Blog/May 2013/May 24th

May 24th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

Summer is definitely here in the Land! The cool weather left us rather abruptly, and the seasonal heating began. Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the week, but the heat will abate on shabbat. As the week progresses it will become normal for the season. Of course, with air-conditioning it's not very noticeable indoors...

Daniela was under the weather (so to speak) this week (רפואה שלימה!), and Sarah was busy with school-work. Esther and I were busy as usual, and nothing super exciting happened this week in the desert. Well, excepting the return of the six-legged demon-spawn which is forcing me to once again take up arms.

At work I was able to make very substantial progress in speeding up our product. It is now about 200 times faster than when I started, and there is yet more I can do. But first I have to make sure all the optimizations didn't make anything stop working (that's surprisingly difficult to verify).

In other work-related news, I have been the "go-to" person for all sorts of technical Black Magic for quite some time. But recently, a number of new employees joined and they regularly come around asking questions throughout the workday. Most particularly, they ask about the Vim editor, since I'm the local expert on that tool. In order to reduce the amount of time each day I have to spend fielding questions, I've decided to give a mini-seminar in four parts: half an hour each time for four weeks, training the youngsters how to get the most out of Vim. I hope it does some good...

Various and sundry:

• Modern Orthodox Zionism in America seems less about Zionism and Judaism than about Americanism. Sad.
• VDH says that if the voters only knew the truth about Obama, they wouldn't have voted for him. I disagree: Americans are getting dumber by the day, and the allure of "bread and circuses" is no less powerful now than it was in Roman times.
• Anti-semitic "Anonymous" morons are coming up against Israeli hacker geniuses. Who will prevail? News at 11!
• An excellent open letter to the Arab League
• And Down Under it's time to secede.

This week we have two of Sarah's good friends for shabbat, but we will also be eating out one meal. Our short menu will include:
smoked fish, chicken-vegetable soup, roasted chicken, leek pashtida, kebabs, grilled vegetables, salatim, beet salad, Israeli salad, cabbage salad, carrot salad, cookies and seasonal fruit.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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