Older blog entries for moshez (starting at number 26)

This is not really a diary entry, but rather a request for help: I couldn't find Fefe's address anywhere, and I want to contact him. So I decided a good way would to be to put in a diary entry to get into "recent entries". If anyone reading this has any connection to Fefe, please e-mail me at find-fefe@zadka.site.co.il. Thanks in advance.

Yesterday I was in Tel-Aviv meeting with clients. After the meeting, I met with Rami and Hezi for lunch. It was a lot of fun -- we made jokes, ate good food, and I started admiring Hezi for the way he talks to women. On the bus back I saw someone reading an article which started "XML is a new programming language". I guess they just s/Java/XML/ to last year's article. I restrained myself from telling him not to waste his time, and instead continued reading "Always Coming Home". I called up Chen to say hello and promise to give her the book when I'm done with it.

OK, back from reserves service in a hole in the south. Actually, it was kind of fun. The guys with me were Rami (an apprentice accountant with a nice wife), Hezi (apprentice lawyer), Liron (insurance salesmen) (and yes, I know of no sharkier professions), Yaniv (learning EE, and yes, I still look up to EEs), Nati (learning software engineering) and Meni (lerning mechanical engineering). We had lots of time to sleep, talk, do some (don't laugh) male bonding. We invented the "uniform scale" for women: a woman is x if x of the women are less beautiful then her. Actually, for convinence we scale x up by 10. So 5, say, means half the women are less beautiful then her. Watching TV and arguing about numbers was fun. Every now and the a number, say "8" was thrown. "No, 7". "Well, maybe I'd give her 7.5", and so on. I also managed to read tons of science fiction, and even get a taste for Haykus. We argued about history, philosophy and religion. Explained what stock and stock options are, and what is topology. How to form a non-profit, and how to prove 2 to the aleph null is larger then aleph null. We had a trivia of the day every day, ate fine meat and (don't tell) even drank fine beer. We played backgammon till the dice were raw. Loads and loads of fun. It's amazing what fun we had, in that hell hole in the south. Today I went out with Stav and Ira. We drank some, talked some, and sang "Sheker Hakhen" (by "Hasaruf") together, feeling it to be somewhat relevant. Long live the ex-club!

Today, for the first time in my life, I met a client. It was fun. Well, on the bus to Tel-Aviv I met a friend of mine from the army, and we spent the ride talking. He told me some army horror stories. Scary! Well, then I manage to get to the client. I installed some software, configured it a bit, and after ~7 hours, I left. Then I remebered why I hate Tel-Aviv: you can never find a bus station. Oh, well.

Yesterday Stav and I went downtown to drink and talk. We had lots of fun -- I taught him what Guiness untabbed is (strong and good), I drank Fuzzy navel. The barwoman at Mike's Place is simple way, and I mean *way* cute. It was fun just listening to the band, looking at her, and trying to reinvent Linux with Stav. There were two cute girls in a table next to us. When one of them went <some place> the other started to offer her pizza to everyone there. Fun fun. Well, the one who constantly left looked really good, so when Stav and I decided to leave, I left a note on her jacket asking her to call me. I then found her outside and told her I left a note on her jacket. Well, so far, no call. Oh, well. Anyway, then we decided we want to go some place else with food, so we went to Riff Raff. There we talked about reconstructing technology, including settling in place. Then we talked some more, and went to the Cave pub. There the waitress was not cute at all, but the drinks were all right. We drank a bit, talked some more, and staggered to a taxi home. Today I woke up with the predictable headache, and got a clean slate on my mail. MUTT rulez! And I'm logged in to #debian for the first time. Loads of fun!

Yesterday night Ira invited me over to see "First Strike", a Jacky Chan movie. It was my first Jacky Chan, but Ira kept complaining that they have too much pseudo-plot and too little fights. What fights were in the movie were simply great. Then we saw "Nikita -- The TV Series" or something like that. It's really got no connection to the original movie, but was cute nonetheless. Then we saw some Michael J. Fox movie about ghosts...funny, like a parody of "Sixth Sense", only it was before it.

Yesterday was also the day I finally finished Stav's books -- all eight of them, which meant that I can do more then one book/day. Perhaps I'll finish the Amber decalogy before my trip to Amsterdam. (Or perhaps I'll do the finish up on the plane -- always something good to do on flights).

Yesterday was a lot of fun. Ira, Stav and I went to Abu-Gosh to eat some humus and then baqlava. We met with Eitan there and had lots of fun. Then we came back to my place, and talked a lot until my family decided to go out to dinner -- so I shooed Adi and Ira away, and went to eat. We went to "Anashim" in Ein-Karem, and I had a sushi platter. Good for the soul...

