Advogato blog for shlomif

Blog Entry for my 36th Birthday

Sun, 5 May 2013 12:15:12 GMT

Being born on 5 May 1977, I turn 36 (= thirty six) on 5 May 2013. 36 is a special number for me in part because it is the square of 6, but more importantly because it is two times of 18. The age of 18 is considered the start of maturity in Israel when Israeli boys and girls gain the right to vote, and are supposed to enroll into the Israeli military, and normally hit sexual maturity at that point. The time I was 18, 19, 20 in 1995-1997, was very influential for me, and now I feel that I have achieved a second maturity.

I feel I have finally reached peace of mind, am enjoying all the little things in life, and can honestly see reality as it is, and see through many lies. Part of my problem was that for a long time I was playing the “Invisible”, which is something I decided to avoid from now on and work on better publicity. A different issue was me thinking of myself as The Eternal Jew, i.e: a profile, or a “god” in the stock exchange of the gods, which was an unhealthy tendency that I finally put to rest in a scene of my screenplay, Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (thanks to the wonderful protagonist there). Finally, yet another problem was that I have not accepted who I am, which is also something that I decided to avoid from now.

If I were ever going to visit Fantastica, the land of imagination, I would need to be very careful from the wrath of the characters of my stories and screenplays, whom I have put to much suffering (but at least all of them, with an exception in The Enemy and How I Helped to Fight it, ended up alive at the end of the stories and happier than ever. However, all this suffering was secondary to my own which involved hypomanias, and even some Manias, which caused some deteriorated health, and unhappiness to my surrounding.

I have decided that from now on, I would like to socialise more. I was told and understood that the lack of socialisation was part of what is causing hypomanias, and the underlying reason behind Bipolar disorder. I have already attended one Science Fiction and Fantasy Conference in Tel Aviv, and it was a wonderful and colourful experience, and also proved a catalyst for coming up with the idea of a screenplay I have written. I want to do stuff like that more often which will hopefully mitigate my hypomanias problem.

On this occasion, I would like to thank the people who helped me and guided me throughout my journey to maturity: my psychotherapist (whom I won't mention by name, but who provided a lot of solid advice), and Dr. David Burns for his excellent book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy; my friends from the Technion, the Haifa Linux Club, and the Tel Aviv Open Source Club; my friends from the Internet, and my family members for being there when I needed them.

I would also like to thank my characters, who provided a window into my soul and my innermost desires:

The ex-Member of the Organisation from my first real novella The Enemy, who was full of mathematical logic and was practically inhuman.
The Friends in “The One with the Fountainhead” who were happy to play the characters from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead while parodying and modernising it along the way. They signified what I was unhappy about the Fountainhead and also my growing interest in romantic relationships.
The Human Hacking Field Guide brings us Erisa→Eve, the sexy, mysterious, insurgent, and typical “bad girl” antagonist, who after becoming less of a rebel without a cause, and at the age of 18 felt like she can write her own replacement for In Search of Lost Time, and publish it, and it would be better than the original. Eve, I wish I knew I was reflecting on myself in this respect!
From Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, we find such characters as Q, my own Q2, Jadzia Dax, and my own Katie Jacobson, who face a mishmash of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Judaism, Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind theory and other Near East history, open source hackerdom, and various Elders of Zion and Illuminati conspiracy theory, and survive to tell the tale, reflecting upon some of the farfetched stuff I thought to be true, during my “Great Mania”.
Finally, Selina from Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, handled the various vampires and demons she ran into in a graceful and natural way, and finally put my whole obsession with “The Eternal Jew”/“The Invisible”/“The Slayer”/ “The Dispeller”/“The Free”/etc. to rest. Selina, you are great - I love you!

During this period, I have also started writing Humanity - The Movie, which aims to be a parody of Humanity and modern life in particular, and which I originally imagined as being written and filmed by a Bajoran extraterrestrial who arrived at Earth, also during my “Great Mania”. I also began writing The Pope Died on Sunday, which tells the story of an atheist female graphic designer (and a software developer by training) in Milwaukee, during the summer of the year 2000, reflecting on an old mentality, and finally The Blue Rabbit Log, which is a Crazy Comedy parodying Role-Playing Games, and is based on an old idea of mine.

Anyway, right now, I feel like I have reached some greater and greater enlightenment and am more capable of handling life’s problems as I run into them. I have been realised more that the gods help them that help themselves, that I should be happy of what I am and proud of it, and that the people around me can often be dicks. I also realise now that my relentless policy for honesty and sincerity got me in a lot of trouble, because people don't want to face the Elephants in the room, but that I should still try to be more tactful in the future I also realised many people can often be jerks, and try to hurt you on purpose.

Cheers, and have a great 5 May day.

