Blog/February 2011/Feb 18th

Feb 18th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Romance is in the air; Sarah fired and imprisoned; Three sheets to the wind; more privacy concerns; incredibly beautiful weather.

Ah, (almost) spring! The flowers bloom, and the thoughts of creatures great and small turn to propagation of their respective species. The weather turns a little nicer and suddenly people melt and get mushy. It's inevitable, I suppose. Daniela (not known to be mushy) has been getting more and more serious about a young fellow (whom we hope to meet soon, in some manner). We don't know much about him, except that he doesn't care for chocolate. Our daughter's become serious enough that she's asking for recipes for non-chocolate cakes -- and if you know her, you understand just how serious that is.

Sarah had an exciting week. It started off when she left her keys at home (through no fault of mine, no, not at all) and was therefore at the mercy of her roommates for entry and egress. One day she was later than the others getting out, and found she was locked-in her apartment and could not escape. Worse, her "lady" cancelled due to illness, so she had the entire day free -- but couldn't leave! Another day, her newest lady "fired" her, because she thought Sarah was "too young". Considering that all the sherut girls are basically the same age, I'm not sure what she was expecting. But things picked up as Sarah acquired a new "lady" -- this one almost 101 years old! This particular lady has lived in Israel 80 years -- and yet, doesn't speak Hebrew!

Esther and I decided (actually, she decided) that we needed new sheets. I'm not sure why, since our current sheets are only twelve years old. In any event, we went to the "Malha" mall, on the other side of Jerusalem from us, had a nondescript mall-dinner and then went looking for sheets. We found them. What we didn't find was sufficient incentive to spend the ludicrous sums the stores were asking (even on sale!) for the sheets they were purveying. If you know of a store in Israel selling sheets for a reasonable price, tell me, please!

I'm sure you're all tired of hearing me drone on about privacy issues, and computer security. However, I'll drone on yet again -- just to inform you about sanitizing disks. You may not be aware, but when you get rid of an old hard disk, or a USB key, or a floppy disc (remember those?) -- the data you had stored on them is almost trivially easy to recover. That means that anyone who gets that storage device can get your information off of it -- and if you stored anything private or important, that person has access to it.

There are a couple of things you can do. The first step is to encrypt your disk. On Ubuntu-type systems you can choose to have an "encrypted home directory" when you install, and that is a very good idea. But whether you do that or not, when you get rid of your disk you should securely wipe the data off the disk. But as the link I posted in the previous paragraph intimates, it is sometimes necessary to physically destroy the media so that data recovery is impossible. Certainly, anyone who has sensitive information stored on the media should take notice of this.

The weather has been nice, and chilly. But today it's very nice, and for shabbat it will be spectacular. We're really looking forward to it. The rain is supposed to return at the beginning of the week, and we look forward to that as well! Fortunately for us, we took advantage of the one really sunny day this week to catch up on our laundry (don't forget, we have a green dryer).

Sarah's got more friends coming this week. We will try to feed them: chicken cacciatore, tuna salad, Hallah from our icy reserves (pesaH is coming...), spice cake, salatim, traditional chulent, lentil salad, cauliflower salad, green beans and mushrooms, braised fennel, baked yams, roasted peppers and kohlrabi-carrot slaw.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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