The forest at entrance to Jerusalem

Yesterday evening I was in a meeting, which will lead – if there is enough interest – to a creative writing workshop.
We were asked to write about an imaginary forest.

My version of imaginary forest was based upon the real forest at entrance to Jerusalem.

When driving on road No. 1 toward Jerusalem, after you survive the drop after Qastel and the Motza Illit junction, you leave the road for a road, which goes to Beit Zeit. There are buildings of Motza Tahtit, but you proceed toward Beit Zeit. The area is not well-developed forest. When you arrive near Beit Zeit, you take turn to the left, pass near the public swimming pool of Beit Zeit (or at least whatever remained of it).

You eventually do enter the forest and continue driving the narrow and one-way road toward one of the entrances of Jerusalem. You feel you would like to have the forest continue forever, or at least for considerable distance.

However…it ends after few Km, and there are rubble, trash and buildings on the sides of the road. The trees end as well.

Such a place makes me feel sad. There are not enough areas of nature around in this small part of the world.

Maybe once there are Dyson spheres, there will be enough room for wild nature together with much larger human population with all its civilization trappings.

Push toward excellent Hebrew support in OpenOffice 2.0!

I urge all users of Hebrew office software products (such as word processor, presentation editor, spreadsheet, etc.) to vote for higher priority of bugs, which harm the usability of OpenOffice for serious Hebrew word processing.

Details can be found at http://www.xslf.com/archives/000122.html

The process of registration to bugzilla of OpenOffice is amazingly easy, so is the process of voting for the bugs.
Spend 10 minutes now (some people claim it took them less than 3 minutes) and save lots of grief in the future thanks to not having to deal with closed source office software.

Flu

After few flu-free years, I got flu.
The damage so far is three postponed meetings.
My dreams have the kind of obsessive-compulsive quality which does not promote really relaxing sleep.
On the other hand, thanks to loss of appetite, my weight has been reduced a bit.

The Tsunami DIsaster – pointing out the need for pilotless cargo airplanes

Now, that adequate help was pledged for and actually provided to the countries stricken with the tsunami, the major bottleneck to prevention of further deaths and hardships is logistical.

Other disasters of similar magnitude, which happened during recent years, were localized in a relatively small region. So the logistical issue was not a significant factor. The tsunami disaster is affecting several communities all around the Indian Ocean. Several of those communities are in hard to reach geographical areas.

For example, in several places, the most important unavailable items, which stand between recovery and further deaths, are water purification tablets and medications against plagues.

This leads to the idea that to prepare for future disasters of this kind of geographical dispersion, rescue teams should equip themselves also with fleets of pilotless cargo airplanes. At time of need, those airplanes would be launched from a mother ship and carry their cargo to the far corners of the disaster area. They would then drop the cargo off and return to the ship. They would be equipped with GPS units and they would network with each other, so that they can autonomously spread over an area and distribute their cargo evenly over it. Each airplane would be capable of carrying 10Kg cargo and have range of 1000Km from the mother ship.

A fleet of 50,000 pilotless airplanes could have meant the difference between a minor logistical nuisance in the tsunami’s aftermath and a major headache for the rescue teams and the health systems of the countries involved.

Who is feeding my car's tires with screws?

Today I had to cancel a trip to outside of my city, because one of the tires in my car lost air after having been pumped full of air only two days ago.
I replaced it with the spare tire, even though my next planned car drive is only tomorrow, to the local tire repair shop. This was because at this rate of air loss, the radial tire would probably be damaged by tomorrow in the morning.

Upon examination, I found that a screw got stuck in the tire. It makes a hole and blocks it, so there is no immediate air loss.

Few days ago I had another tire damaged by screw, and it was repaired. But I didn’t ask the tire repair shop to inspect all four tires for more screw poisoning.

Both tires were on left side of my car. I wonder in which parking location, during the last several days, did the tires get poisoned by screw diet.

The upside of the episode is that I got to practice tire replacement under relatively benign conditions – car parked near my home, nothing urgent to do (besides the canceled trip), it did not rain at the moment, it happened during daytime (one of my lesser nightmares is having to replace a tire at night, during heavy rain and on way to a party).

A Big Dilemma and its Resolution

I am satisfied with the decision, which I made.

Exactly a week ago I saw, in http://www.whatsup.co.il/, an announcement about a “Business models of Linux and Open Code” track to be held as part of the Go-Linux Q4-2004 conference to be held on Wednesday Dec. 22, 2004.

At this time, this subject is very dear(sic) to me. So I decided I want to participate in the aforementioned track. I registered for the free conference.

I needed to book a Sign Language interpreter or a notetaker to make the conference accessible to me. The service, which provides them to deaf persons, needs at least one week advance notification to be able to find a free interpreter or notetaker. I needed to know the exact hours of the track to be able to book someone for those hours. So I made inquiries. The administrative organizers (People&Computers) were not so cooperative. The technical organizer, whom I contacted (Eli Marmor from netmask.it), was very cooperative.