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Blog Entry for my 36th Birthday

Sun, 5 May 2013 12:15:12 GMT

I would also like to thank my characters, who provided a window into my soul and my innermost desires:

The ex-Member of the Organisation from my first real novella The Enemy, who was full of mathematical logic and was practically inhuman.
The Friends in “The One with the Fountainhead” who were happy to play the characters from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead while parodying and modernising it along the way. They signified what I was unhappy about the Fountainhead and also my growing interest in romantic relationships.
The Human Hacking Field Guide brings us Erisa→Eve, the sexy, mysterious, insurgent, and typical “bad girl” antagonist, who after becoming less of a rebel without a cause, and at the age of 18 felt like she can write her own replacement for In Search of Lost Time, and publish it, and it would be better than the original. Eve, I wish I knew I was reflecting on myself in this respect!
From Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, we find such characters as Q, my own Q2, Jadzia Dax, and my own Katie Jacobson, who face a mishmash of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Judaism, Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind theory and other Near East history, open source hackerdom, and various Elders of Zion and Illuminati conspiracy theory, and survive to tell the tale, reflecting upon some of the farfetched stuff I thought to be true, during my “Great Mania”.
Finally, Selina from Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, handled the various vampires and demons she ran into in a graceful and natural way, and finally put my whole obsession with “The Eternal Jew”/“The Invisible”/“The Slayer”/ “The Dispeller”/“The Free”/etc. to rest. Selina, you are great - I love you!

Cheers, and have a great 5 May day.

New Story: The Earth Angel; Soviet reversal jokes; new text in The Pope and in Selina Mandrake; “Put

Thu, 2 May 2013 09:09:26 GMT

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage.

There is a new story titled The Earth Angel which I have started to write:

Dr. Alan Stein (Attn.) had not seen that side of Samantha before. As they sat there in the Chinese restaurant, two days before Ari, their system administrator, left for a trip to Israel, Samantha was emitting a lot of profanity, and sharing her frustrations of her life and the world. Dr. Stein was beginning to regret the fact that he had agreed to comply with Ari’s wishes, and invite her to lunch with them.

Samantha Rodriguez was the newest hire at Alan’s law firm - a brilliant attorney in her early thirties, who looked great, was always groomed, and got a lot of work done, despite the fact that she almost never stayed overtime, and also took many days off. One fly in the ointment was the fact that she was single, sexy, and kept asking her co-workers out on dates, or accepting their own invitations. As much as Dr. Stein agreed that she had been a good hire, he was desperately trying to avoid interacting with her.

“Anyway, I ended up telling my friend, Jasmine, who can be a real bitch sometimes, to fuck off, and deal with her troubled life herself. I simply ran out of patience.” she said.

“Bravo!” Ari said while clapping his hands. “By the way, Samantha, how did you become a lawyer?”

“Oh, that's a long story.” she said while playing with her fork.

“And we’ve got time to hear it, right Mr. Stein?”

“Yes, I guess we do.” Dr. Stein answered.

“Well, I studied Linguistics as my B.A.,” Samantha said “and by the time I graduated, my head was filled with vocabulary, and to a lesser extent - grammatical rules, my heart was broken from many heartbreaks, and I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my life. I ended up narrowing it to three options: 1. Find a paying job - as a programmer or whatever else I could land. 2. Stay in the academia, studying for a Masters and/or a Ph.D. and — 3. Go to law school. I figured out fucking Med School was never my thing.”

“Anyway, after consulting it with my friends, I became even less capable of knowing what to do. So I did the logical thing - I rolled a die.”

“A die?” Ari said.

“Yes, a ten-sided die or a 1d10 in role-playing game parlence. That’s usually what I use. It landed on the law school option, so that’s what I decided to pursue.” Samantha said.

“So, you placed your fate in the hand of chance?” Ari asked

“Yes, I did. Nothing wrong with doing that, if you ask me.”

“Well, everyone say you are an excellent attorney.” Ari noted.

“So they do.” Samantha said, “Maybe they are right.”
The translation of the already written part of my story, The Pope Died on Sunday is now complete:

Rachel contemplated how to start the conversation.

“So how did you become an infrastructures engineer?” Rachel asked.

“Well, ever since I was young, I wanted to be a plumber.” Greg replied.

“A plumber? Seriously?” Rachel said with astonishment.

“Yes. Very strange, but what can I do — that is what I wanted to be.” Greg said, “I spent a large part of the summer vacations being an apprentice for plumbers and enjoyed every moment. Anyway, after I graduated from high school, I was planning to go through a plumbing training course and to get my qualification. But my father approached me and told me: ‘Greg, my son, I have, thank God, enough money so you study what you want in university. So why not exploit that? If you want, you can become a plumber who graduated from university.’”

And he went on: “So I agreed with him, but decided to study the closest thing to plumbing: civil engineering with a specialisation in the engineering of water and sewerage infrastructures. And surprisingly I realised that a large part of it was quite interesting.”

“So did you become a qualified plumber eventually?” Rachel queried.

“Yes, I passed the course. But I still got a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and that’s what I prefer to do.”

“Hmmm…” Rachel said “Finding a good plumber in this day and age, to say nothing of one who is a university graduate, is hard.”

“Well, I cannot testify that I’m a good plumber. A person cannot testify for his own qualities.” Greg replied.

