Blog/April 2010/Apr 23rd
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Apr 23rd (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!
A very busy week! First, we found out that the cousins whose bar-mitsvah we missed, well -- they were there when we were there, but we missed each other. Nonetheless, it worked out for the best, as I'll explain later. The 62nd Israeli Independence Day (Yom HaAtsmaut) celebrations (preceded by the Israeli Memorial Day (Yom HaZikaron) commemorations) were on Tuesday. Sarah's art project final was Thursday. And I finished up and got paid for a small programming job. A very busy week indeed!
After having missed the cousin's shindig, we explained that we had been there, but just didn't see them. Long story short, we went to their place (on the other side of Jerusalem) for a Yom HaAtsmaut barbecue. That was very nice -- we got to meet a bunch of relatives (and I suppose, so did they), and the atmosphere was relaxed. As we were getting close to leaving, my cousin (well, my cousin's husband) started telling me about reorganizing his accounting firm, and that he needed to hire some more people. So I mentioned that Esther is an accountant, and his ears perked up. Then he talked to her a bit and suggested she "come by the office" to check it out; but that if she's interested, she shouldn't wait very long since he had to hire someone soon. They settled on her going there this coming Sunday. But Wednesday night he asked her if she could come in this Thursday instead, which she did. The end of it is: Esther has her first (part-time) job in the Land! מזל טוב! Like I said, it was for the best that we missed the bar-mitsvah.
On Yom HaAtsmaut we also watched (for the first time, and over the internet) the "World Bible Quiz" (חידון התנ"ך העולמי), in which Binyamin Netanyahu's son Avner took third place, and first place went to the 17 year old Or Ashwal. The three of us watched in amazement as she won without missing a single question and with barely a hesitation. Very impressive!
Wednesday we went to Sarah's school to see the "art exhibition", which was a display of all the final-exam projects of her art-major class. Pictures of Sarah's work are here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. A blurb in Hebrew describing her work is here. Essentially: "Often, we find ourselves in difficult circumstances and feel as though we are imprisoned. The cages represent difficult periods, and the figures inside them represent the various reactions people have to their situations...". In her work, the black figure represents a depressed person who is consumed by his depression. The red one represents the desperate person, who lashes out at others. The white one represents someone who has gone through it all, made peace with himself, and understands how to get out of his situation.
I managed to finish the small job for a prior client of mine on which I've been working for several weeks. I also managed to get paid for it, which is always a plus! At my full-time job I was involved in fixing some (potentially) serious problems with our product installer -- which, unfortunately, were my fault (though they were very obscure issues). Given that they came to light only after 200 thousand downloads of our product, I almost don't feel too bad. I also revamped the Reva Forth site, switching from a hosted forum to using email discussion-lists, and using Fossil as the basis for everything else.
Odds and ends:
- Microsoft's lackadaisical coding is the main reason for the plethora of software viruses and other various "malware".
- GMail's security has been compromised. So now all that information they collect is more readily available to malefactors. Great.
- An interesting paper on the unfortunate state of conversion to Judaism in current times.
- Sometimes we need to shift perspective
- Google won't let Ken Thompson (the co-inventor of the C language, as well as the Unix operating system) check in code unless he takes a programming test...
- Benji Lovitt's 62 more things I love about Israel
This week we're hosting friends of ours, a family which made aliyah to Maaleh Adummim but then moved to Ra'anana for a job. Anyway, the menu they can look forward to this week includes: baked tuna steak, homemade Hummus, matboucha, schnitzel, baked chicken, baked yams, banana cake and a variety of salatim. Yum!
Until next week,
Shabbat shalom !
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