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Blog/April 2013/Apr 5th

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Apr 5th (See this week's devar torah) Comments or questions? Click here!


(the devar torah is from 5770, not a new one...)

Hi, again!

We started the week getting ready for the second yom-tov of pesaḥ. Esther complains that it's a holiday which gets no respect -- nothing special to denote it. She's right. I said that perhaps the reason is that it commemorates the parting of the Reed Sea, which is really just a stage of our leaving Egypt -- and though that's a seminal event, it does not mark the completion of our redemption. So we count down until the next holiday, shavuoth, commemorating the giving of the Torah. That marks our true redemption. Just a thought, anyway...

After the yom-tov we (Esther, that is) took Daniela and Jeremy to the airport to wend their way back to the Exile. B"H, they landed safely; but while they were here we had a great time together. Jeremy had to return to work the day after they got back, though Daniela still has time off.

As for the rest of us, it was "back to normal" almost immediately. Sarah and I returned to our respective occupations, and Esther was working furiously to get the kitchen back in ḥameṣ mode. I chipped in by taking all the pesaḥ equipment back to our storage area. We're getting better and better at making the "transition" in a speedy manner, B"H!

It was a short work week, but pretty intense. I'm continuing to work on improving the speed of our program, and managed (with input from one of the team members) to get our numbers to improve by 30%. If I can squeeze another 30% out of it, there will be serious rejoicing.

I also finally got around to trying my new zemanim application on an actual device. Not too impressive, there are a few big issues. First, the way I'm drawing the clock doesn't seem to work on older Android devices. Second, the startup time is excessive. Finally, the responsiveness is not as good as I need it to be. Even though the "development cycle" is amazingly fast, it's not helpful if the end product is slow. So now I'm looking into a light-weight alternative to "JQuery Mobile", and at optimizing the performance. I'll give it a couple weeks before I abandon the effort, since the lure of "easy" cross-platform applications is pretty hard to resist. I've been getting lots of comments (mostly positive, but many constructive) about the current version, and I want to get a new version out soon.

How about some high-and-not-so-highlights from this past week's happenings in the Land?

We're looking forward to pleasant weather over shabbat, with hot weather at the beginning of the week trending back to pleasant over the coming week. There are ongoing sporadic showers here this morning. Springtime in the Land is most excellent!

No guests, only the nukular family this week. We need to recover from all the yom-tov food, so we'll take it easy:
homemade ḥallah (yeah!), smoked mackerel, vegetable soup, beet salad, "Israeli" salad, roasted eggplant, guacamole, sheseq chicken and rice, cholent, and strawberries and cream.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!


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