“Well, even a bad plumber is good enough for certain needs.” said Rachel and witnessed Greg bursting into laughter.
There are some new or extended scenes in Selina Mandrake - The Slayer:

[ Selina is sitting next to her computer at home with Firefox browsing the Hebrew wikipedia. She keeps highlighting words and hovering over them to find translations using a Firefox extension.

There is a signal, and the Pidgin icon in the status bar starts blinking. Selina clicks it. ]

Mosheh Ben-Amram: [on IM] Hello, Selina! How are you doing, today?

Selina: I’m fine. Trying to contribute to the Hebrew wikipedia. These Affixes are driving me crazy.

Mosheh Ben-Amram: Heh, עברית קשה שפה, but there are worse.

Mosheh Ben-Amram: האם את מדברת עברית? [= “Do you speak Hebrew?”]

Selina: Qtsath, or as new speakers will say Qetsath. Heh.

Mosheh Ben-Amram: Yes, one of the first words you have to learn to say, and it’s already a Shibboleth.

Selina: Emeth. [= "True."]

Selina: BTW, are you actually Mosheh Ben-Amram (= Moses) the Hebrew prophet?

Mosheh Ben-Amram: I won’t deny that I am.

Selina: Hah!
I added a page of “In Soviet Russia” factoids:
- In Soviet Russia, cats own you. No, wait! Cats own you everywhere.
- In Soviet Russia, superstition believe in you. (Sawyer X)
- In Soviet Russia, food tastes YOU! (Leuthihi)
“Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Acquires Google Inc.” - a breaking news story published on 1 April 2013:

1 April, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel: Due to the spectacular commercial success of Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s Enterprise Edition and its Webscale™ edition, we have amassed quite a bit of cash in the bank, so we decided to make a small but important strategical acquisition. As a result, Freecell Solver Enterprises™ is proud to announce its upcoming acquisition of Google Inc., which will result in an exciting synergical merger.

Some of the upcoming changes would be replacing Google’s tech support (which is notoriously bad) by Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s world-famous and superb tech support (as detailed in the essay “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” by Joel on Software), as well as integrating Google search into Freecell Solver™ for an enhanced experience in solving Freecell. We are also planning on creating a separate YouTube top-level category for card Solitaire-related videos (including screencasts and presentations).

Another one is “Announcing New Israeli Usergroups”.
There are some new sections in my essay “Putting all the Cards on the Table (2013)”:
During the Middle Ages, the apprentices of craftsmen graduated to become masters, and started their own shops, at a much younger age than 18. Today, most people graduate from high school at that age, and are expected to remain disadvantaged until then. There isn’t a good reason why the youth of today should not be able to make useful contributions to arts, sciences, philosophy, and entertainment, despite their young age and inexperience.

Here are some examples:
1. Dmitri Gaskin is a core developer of both jQuery and Drupal and gave a talk about jQuery on Google Tech Talks, while being 12 years old.
2. Maria Aragon was 10 years old when she was recorded performing a cover of Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way”, which has received over 50 million views on YouTube as of April 2013 (and which I like better than the original).
3. Much previously, Samantha Smith changed the fate of the cold war, when being 10 years old, by the simple act of writing a letter.
4. In the 18th century, Carl Friedrich Gauss started making important contributions to mathematics from a very early age.
Our contemporary culture sort of expects kids (what Americans refer to as children, “pre-teens”, and “teenagers”) to remain “innocent”, naïve and inexperienced, and immature, and, as a result, most of them behave accordingly.
The abstract to my yet unwritten novella “The Road to Heaven is Paved With Bad Attentions” is now partly translated to English.
There are new quotes in the collection of Unix-like fortune cookies:

An engineer dies and reports to the pearly gates. St. Peter checks his dossier and says, “Ah, you’re an engineer. You are in the wrong place.”

So, the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer gets dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements. After a while, they’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and the engineer is a pretty popular guy.

One day, God calls Satan up on the telephone and says with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”

Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and there’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.”

God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake. He should never have gotten down there; send him up here.”

Satan says, “No way. I like having an engineer on the staff, and I’m keeping him.”

God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”

Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right. And just where are you going to get a lawyer?”
Many meaningful <meta name="description" /> tags were added to the pages to help with the descriptions in search engine results.
I added a set of links to all the pages referring to my online presence elsewhere on the web, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Reddit.

Recent Hacktivity Log

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:09:28 GMT

This is another recent hacktivity log of what I have been up to recently, as far as software development and writing is concerned.

“Every Publicity is Good Publicity…”

True to my belief that “The Gods help them that help themselves”, I have been working much more on publicity recently, utilising my Twitter account, my Reddit account, my Facebook account and other online resources. I am not exclusively promoting only my own works, and also share/retweet/etc. the posts of my friends. I had great success with this /r/xkcd subreddit post which so far received 150 upvotes (and 36 down votes) about my new screenplay Summerschool at the NSA which has a strong xkcd (= the web comics) theme, and also had some lesser success with posts to other subreddits. As usual, I also upvote and comment on other people's posts and comments.

