Blog/March 2013/Mar 1st

Mar 1st -- (sorry, no devar torah this week)

Hi, again!

Purim came in with a bang, literally. The "youth" seem to have acquired all manner of fireworks, and were setting them off more or less all the time. Though that's irritating, it wasn't the Big News of Purim...

We have an arrangement with my ḥevruta and his family: we have the purim meal at their place, and they have the pesaḥ seder at our place. We've been doing this for the past five years. Since purim was immediately after shabbat this year, we invited the aforementioned family to our place for a shabbat meal, figuring they would be overwhelmed with preparations and needed a break.

Little did we know just how overwhelmed they would be! On shabbat they awoke to a flooded apartment. Seems a hot-water pipe rusted through (of course these things only happen when you can't do much about them!). Anyway, they ended up having to prepare the purim meal at our place, and we hosted them and their cooking and the meal itself. They just disrupted all our mojo! In the end, they did as we suggested and called their insurance company -- which sent out pros to take care of the problem (after purim of course). So all's well that ends well, but why do these things only ever happen on shabbat and yom-tov?

Daniela and Jeremy also had an interesting shabbat last week, but I'll leave it to them to fill in the details. This week they're just keeping a low profile and staying home. Sarah was a ghost this week... there were rumors of her presence, but few traces were seen.

Since purim fell on Sunday (for those of us outside Jerusalem) and Monday (for Jerusalem residents), work was all messed-up this week. Sunday I stayed home and partied with the best of them. Well, to the extent I ever party. And Monday I went to work, but most of the others stayed home, so it was very quiet there. Excellent! But as the week wore on, it was apparent that everybody's internal clocks were pretty screwed up. Really, really looking forward to shabbat!

<intense geekdom>
First of all, I spent a fair amount of effort this week on my zemanim app, specifically trying to get the "compass" (e.g. direction-of-prayer) to be reliable. Guess what? You cannot rely on the built-in compasses in Android phones (at least, not in the several devices I have tested). So when people complain about the compass being "wrong", they're probably right. <grrrr>!

And during the week I stumbled on this incredible resource of hundreds of free "ebook" versions of lots and lots of technical books. One of the books there pointed me to the amazing PhoneGap tool, which lets you write a "web" application and then package it up to run on Android, iPhone, and many others. This has caused me to reconsider the development path I was taking with my "long-term project", and seek out a similar tool for desktop applications. Guess what? Such a thing exists.

This is a potentially huge "lever" for me, since I can concentrate on the logic of the application (writing it in HTML, CSS and JavaScript), and "wrap" it up so it will run on Windows, Linux, OS/X, Android devices, iOS devices and more. The downside is that one has to write the application using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript ... which is limiting in many ways. However, being able to get the application written in less time, and deploy it to five different platforms simultaneously is incredible leverage.

So now I need to acquire some iPuters. Anyone who knows of very cheap Macs (OS/X) and iPhone/iPad (second hand is great) which I can use for development purposes should feel free to let me know (or donate directly to me!).
</intense geekdom>

In other news: I went to the "APOSTherapy" appointment I mentioned last week, and it was quite interesting. Suffice it to say that after two hours, I ended up with some weird-looking therapeutic shoes tuned to address my specific problem(s). The thing that's really odd is that one is not supposed to wear them all the time, or even a lot; just half an hour a day (at first), and only a few minutes of walking around. This is increased gradually as you get used to the shoes and your body adjusts. What I can report so far (after three days of using them) is that my back and shoulders hurt after using the shoes. I suppose that's because they force my body to align differently. And my knees hurt as well, but the next day they feel somewhat better. So, we'll see how it pans out; I'll keep you informed.

We're playing to a packed house this shabbat! Sarah's friend, my ḥevruta's daughter, and other friends of ours will be here, enjoying: homemade ḥallah, lentil salad, radish salad, cabbage salad, matboucha, guacamole, zucchini spread, chicken soup, chicken-with-red-rice, kebabs, grilled vegetables, chicken-noodle casserole and mystery desserts courtesy of our guests.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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