Blog/October 2010/Oct 8th
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Oct 8th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!
B"H! The hot weather seems to have taken a break, with temperatures being cool at night. Not even a week after we changed to praying for the winds to blow and the rain to fall, we're supposed to have rain this very weekend! Here is a picture of a rarely seen phenomenon taken from our front yard today. I know, those of you in Seattle are grumping about how wet your summer was -- but we haven't seen any rain since about April... it's very exciting to us!
Esther, Sarah and I have been working as usual; Daniela returned to school and is deep in her studies. My work has been crazy; I'm supposed to come up with a new way of doing installs on the Mac because a client of ours doesn't like our perfectly good method. So the work of a year and a half has to be redone in two weeks (less, actually) -- and it's not going smoothly. The Mac is not programmer-friendly. At all.
Sarah has had an unusually 'exciting' week. As you know, she's working with elderly people in Tel Aviv. This week, one of the ladies she works with started groaning and leaning on her, startling my daughter. She called the lady's daughter, who told her to call an ambulance. Good thing she did, because the woman had had a minor stroke -- if Sarah hadn't been there, it might have been hours before she got treatment.
Because of the holiday season, when locustsIsraelis eradicate any traces of produce from the stores, vegetables have become scarce and very expensive. I heard on the radio yesterday that some government office is telling consumers not to pay more than 17 NIS for a kilo of tomatoes -- that's $2.20 per pound at current exchange rates; they are usually 3 NIS or less! And they are being sold as high as 24 now. Yikes! And the tomatoes in the store are green and not ripe. <grrr>
What else? Esther's computer contracted a virus yesterday, a very annoying one which kept popping up and telling her that her computer had all sorts of infections and that who knows what sort of bad things were going to happen to her if she didn't pay for some anti-virus software (a scam to separate the unwary from their money). So I told her to shut the machine off and wait for me to come home. When I got home, I booted the machine into a recovery-disk and scanned for viruses; no dice. Then I scanned the disk for files changed in the past week; that pointed to some suspicious things, but nothing obvious. So I then booted in to Windows "safe" mode, went into the registry and looked at the 'Run' and 'RunOnce' keys -- bingo! Removed them, removed the files which were loaded there, and forced her machine to auto-update Windows. No permanent harm done, but several hours of my life irretrievably gone.
OK; you know how I'm always going on about privacy and the need to use encryption? Well, one British youth took my stand to an extreme, and is now sitting in jail (gaol for you Brits) because he refused to disclose his computer's password -- and since he encrypted his hard disk (like everyone should do!), the police cannot get at whatever they were looking for. Now, regardless of the merits of his particular case or the British law, I would like to humbly suggest an out for anyone who may happen to have a similar situation. Encrypt your disk as you did before; but if you have anything you really want to keep away from, em, anyone -- use TrueCrypt to make a separate, hidden, encrypted drive within your encrypted drive. Put your super-secret stuff there and make sure it's not obviously something of interest. Then, when the gorillas threaten you with the lead-filled rubber hoses, you can (reluctantly) turn over the password to your main disk (protesting invasion of privacy, of course), while still maintaining your really secret stuff, secret. Of course, you need to not use a lame password, and in particular don't use the same password for your main disk and the secret disk! Really, I shouldn't have to tell you this ...
This shabbat Sarah's got a guest over, a friend from elementary school she hasn't seen in years. We'll try to feed her with: barley-vegetable soup, roast chicken, rice pilaf, stir-fried veggies, the usual collection of salatim, beet salad, fava beans (ful), red-lentil hummus, baked eggplant and cholent.
Until next week,
shabbat shalom!
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