It seems that the main problem with my site up to now has not been that it lacked good content, but that most people were not aware of the site.

I’ve also been experimenting with buying Project Wonderful web advertisements, but so far they did not yield too many clicks.

The Olamot Sci-Fi/Fantasy Conference

As I reported on the Hamakor mailing list, I attended the Olamot Science-Fiction/Fantasy/etc. conference that took place during Passover in Tel Aviv, Israel, and had a great time. I didn't bring a camera to the first day, so people on IRC did not believe me that I saw many highly attractive geeks there, which I remedied by bringing a camera and taking many photos during the second day.

The conference was colourful, zany, and inspiring and most of the people I saw agreed to be photographed. I spent most of the time there helping with the booth of the open source community and we were better organised and more prepared than a similar conference several years ago, where we only had a very huge and heavy Sun CRT screen that did not yield to our attempts to get it to display something on the computer.

Work on Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (a Buffy Parody)

I was able to mostly complete my work on the screenplay Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, which is marketed as a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but which also crosses over many other elements, including from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Judaism, history of the Near East and Europe, and computer geekdom. It is in a usable condition now, but there are still some missing scenes, and the screenplay may also need some polishing.

Buffy and Clarissa Facts

In the name of girl power, and FOR GREAT JUSTICE, I have continued to collect factoids about females: Buffy Summers from the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and and Clarissa Darling from Clarissa Explains It All (which I fear no one is familiar with or remember now, but still makes for some awesome factoids). Additions are welcome.

Summerschool at the NSA

I got the idea for the screenplay Summerschool at the NSA during the Olamot conference mentioned above, and I am thankful for such great conference for providing a lot of inspiration. I was able to complete the screenplay in less than two weeks and it is in a usable condition now (but likely still has many rough spots). Quoting from the abstract:

The Hollywood actresses Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy fame) and Summer Glau (of xkcd notability) conspire to kick the ass of the NSA (= the United States government’s National Security Agency), while using special warfare that is completely non-violent.

This screenplay crosses Judaism, the Mother Goose nursary rhymes, My Little Pony, substance/etc. addiction, xkcd, Buffy, the song “99 Problems” by Jay-Z, and some personal insights and memes, and despite all that is actually mostly realism for a change.

“All Truth is God’s Truth”

Some people, with whom I talked on the Freenode chat network, complained that I didn’t stay loyal to my Jewish roots, and instead crossed Judaism with other idea system, and some newer sources of influence. However I’d like to quote Larry Wall from his “Perl Culture” keynote:

I have a book on my bookshelf that I’ve never read, but that has a great title. It says, “All Truth is God’s Truth.” And I believe that. The most viable belief systems are those that can reach out and incorporate new ideas, new memes, new metaphors, new interfaces, new extensions, new ways of doing things. My goal this year is to try to get Perl to reach out and cooperate with Java. I know it may be difficult for some of you to swallow, but Java is not the enemy. Nor is Lisp, or Python, or Tcl. That is not to say that these languages don't have good and bad points. I am not a cultural relativist. Nor am I a linguistic relativist. In case you hadn't noticed. :-)

Furthermore, like Ayn Rand noted in her journal, a good work of fiction requires a solid philosophy, and so one can learn a lot from works of fiction. Furthermore, Peter Ustinov noted that “Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”, so even humorous works of art convey a good philosophy.

I think the main difference between contemporary or old works of fiction, such as the Greek mythology, Aesop’s fables, the works of Alexandre Dumas Pere, Star Trek, Buffy, etc. and “holy” works such as the Holy Bible or the Qur’an is that some people still take the latter too seriously, and consider them the final word on how to lead your life, rather than just another step in the road to enlightenment.

So I’m not going to let my personal philosophy stagnate by sticking only to traditional Judaism, which itself was never pure, and always incorporated many useful ideas from elsewhere, and still should.

XML-Grammar-Screenplay / XML-Grammar-Fiction

When working on the screenplays, I noticed that some of the error messages were quite unhelpful, so I implemented more informative error messages in XML-Grammar-Fiction / XML-Grammar-Screenplay. I noticed that the code was getting quite complicated, so I refactored it a little, but there is still a long way to go.