After troubles, tribulations, cancellations, and cancellation of cancellations, I sent an E-mail message to the organizers announcing that I am canceling my registration. Immediately I got the conference schedule and could at last book someone exactly for the hours which I needed. However, this happened two days before the conference itself.

The service was not successful in finding me a free interpreter or notetaker by the conference time.

Now I had a dilemma: to go there anyway, enjoy only partial accessibility, and at least get some useful information; or to boycott it altogether and forfeit the chances.

After long thought, I decided to give it a chance and to go there anyway.
I also notified the service my plans and that if someone else cancels his Sign Language interpreting assignment, they may send the interpreter to me even at the last minute. I brought a laptop with me just in case a notetaker shows up due to cancellation elsewhere.

No such miracle happened.

I arrived today at 14:00, as planned, because I was interested only in the afternoon lectures. Eli Marmor’s lecture was worth the time, thanks to its having been partially accessible (he lectured with a fairly detailed presentation). It was worthwhile for me to go there for the lecture. I stayed on for the next two lectures, which were accompanied by presentations as well.

Only when the final speaker, Dr. Yossi Vardi, who is a popular speaker in the Israeli Hi-Tech scene, started to speak, did I stand up and leave the conference. He gives lectures without presentations.

Accessibility

The lectures were fully accessible to hard-of-hearing people: the lecturers carried on their person a microphone connected to a small transmitter, which transmits the speech to receivers possessed by hard-of-hearing people in the hall. This was thanks to an hard-of-hearing participant (whom I know) in the conference. He arranged for the lectures to be accessible according to his needs. His job was simpler because all he needed was to bring equipment and get cooperation from the organizers and lecturers. I had to locate a warm body with functioning hands (for either signing or typing).

The accessibility needs of deaf people are different from those needed by hard-of-hearing people.

In an utopia, conference organizers would ask the participants if they need any special accommodations. If yes, the organizers also organize the needed accommodations. According to my experience with Israeli conferences, the formula which works is that the participant with special needs arranges his own accommodations, and the conference organizers do not stand in the way and fulfill small&simple requests.

My problem with the Go-Linux conference accessibility was that I was not given the maximum possible time (a bit less than a week, under the circumstances) for arranging my own accessibility accommodations.

Maybe, if I yelled that this is an emergency for me, I’d get someone. But it would not have been fair for those deaf persons, who have a real emergency (medical or legal).

Sunbathing, vitamin D and calcium

Warning: this entry reveals my shamefully ripe old age.

After buying calcium-rich milk, I talked with a co-worker about bones, calcium and vitamin D.
He was flabbergasted when I told him that one of the sources of vitamin D is sunbathing, and that when I was child, people extolled the healthy virtues of sunbathing.

Apparently, doctors stopped recommending sunbathing once the food available to all became richer, richer also in vitamin D. So it was not necessary to sunbathe anymore for the vitamin and expose oneself to skin cancer risk in the process.

Or…he faked being flabbergasted (more probable).

The brave new business buzzwords

Eric Sink (blog at http://software.ericsink.com/) wrote about Micro-ISVs – one-man companies which develop software. His articles are: Exploring Micro-ISVs and First Report from My Micro-ISV.

Some enterprising souls started a special Web site for Micro-ISVs at http://www.microisv.com/.

I wonder how many months will elapse before we are swamped by Web sites, courses, seminars, How-to-do books and other merchandise about Micro-ISVs and Micro-business in general.

KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken)

When I was adolescent in USA (not the usual cliche from 2nd rate TV series, only because we spoke Hebrew at home, and I had the unpopular – for the era – hobby of computer programming), one of my favorites was Kentucky Fried Chicken, which advertised its presence with the rotating container showing the Colonel’s head in full glory.

The franchise entered Israel several years ago, but was not as successful as McDonald’s and did not suffer as much disgraceful failure as Wendy’s or Starbucks (or Planet Hollywood). When the geography was right (i.e. they were on my way between home and where I worked at the time), I ate there once in a while.

As my commuting patterns shifted, I did not eat their fried chicken for long time.

Today in the evening I decided to look for a good sushi bar in Ibn Gvirol Ave., but did not find one (the one which I did not look for disappointed me some time ago). Because a container with picture of none other than The Colonel’s head revealed itself to me.

Turns out that they opened a restaurant in London Ministore.
So I ate there.
The service was courteous, and the man in charge (?) asked me later, waitress-style, if all is OK.
With the menu I was less impressed. I was used to the standard menu of six wings with French Fries and diet Coke.

But the exact menu was not available. I took the closest choice (“teruf No. 7”), which consisted of all the above, plus salad (the alternatives were beans and puree). I did not care in particular for the salad.

It looks like the franchise was allowed to try to do things a little differently and look for the formula of success in Israel, which eluded them so far.

The chicken had the usual KFC-Israel taste.

Once upon a time, there was a prime minister with sense of humor

http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eshkol/

I do not remember seeing a Web site in memory of anyone, who is not professional comedian, in which every page of information is accompanied by few jokes by, or about, that person.

And to think that the person in question had a lot of serious accomplishments as one of the leaders of Israel, it is mind-boggling!