Blog/February 2011/Feb 4th

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

When adar enters, we increase in happiness! Wonderful winter rains soaked much of the country this week. Exciting popular uprisings permeated much of the region. Goodbye to GMail; hello to "interesting times".

The long-awaited winter finally seems to have arrived. The weather was wet and cold all week, and shows signs of continuing that way over shabbat, but tapering off by Sunday. Perhaps next week will also be damp -- one can hope, anyway. Since today is the first day of adar I, we now have just a month and a half until Purim, so there is still time for winter weather to replenish our reservoirs.

Sarah has applied for a second year of "National Service", and is trying to get a job working with new immigrants. She had a sort of interview this week for one of the positions she applied for, and we'll have to wait and see how it works out for her. We all hope she gets accepted to what she wants.

The uproar in Arab lands has not subsided, and indeed Egypt is on the brink of collapse. I had an interesting discussion with an Arab who works in my building (we frequently have interesting discussions). His take was that Mubarak is a "bastard" (his words), but that there isn't even one Arab country with a democratically elected leader, and that isn't going to change. He said (and I agree) that it makes little difference who takes over in Egypt or Jordan or wherever, since the ordinary people will suffer just the same whoever is in charge. I wonder how widespread his point of view is, on the real "Arab street"?

People have been complaining to me for some time that they "didn't get the blog". Meaning to say, the email I send out to them did not arrive. I didn't pay too much attention to those claims, since I was using GMail and figured whatever problem they were having was on their end, not mine.

So imagine my surprise when I found that Google/GMail has been removing email addresses from my mailing lists, without so much as informing me?!? To top it off, the email I noticed missing was my own mother's email, which (really, Mom!) I had certainly not removed from the list! This is on top of Google not safeguarding privacy in the GMail system (as evidenced by Facebook having access to information only stored in GMail).

It was the last straw; so this week I abandoned GMail, and am hosting my own email server directly. This presents its own set of problems -- but the biggest is that most place (hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc) do not accept mail sent directly from a 'home' address. They do this because spammers frequently set up a home-based emailer, and they don't want to route spam through their systems. The second biggest problem, of course, is that my family was not excited about this move ...

So what's a home-mailer to do? Theoretically, one uses the mail server of one's ISP (in my case, Bezeq International). Since they provide my connection to the internet, they also provide me a mail server. But ... alas, it's not that easy. Bezeqint won't let you send mail unless you "authenticate" -- even if you are sending from their own connection. Since I have never used their server, I had no idea what credentials to give them. But after half an hour "chat"ing with them, I got the information I needed, and now I seem to be in business.

This week we've got two young ladies staying with us. They'll partake of: mullet a la italiana, matboucha, eggplant with techina, radish salad, red kubbe soup, baked chicken, green beans, cauliflower kugel, rice, meatball cholent, egg salad, chocolate-nut-fruit clusters, marble cake. And just for your information, I'm making the challah this week -- so it will not be as, em, attractive as it usually is...

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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