Freecell Solver

Someone reported problems understanding the solutions of the online (JS-based) port of Freecell Solver, and I decided to convert the card suit identifiers to their Unicode equivalents. So from:

Foundations: H-0 C-0 D-0 S-0
Freecells:
: 4C 2C 9C 8C QS 4S 2H
: 5H QH 3C AC 3H 4H QD
: QC 9S 6H 9H 3S KS 3D
: 5D 2S JC 5C JH 6D AS
: 2D KD TH TC TD 8D
: 7H JS KH TS KC 7C
: AH 5S 6S AD 8H JD
: 7S 6C 7D 4D 8S 9D

We get:

Foundations: ♥-0 ♣-0 ♦-0 ♠-0
Freecells:
: 4♣ 2♣ 9♣ 8♣ Q♠ 4♠ 2♥
: 5♥ Q♥ 3♣ A♣ 3♥ 4♥ Q♦
: Q♣ 9♠ 6♥ 9♥ 3♠ K♠ 3♦
: 5♦ 2♠ J♣ 5♣ J♥ 6♦ A♠
: 2♦ K♦ T♥ T♣ T♦ 8♦
: 7♥ J♠ K♥ T♠ K♣ 7♣
: A♥ 5♠ 6♠ A♦ 8♥ J♦
: 7♠ 6♣ 7♦ 4♦ 8♠ 9♦

Moreover, Shirl Hart informed me that he/she have uploaded a Java port of their Freecell Solver to GitHub, which runs much faster (70x reportedly) than the Perl version (but might still consume more RAM than an equivalent C port). All the power to Shirl!

DocBook EPUB generation

I ran into some problems with getting the EPUB (an Electronic book format) generation of the DocBook/5 XSLT stylesheet to work properly, but it was fixed in this commit thanks in part to help I got on the docbook-apps mailing list.

Wiki-ing

I have been desperately trying to find a usable photo (under a Creative Commons licence/etc.) of Christina Grimmie (= the singer and musician known for her YouTube videos) for her Wikipedia pages, without luck so far.

I also have been trying to protect the English Wikipedia page of Tiffany Alvord (another superb artist) from deletionism, and it’s ironic that the Spanish Wikipedia page about her is longer and more comprehensive, even though Alvord is American and almost always sings in English.

Furthermore, I have been using several pages in the Buffy Fan Fiction Wikia to organise my thoughts for the Selina Mandrake screenplay.

Thanks

Thanks to protist (Jonathan Avery) and Gabor Szabo for reviewing this post and commenting on it.

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New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Summerschool at the NSA the screenplay + New Factoids

Tue, 9 Apr 2013 18:09:28 GMT

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. This time, the highlight is some interesting new content.

Summerschool at the NSA, subtitled “As the sling shoots, grown-up men will sob”, is a screenplay, which I completed and is in a usable condition. The Hollywood actresses Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy fame) and Summer Glau (of xkcd notability) conspire to kick the ass of the NSA (= the United States government’s National Security Agency), while using special warfare that is completely non-violent:

[ Black screen, SMG’s (= Sarah Michelle Gellar’s) voice, while emulating her daughter. ]

SMG: Humpty dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty dumpty had a great fall. And all the King's horses, and all the King's men could not put Humpty together again.

[ Screen showing SGlau (= Summer Glau) laughing. SMG and she are sitting at a diner together. ]

SGlau: [Stops laughing.] Oh my God, Sarah, your daughter’s so smart.

SMG: And… funny!

SGlau: Yes. Well, what does she like aside from Mother Goose?

SMG: Oh, she loves My Little Pony. She and I watch it almost every week together.

SGlau: Wow, you're a pega-sister, too?

SMG: I'm not addicted to My Little Pony. I swear! I can quit any time. Just let me watch one… more… episode. [giggles]

SGlau: Hah, hah. For your information, my My Little Pony addicts’ support group meets every second and fourth Saturday of the month, and I am currently at step five of our twelve step program.

SMG: Sounds like a plan. I'll consider joining.
There are brand new factoids page of Clarissa Darling Facts (from the old Television show Clarissa Explains It All) as well as new Buffy facts and Chuck Norris facts in the factoids collection:
- Tomorrow never dies, unless Chuck Norris volunteers to take it out of its misery.
- The Chuck Norris of the Buffyverse, has been secretly training under Buffy’s supervision, and so far - lost every battle with her.
- Clarissa Darling can start from “I think therefore I am” and prove that the grass is green, that there are about 365 days in a year, and that Isaac Newton formulated the Law of Gravitation back in 1687.
I added a page about my nickname, “Rindolf” and its etymlogy, as well as about Rindolfism, which is my philosophy.
There are some new quotes in the UNIX-like fortune cookies’ collections:

I recall discussing Buffy with a Jewish American friend, who used to be secular, and now has become an observant Jew, and married a woman who properly converted to Orthodox Judaism, and they have some children. We discussed the fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar was Jewish, and yet that many men (and some Lesbian women) were more attracted to Alyson Hannigan’s character, Willow Rosenberg, who was a shy and sheepish, redhead, Jewess. Then when I mentioned that Hannigan was only a maternal Jew, he said she is “kosher” (because someone whose mother is Jewish and who did not convert to a different religion, is a bona-fide Jew). I found it amusing that you refer to women by the same word as you do to food, but I think the ancient Hebrew word "kasher" also means "approved", "appropriate", "legal", etc.

In any case, both Hannigan and Gellar are now married, and so trying to separate between them and their husbands is not kosher. ;-)
Finally, the main navigation menu sports a new and more usable CSS style thanks to the great work of Joe Crawford. Thanks, Joe!

Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Acquires Google Inc.

