Blog/June 2016/Jun 3rd

June 3rd (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi again! We’ve had some warm weather, now turned hot. It’s supposed to get very hot over the next several days (36C/97F in Jerusalem, hotter still here) and then calm down to normal summer temperatures at the start of the week. Of course, we’re in June now, so it’s too much to expect the pleasantly cool temperatures to continue!

Family:

Sarah is finished (mostly) with school, though she still has to work on some project. She’s also getting psyched-up to go on her trip to visit her grandma in Seattle, in just over two weeks. I’ll be following two weeks after her. It’s going to be a busy summer.

One of my cousins celebrated becoming bat-mitsva this week. To be precise: she’s my second-cousin-once-removed on my paternal-grandmother’s side. Got that? They’re a lovely family, and we should make an effort to get together with them a bit more often than we do. Alas, that’s life!

Work:

I’ve been “reaching out” via email to all kinds of people, trying to get a contract of some kind. This week, a professional acquaintance of mine in Germany offered to work with me on getting some German company to give me contract work. That is a very nice offer, and I hope it bears fruit.

We tried to get the manufacturer of the micro-controller we’re using in our custom e8th board to be a corporate sponsor. To our surprise, they responded that it wasn’t in their interest to support 8th, since it would make it easier for people to switch to using another micro-controller. That’s pretty short-sighted of them! By the way, you can still contribute to our fundraising effort by clicking that link!

In other news, our one (non-family) employee decided to leave us after a two-year stint. We wish her the best of luck! From now on we’ll use sub-contractors to handle any extra work that comes our way.

Politics:

• J Street staff member hallucinates that they are making Israel safer. Will they share their drugs with us?
• The US slams Israel’s recent political changes while remaining mum on Iran’s anti-America screeds.
• The Trump anti-establishment vote.
• More on Socialism and “the Bern”.

Technology:

I made an effort this week to do some more optimizations in 8th. The results show very good progress, especially in light of the frequently asked question, “how does 8th compare with other languages”. At the very least, we can demonstrate that our performance is often better than Java’s — which is something people would like to know. We need to considerably improve our numeric performance, but in general things are getting faster and smaller and better.

Misc:

The restaurant chain “Sushi Rechavia” opened a branch here in Ma’ale Adummim, to our great joy. So we tried it this week, and came away very disappointed. Actually, we were going to try it last week, but they couldn’t take our order because their computers were down. That should have been a sign. Anyway, we hope that our initial experience is simply due to the branch being new, and hopefully the quality will improve as time goes on.

We’re looking forward to an A/C-cooled shabbat, good company, and wine!

This shabbat Dinah will be joining us! On the menu:
homemade ḥalla, chicken thighs, meatloaf, zucchini quiche, stir-fried veggies with tofu, rice, salatim, roasted yams, lox, and cookies.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom!

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