Blog/January 2012/Jan 6th
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Jan 6th (sorry, no devar torah this week)
Hi, again!
Coming up on the "big 5-0" this shabbat, according to the Gregorian calendar used by most of the world. Still have a couple weeks to go according to our calendar (ב' שבט, if you want to know...), which is what's important in my bit of the world. Either way, I'm reaching the age our sages ob"m said one is suited: בן חמישים לעצה -- "at the age of fifty, for giving advice". Maybe that explains why my advice up until now has been mostly ignored?
Esther will be traveling after all; she's leaving for the US this coming week and will spend two weeks in the Exile, helping Daniela (like it or not!) and visiting with friends and relatives. So this week we've been rather busy setting up the itinerary and making various preparations for the trip. I'm not looking forward to her absence, even if it does make my heart grow fonder ... but I suppose it's all for a good cause.
My technical coup de grâce this week involved Esther's long disused PalmPilot. In preparation for the aforementioned trip, she was anxious to get her (long) list of phone numbers and addresses from said device. The main problem being that the device had been "factory reset" due to some technical problem or other, and no longer had any of the precious information on it. However, I recalled that when I moved her from Windows XP to kubuntu, I had copied everything on her hard-disk to an external hard-disk -- surely, the "Palm Desktop" files were there?
After a short search I found the files and copied them to my laptop. But alas! they were in Palm format, and nobody uses that but Palm! So I used Google to find out if anyone had bothered to write a program to "dump" Palm files on Linux systems... and of course, my search was fruitful. (As an aside: you can almost always find someone who has had the same problem as you have!) Anyway, after a bit of twiddling I was able to compile that program, dump her data, import it into a LibreOffice spreadsheet and send it to her... all contacts intact! For this act of technical mastery I earned extra bonus "you're amazing!" points, always a good thing.
What other technical tidbits can I send your way this week? I spent some time improving my vim scripts for "session" maintenance, so now things are faster. I also did more work on the synagogue's website, but not as much as I had hoped to -- it was a very busy week! I've been tapped at work "because you have experience" to write a standards document. That's a document telling the other people there how they should write their code. Since nobody likes being told how to do their job, few people pay attention to these sorts of documents, and they come to detest the authors of same. Oh, well...
The weather is cold, and we expect rain towards the beginning of the week. The air-conditioner in our salon is of the grumpy variety, being unappreciative of being told to heat beyond 20 degrees Celsius (it flips the circuit breaker if you tell it to heat more than that). So we have a fairly cool (but at least not cold!) salon, perhaps I should warn our guests to bring sweaters?
We'll be entertaining some friends this shabbat, no doubt regaling them with tales of my technical derring-do. The menu will include: pan de pescado, beet salad, ḥumus, Israeli salad, radish salad, chicken soup, brisket, chicken, baked baby potatoes, roasted turnips in balsamic vinegar, roasted carrots and zucchini, chocolate cake, matambre and salatim.
Until next week,
shabbat shalom!
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