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 16:08:38 GMT

1 April, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel: Due to the spectacular commercial success of Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s Enterprise Edition and its Webscale™ edition, we have amassed quite a bit of cash in the bank, so we decided to make a small but important strategical acquisition. As a result, Freecell Solver Enterprises™ is proud to announce its upcoming acquisition of Google Inc., which will result in an exciting synergical merger.

Some of the upcoming changes would be replacing Google’s tech support (which is notoriously bad) by Freecell Solver Enterprises™’s world-famous and superb tech support (as detailed in the essay “Seven steps to remarkable customer service” by Joel on Software), as well as integrating Google search into Freecell Solver™ for an enhanced experience in solving Freecell. We are also planning on creating a separate YouTube top-level category for card Solitaire-related videos (including screencasts and presentations).

We are sure that the upcoming acquisition is going to allow Freecell Solver Enterprises™ to further its competitive edge, and allow us to have even more significant growth, which will in turn allow us to make even more significant acquisitions. As our CTO, Shlomi Fish, notes: “good times are coming.”.

Soon, people will say “Let’s Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Superheroic Web Search™ it!” instead of “Let’s Google it!”, for an exciting Web 3.141592™ experience.

“Publish or Perish” = “Life or Death”

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 01:08:39 GMT

There is an old adage about the Academic life that reads: “Publish or Perish”. Wikipedia reads:

“Publish or perish” is a phrase coined to describe the pressure in academia to rapidly and continuously publish academic work to sustain or further one's career.

Frequent publication is one of few methods at scholars’ disposal to demonstrate academic talent. Successful publications bring attention to scholars and their sponsoring institutions, which can facilitate continued funding and an individual's progress through their field.

Let’s go a little farther from the “frequent publishing” and just into publishing something in time, and it is evident that a man has two choices:

To publish everything he or she knows and thinks in time, and be completely honest and sincere (without lying, keeping secrets, or even speaking in riddles, but while still keeping some privacy and using tact and wisdom.). ( = "Publish" ).
To keep things to himself or herself, lie, or use other forms of deceit or camouflage, thus resulting in him isolating himself from society and becoming paranoid. (= "Perish" ).

If we look at history, we will see that the most enduring and surviving idea systems were the ones that consistently published: the Greek philosophers, the Jewish scholars, the Muslim scholars of medieval times, the post-Renaissance/post-Printing-press Europeans, the American mass-media / mass-publishing revolution of the 20th century, and the user-generated content Internet of today. Yes, there always was a lot of junk (see Sturgeon’s Law that says that “90% of everything is crap”), and that includes the content of the very Tanakh (= Jewish Bible) that many people still consider holy. However, there is always a minority of exceptionally good stuff. (For more insights about that, see Paul Graham’s essays “What Business Can Learn from Open Source” and “Web 2.0”).

It is extremely unlikely that a single man called Aesop told all of the fables that have been attributed to him, and even if (King) David existed, he has not taken all of the actions that he was told to have taken in the Bible, because many such tales were common in the ancient Near East. Instead, they were both ancient memes, and people had no qualms to gradually improve upon them and spice them up.

So you should definitely publish, because keeping your “secrets” or “core competency” for yourself is not only dishonest, but a superbly bad strategy, because you will have little motivation to improve what you did, and other people won’t be able to contribute to it, build upon it, or criticise it.

The biggest offender of the “Publish or Perish → Life or Death” principle I can think of and can relate to is the National Security Agency (NSA), and they now face two options: either publish everything they know promptly —or alterantively perish.

How do I plan to make them realise that? See my page with NSA “facts” and its links, as well as my latest anti-NSA activism in the form of the informal screenplay Summerschool at the NSA. The latter stars the actresses Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy fame) and Summer Glau (famous for being featured in xkcd #406: “Venting”, and some subsequent xkcd strips) as themselves, and who conspire to slay/terminate/kick-the-ass-of the NSA for good, in a typical David vs. Goliath fashion.

For publishing and therefore life,

— Shlomi Fish

Licence

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2013, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version of that licence). In addition to that, the author gives an explicit exemption to use the article in sites with web advertising.

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Selina Mandrake, NSA/Buffy/Chuck Norris facts, Yachar's Music

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:07:28 GMT

Here are the recent updates for Shlomi Fish’s Homepage. This time, the highlight is a lot of interesting new content.

I have started writing a comprehensive essay titled “Putting all the Cards on the Table (2013)”, which is also syndicated as a blog post on my Unarmed but Still Dangerous blog. Here is the abstract for it:

What is the problem with the Technion and why is it graver in M.I.T., and why you should watch the film Silver Linings Playbook to realise why it's not a problem? Why was the David who fought Goliath a hacker, and what is the difference between a tragic hero and an action hero? What was the second major battle that Chuck Norris lost? What are the machines that can give us questions (and lots of them)? Why not exerting a mental effort will make matters go from bad to worse? Who was the Jennifer Lawrence of Web 1.0? And what were my two greatest mistakes, which you should not duplicate?