Now that it's the promgrenade season, we have lots of ripe promgrenades. I spent all morning peeling them, with the necessary periodic sampling. Now we have >3kg of peeled promgrenades waiting for me. It sounds like a lot, but you can easily kill a kg of promgrenade while talking to someone. Luckily, I'm peeling them faster then they are being eaten -- for the moment.

To all dedicated readers of my journal: I'm sorry. I'll try to be more consistent in the future.

This has been quite a week: my first non-working week. The only slight problem was that on last Thursday, my radiator gave up the ghost. That means that until today I was car-less. Well, being a) carless and b) with a lot of Stav's books I mostly stayed at home and read. I've read quite a number of books, and I'm enjoying it. Of course, I've also graced the internet quite a lot. It's fun. Today was a very exciting day: my father and I started planning our vacation to the Netherlands. And, what's more, I finally got my car back. I missed my great big white Audi. Wuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What fun to me!!!! Oh, and I also had to go to Proficieny (my old company) to sign some papers and get my last paycheck. I can't believe I won't see the place anymore.

Well, since I haven't put in entries in quite a while, I'll recap a bit. Alex and Debi are now in the US, and I probably won't be joining them since I don't want to go to Cornell. Ira is finally back from abroad, but I haven't managed to see him yet. Probably this weekend. I've met with Chen, and we had a lot of fun, and I'm finally over her. It was action packed three years which I can now put behind me and be friends with Chen. There were times when I wouldn't have realized it possible.

Last night I had a great Step Aerobics lesson. The regular teacher was sick, and an apparently much more popular teacher substituted. It was hard! It was very fast-paced, which made it difficult both technically and physically. I got out half dead. Linux-il is trying to design a dinner, and it seems I won't be there, since I don't want to pay taxes to the "Rabbanut", and they're insisting on a kosher place. Bummer. I got the LJ yesterday, and started reading it. Nice articles, though some of them are really for novices. Reuven's article was nice, though I haven't began reading it seriously. I did notice a slight error (cnn.com should be .cnn.com, otherwise the cookie wouldn't be sent to www.cnn.com). On a similar streak, a server-side Cookie module is finally making it's way into Python. AMK has finally gone over my docos for Cookie, so I'm feeling safer. I should figure out how to document that __repr__ is the same as .output() -- I'm starting to think the whole Python documentation mechanism should be *really* built from the ground up. JavaDoc never had some problems, because there's no overloading in Java. Hmmmmmmm............

Well, finally I got of my butt and wrote another entry. So much has changed since the last diary entry, it's simply amazing. For one thing, I've quit my job -- I'm going to work for Lerner doing web development. Finally, some hope of using Python is in my future, in a company that is actively for me being on the Python development team. It should be loads of fun to work. Of course, just meeting Reuven was a draining experience -- my car died a day before, and we had to make several trips to the idiots at the car shop before they managed to fix my car via brute force. Well, finally people who are worse at what they do then programmers. Oh, well. Now I'm happily learning database stuff, which is really cool. Though I still believe object databases are the future <wink>. I'm going out a lot these days with both Alex and Debbi, and Ira and Stav, usually not at the same time. For Alex's birthday, I brought Stav, and just like I predicted, Debbi and him got along really well. (Well, all it takes to get along with Debbi is to say good things about Macs, which he did...). Last night there was a cool late Too Be'av (the Jewish love-day or something) party in Sataf. Loads of fun -- lots of people from where I served in the military, lots of people from hi-tech company. It took a concious effort not to talk about computers, but I guess I managed well in the face of temptation. I met lots of people I haven't seen for a while, like Vadik and Yuval Aharoni, laughed a bit at people still doing military service and had lots of fun. It's nice to see that old military rivalries never die -- you explain to people that where you served you made fun of where they serve semi-professionally. (To those who understand, the word "niggers" comes to mind). I met this really cute girl called Michal, and we ended up talking half the night about everything. I even managed to get a phone number from her, which made me really happy. Well, perhaps I am over Chen already. Which reminds me, IGLU is starting to form a non-profit, which is cool. The coolest thing is that the organizational commitee is called "The IGLU Cabal". That seems like a good time to tell the true story about the IGLU cabal. One day, Stav, Ira and myself were in Ira's house talking, when I suddenly said "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a rumour about an IGLU cabal, and everyone kept denying it? Probably merely denying it vehemently enough would make people sure it exists." Well, the decision was that come morning, I'll spoof an e-mail asking "What is the IGLU cabal?", and all of us will repsond with "There is no IGLU cabal", and put it in our signatures. To anyone doubting the story, check the mail headers -- Yaron Cohen was from "prof-sol-....netvision.net.il", which is "Proficiency Solutions" (the old name of my company) and netvision is the ISP.). Well, it went off really well, and apparently denying it vehemently enough actually created it -- which proves reality imitates the imagination. Well, all in all the last days were a hectic jumble of fun and extreme emotions, but now I'm happy.

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