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Blog/April 2014/Apr 4th

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Apr 4th (See this week's devar torah) Comments or questions? Click here!


Hi, again!

Much of our mental (and physical) energies this week were dedicated to getting ourselves geared-up to prepare to begin to be ready for pesaḥ. Besides getting set up with meat and wine and “unleavened bread”, there are plenty of other groceries to acquire and organization and cleaning of the house to accomplish. This, even though we are quite relaxed about the cleaning compared to what many of our co-religionists do. The main thing is to be organized about the process.

The biggest news of the week is that Daniela was not only accepted to a dual-masters program at NYU, but somehow managed to get them to give her a full scholarship. So congratulations, daughter, and we look forward to hearing all about it when you and Jeremy are here in just over a week (!).

Sarah spent all week working on projects, she’s plum worn out; we expect her and Dinah to sleep most of shabbat. Something that should be of interest to Sarah (and anyone else who is vegetarian) is a new study about the health effects of vegetarianism. It’s very interesting, and contrary to what most of us would expect. To wit: vegetarians are generally less healthy than non-vegetarians. There are questions to ask about the study, but it’s an interesting data point.

Last week I mentioned the despicable manner in which the US is treating Pollard. It gets worse: now, our “best friends” are blackmailing us. I sincerely hope Netanyahu grows a pair and tells the Americans to go piss up a rope. I am happy to report that as of today, we seem to be showing some spine, and are calling off the last release of terrorists. Hopefully, this will be the last we have to hear about the ill-named “peace process”, which resulted only in Jewish deaths and no peace.

This week, Canonical (the purveyors of “Ubuntu Linux”) announced that they are shutting down their UbuntuOne cloud storage service. You may not care, but I do: I was using UbuntuOne as my “off-site” backup. So now I’ve had to switch my off-site backup to use “Dropbox”.

So what is “Dropbox” (or similar services)? Simply put, it’s an easy way to store your electronic documents, pictures, etc. in “the cloud”. That just means that whatever you put in your own “dropbox” is copied “out there somewhere”, and you can access it whenever you want. That sounds like a great thing, but there’s a catch.

The catch is that whatever is in your “dropbox” is potentially accessible to others (such as, at the minimum, the people who run Dropbox). If you’re just saving pictures from your trip to Maui, it probably doesn’t matter. But if you’re backing-up your financial documents, you will want to be careful.

Being careful in this case means using strong encryption to keep people honest. What I do for my own data is put the stuff into an archive file (tar in my case, but zip or other formats work just as well), encrypt the archive with my private GPG key, and then copy the encrypted archive to my Dropbox folder. This is easy, safe and free. If you don’t have a Dropbox account and want a free one, click here.

In the news:


Dinah will be with us this shabbat. We’ll serve up:
chicken soup, vegetable soup, roast beef, roasted potatoes and yams, orzo salad, bulgur pilaf, cabbage salad, Israeli salad, eggplant salad, zucchini with mushrooms, pareve cholent and blueberry muffins.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!


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