I got tired of truly intellectual people like me speaking in riddles all the time and kinda lying to themselves and to others in their artworks, and hiding a lot of what they know, so I decided to put all the cards I have now on the table in a big tour-de-force. It's not finished yet, but still usable, and there's more to come. Not a perfect essay, and not for everyone, but imperfect and sweet.
There is an ongoing English translation of my old and incomplete story “The Pope Died on Sunday”.
Much more text has been added to Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (a Buffy parody) and it is now in a usable condition:

[ There are three young men dressed as Klingons who fight with Bat’leth in the park. Selina is passing by and shakes her head in disapproval. The three notice Selina, and quickly run to her. ]

Warrior #1: Hail The Slayer, we are but your humble slaves!

Selina: [Shocked] And who might you be?

Warrior #1: We are The Three - three vampire brother warriors, who have been fighting since the dawn of time.

Selina: And you are Klingons…

Warrior #2: We can assume any form.

Warrior #1: Yes, we can fight using any weapon, and we are masters of them all.

Selina: so you can fight with something that’s not a Bat’leth?

Warrior #1: Of course, for example, we could fight using the Huge Sword!

Warrior #2 and Warrior #3: Yeah, the Huge Sword!

The Three: [in unison] Huge Sword!

[ Warrior #1 snaps his fingers, and some of these ridiculously large swords from World of Warcraft appear on the ground. ]

Selina: Wow, can you fight using them?

The Three: [non-dramatically] Eh, eh, we cannot lift them.

Selina: Guess not. [Puts her palm on her eyes.] Maybe try something smaller and not as heavy.
In addition, there are many enhancements to the section of the page, including a page about who I think should play the characters in the screenplay, and an Ebook available for purchase.
There are two new pages with facts about people and things:
1. NSA Facts - about the United States’ National Security Agency:
  - The NSA knows what you did last summer. But no one, in the NSA or outside it, knows why they should.
  - The more the NSA think, the less they want to be able to think. So they think less and less.
  - First the NSA ignores “silly” Internet memes, then they laugh at them, then they are unable to fight them, and then they lose.
2. Facts about Buffy Summers from the Television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  - Buffy will always find a wooden stake to slay vampires, even if it means she will have travelled 100 years back in time, to plant a tree nearby.
Extra additions to these or other collections of facts would be welcome.
There's a mirrored bit Freecell Solver™ Goes Webscale.
I have placed Yachar’s old music from Jamendo.com on my homepage, because they appear to have been removed from Jamendo.
There’s a new page with a partial list of some of my favourite online musicians.
The Chuck Norris Facts page contains more facts and translations of some of the facts to Hebrew:
- Chuck Norris helps the gods that help themselves.
- Chuck Norris can make East and West meet.
There's a section of reception on the front page of the essay The Eternal Jew with a combined captioned image/meme.
I have placed the sources for the stories and screenplays in self-contained distributed version control repositories (DVCS) - mostly on my GitHub account, and they contain mostly self-contained build systems. You can find links to their repositories on their appropriate pages.

About Female Action Heroes

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:07:28 GMT

(Note: this was originally written as a comment for a post on the excellent Action Flick Chick blog by Katrina Hill, but was eaten by the WordPress.org instance there, so I decided to publish it here, after a lot of editing and enhancements.)

Excellent feature! I greatly enjoyed it (just note that I'm a guy) - thanks for sharing and I hope the panel was nice. I hope to see and welcome many talented and resourceful female writers and authors of sci-fi and action, who will collaborate to create part of the next generation of female heroines who are intelligent, resourceful, competent, and talented, yet still sexy, and feminine. Naturally, as a male writer (see the stories and screenplays section of my homepage), I am not going to stand idle and let my peers, whether male or female, surpass me easily, but I suppose that there's always a place for more people competing for that.

Buffy Summers was an awesome character, and I was totally into her and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was the superb actress and martial artist, who played her, back in the wild wild Web 1.0 days and the first seasons of Buffy (before Buffy graduated from high school and when Faith was still around). That was shortly after I graduated from high school, had lots of raging hormones, and worked in several workplaces as a programmer, and was about to start my college degree. I think Buffy was the “perfection achieved” (or epitome or whatever it is called) version of the fighting lady, whom girls could relate to, look up to as a role model, and found it easy to feel empathy for, and that not only were guys not intimidated by her, but found her extremely attractive.

Anyway, Buffy and other shows I watched in this period such as Friends and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, provided a lot of inspiration and fodder for my stories and screenplays, and I have also created a world titled the Selinaverse that crosses many such influences (what can I say - bipolar disorder / manic-depresssive disorder can be fun sometimes… ;-)) along with other things. Even my most normal story yet - The Human Hacking Field Guide, which tells the story of several high school teenagers in 2005 Los Angeles, who deal extensively in working on open source software (and to a lesser extent free/open “content”), drew inspiration from the characters of Buffy and Faith for the protagonist (Jennifer Raymond) and the antagonist (Eve “Erisa” Siegel) respectively.

