretty complete at this point, despite appearances.

I started the "new job" this week, and I'm glad (so far) that I did. The actual project I'm working on at the moment is converting their software from "64-bit" to "32-bit" -- yes, that's the opposite direction most things go these days. The reason they want this is that currently the software runs on a big server machine (e.g. a 64-bit environment), but they want to run it in a small "network appliance" which can be easily deployed -- and the particular "box" they are interested in runs a 32-bit environment. It turns out that converting their software is not the hard part -- rather, converting the components it relies on as well as trimming down the memory requirements is going to be the challenge.

I've also firmly established my reputation as an über-geek (in a company where there is no shortage of geeks). Yesterday my shiny new work laptop arrived, bristling with Windows 7 glitter. I promptly wiped it and installed kubuntu on it, eliciting some comments like, "you really don't like Windows, do you?". I've also been tapped as the "linux guru", since while the general population there does know and use Linux every day, they are not as generally knowledgeable about it as I am.

Our car is a 'lease to buy', and I've not been too happy with the car itself. The lease period is coming to an end, so we needed to either come up with the final 'lump-sum', or 'roll-over' into a new deal. Since it was cheaper to roll it over, and we get a new car out of it, we decided to do that -- so as of next week we will not have a car for a couple weeks. It's a little inconvenient in that we don't expect to have the new vehicle in time for Sarah's return to the Land, but we didn't have much choice regarding timing.

While we have the house to ourselves (and hopefully it will only be for a very short time!), we're going to take full advantage of our 'single' status. So next week, I'm being dragged to see a Beatles cover-band. Living life on the edge, that's us alright! I did manage to get Esther's computer running all her old stuff, including Quicken -- under kubuntu. So there, you naysayers!

Since it is only Esther and I this shabbat, we're operating on a short menu: lamb-barley-mushroom soup, baked chicken with yams, roasted vegetables, beet salad, salatim, matambre, honey cake.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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