I think part of the problem with the realisation of female heroines and even female authors, was the traditional Judeo-Christian Ethics value system which limited the amount of activities women were able to do to exclude philosophy, most important artworks, writing, poetry and being a scholar, the performing arts, and naturally - fighting. Furthermore, the names of most of the most important action heroines in the Bible were deemed inauspicious in the Jewish tradition (the Halakhah), only to become popular among Jews after the Zionist revolution. An action hero or a “hacker” (see the essay titled The Word “Hacker” by Paul Graham) is someone who bends the rules, makes up his or her own rules, takes decisive actions, and controls his or her own destiny, even if they are completely not violent. See what I have written about the David who fought Goliath. This is while a tragic hero accepts his own fate, is bound by many invisible rules, and does not take decisive action - the exact opposite of an action hero. (That put aside, I feel that in art, action heroes and heroines often also initially have hubris (= excessive human pride) and undergo a sort of Catharsis (= a humbling process), although it is a more subtle than the one experienced by tragic heroes in tragedies.)

In any case, I think there's some bitter justice in the fact that there have been several important Jewesses who championed the break from the Judeo-Christian ethical system:

Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Alisa Rosenbaum → Ayn Rand, who despite her many faults in personality and in her philosophical work, and the fact that she often fell victim to the falsehoods and moral fashions of her time, greatly helped lay the ground for the move away from the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics (and not just the sexual/romantic ones).

I was told that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was criticised for being not very “original”, but this kind of “originality” in copyright, having original ideas, patents, and even trade secrets (and what open source/open content/etc. like to call being “proprietary”), was a 20th century fad, and Rand still deserves credit for having a retro, but right-in-the-spotlight philosophy. I am well aware that Rand kinda professed to have supported this “originality/anti-open” philosophy in her works, but in her deeds, she was almost always “if you do not publish - you perish”, in the sense of making her opinions and thoughts known and given to the public consumption, even if she was criticised for them.
Marta Kauffman, who co-created the Television show Friends, which despite superficial appearances to the contrary, took a large part in championing an Aristotelian society, a positive sense-of-life, resourcefulness, passion for life, gender equality, and critical thought - including of many modernist and post-modern scientific beliefs.

P.S: you should watch the three episodes of the Parody: A Love Story (Twilight, Harry Potter, Karate Kid, and Buffy parody) video on YouTube, which sports a chubby girl, who seems unattractive at first, but ends up learning and doing some mean Karate in a typical Buffy-like hotness.

Anyway, thanks for the excellent write up and sorry for getting carried away.

Best regards,

— Mr. Shlomi Fish (a.k.a “Rindolf”) of Tel Aviv, Israel.

About Female Action Heroes

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:08:32 GMT

In any case, I think there's some bitter justice in the fact that there have been several important Jewesses who championed the break from the Judeo-Christian ethical system:

Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Alisa Rosenbaum → Ayn Rand, who despite her many faults in personality and in her philosophical work, and the fact that she often fell victim to the falsehoods and moral fashions of her time, greatly helped lay the ground for the move away from the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics (and not just the sexual/romantic ones).

I was told that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was criticised for being not very “original”, but this kind of “originality” in copyright, having original ideas, patents, and even trade secrets (and what open source/open content/etc. like to call being “proprietary”), was a 20th century fad, and Rand still deserves credit for having a retro, but right-in-the-spotlight philosophy. I am well aware that Rand kinda professed to have supported this “originality/anti-open” philosophy in her works, but in her deeds, she was almost always “if you do not publish - you perish”, in the sense of making her opinions and thoughts known and given to the public consumption, even if she was criticised for them.
Marta Kauffman, who co-created the Television show Friends, which despite superficial appearances to the contrary, took a large part in championing an Aristotelian society, a positive sense-of-life, resourcefulness, passion for life, gender equality, and critical thought - including of many modernist and post-modern scientific beliefs.

Anyway, thanks for the excellent write up and sorry for getting carried away.

Best regards,

— Mr. Shlomi Fish (a.k.a “Rindolf”) of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Advogato blog for shlomif

Blog Entry for my 36th Birthday

Blog Entry for my 36th Birthday

New Story: The Earth Angel; Soviet reversal jokes; new text in The Pope and in Selina Mandrake; “Put

Recent Hacktivity Log

“Every Publicity is Good Publicity…”

The Olamot Sci-Fi/Fantasy Conference

Work on Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (a Buffy Parody)

Buffy and Clarissa Facts

Summerschool at the NSA

“All Truth is God’s Truth”

XML-Grammar-Screenplay / XML-Grammar-Fiction

Freecell Solver

DocBook EPUB generation

Wiki-ing

Thanks

New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Summerschool at the NSA the screenplay + New Factoids

Freecell Solver Enterprises™ Acquires Google Inc.

“Publish or Perish” = “Life or Death”

Licence

New on Shlomi Fish’s Homepage: Selina Mandrake, NSA/Buffy/Chuck Norris facts, Yachar's Music

About Female Action Heroes

About Female Action Heroes

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