Sruli's blog

A new feature on my blog: Excerpts from my emails. This one comes from something I sent my boss today: Oh, and one more thing: The pepper in our kitchen is basically ground pepper. In chunks. If you ever try to sprinkle it on something cold (i.e. that you’'re not cooking), in order to taste the pepper you have to bite into a chunk of pepper, which isn’t a pleasant experience. A better solution (or perhaps an additional solution) would be to get pepper in powdered form. This allows sprinkling of the condiment onto cold foods and having the flavor imbued into the food without necessitating masticating a large chunk of pepper. There. Now you know I take my work seriously. Hmm, maybe I'll start another blog and call it Excerpts from the Outbox . Hey, it's a thought.

The kids are going back to school after a long summer. Early on there was some camp, but later on things dragged a bit. I guess Leah's blog will have more about that. But she's back at the dorm (and we miss her) now. Batya (does she still spell it with an "h"?) came and went off to school. Dani came and went off to school. And Ari is here as well. Yechiel will be coming back next week, and hopefully he'll have a Linksys signal booster and a USB 802.11b adaptor for me. It's for the new computer in the mamad (i.e. "protected" room). Oh, didn't I mention that? On one of my trips overseas, the laptop in the mamad went bad. The screen flickered badly. Later I borrowed a large (beautiful) Dell LCD monitor from the office and attached it to the laptop. It worked, but the positioning of the keyboard was problematic, because we didn't have a keyboard in the house that would fit the laptop, which only has USB ports. Later at some point ...

I'm posting this while on the bus to Givat Shaul, so it'll probably be short. Last night we splurged a little and went to the Monte Carlo Circus, which is visiting Bet Shemesh. It was great! Okay, it wasn't a three ring circus, but the acts were fun to watch, and if some weren't perfectly polished, that only added to the charm. We were highly entertained, and a good time was had by all. My personal favorites: poodle act tumblers/acrobats (including a clown who did double duty) a visually beautiful 'spider vs. butterfly' act done with black light, great costumes, etc. Other highlights included of course clowns, jugglers, horses, magic tricks, balancing poles and more. No high wire or trapeze, of course, but it wasn't really missed. Definitely worth the splurge and better than a movie any day of the week. Plus it was local! No pics posted yet, because I didn't have a chance to hotsync the treo. Maybe I'll do some, and...

...if I didn't have a camera on my phone, I wouldn't have been able to capture this! I saw this while I was crossing the street on my way back to the hotel in Miami.

I’m back.  And walking to work from the bus stop, I finally had a few moments to gather some thoughts.  I won’t put them down here, except that I was smiling all through the walk here.  I’m glad to be home.

I decided to read the blog of a friend. He writes actual content! And gets comments and everything! What a concept. On there I found links to other blogs. With real content. People actually read them, contribute, discuss... so that's what blogs are for! I guess I need a "blog mission statement" here so I won't feel so bad about the non-content of my blog. This is totally off-the-cuff, so here goes: The purpose of this blog is to let me ramble meaninglessly with no regard to the value of the content, if any. If you're reading this blog and you're not me, you have been warned. I am writing this so I can keep a personal journal of feelings and events as I see fit, with no other express or implied purpose. I reserve the right to modify this mission statement any time I please. In my head or online, as I choose. I'll probably keep private stuff out of here. If I ever have anything real to say, I'll probably start another blog and keep thi...

Yep, this is it. I get one more day to work on this report and possibly other stuff, then I am outta here and back home for the weekend. Not sure when the next trip will be. Holiday season coming up, and anyway it may not be necessary to come back soon from the reports angle. I may be able to do that sort of thing by phone and IM. The job I'm doing with Gilberto might require more time here, however. While it's not impossible to do from home, I don't feel like I'm prepared for that end of the job. This is mostly because when I got here the whole place was very involved in an August 12th release deadline and the important people couldn't really focus on me. Not really surprising; the company does stuff to make money, after all. But the lack of progress in that area contributed heavily to my "frustrated" post the other day. I'm going to try to make today count as much as possible, of course.

So here I sit, waiting for a ride back to Miami Beach... I should have been more careful about my ride arrangements. Anyway, today I: * started working on a report * was told I'd be working on a different report * backed away from the different report * continued working on the original (which involved converting a query from one schema to another, most of which I am still gaining familiarity with, no comments from the peanut gallery about prepositions, I'm tired) * was yanked from doing the report to work on an "urgent" piece of code that, in a few weeks will be easy as pie but today I have no clue as to how to even approach * shuttled between trying to get back to the query while waiting for two different very very busy people to help me on the code (with two different approaches to the problem!) Are we having fun yet? I've been promised tomorrow will be better. I sure hope it is!

As I sit here in downtown Miami, I'm anticipating getting a ride to Tom and Leslie for the Shabbos. I can't recall having ever met their kids, though one of them will be away anyway for the weekend - apparently I am getting his room. I've brought with me a duffel bag with clothes - some clean, some dirty for the weekend and for the washing machine respectively. Rollie made noises about possibly getting together either together with Tom & Leslie or possibly separately on Sunday. We'll see. I'm hoping for some relax time too. I also need to find a way to resolve how the stuff I've had delivered to Izzy in NY is going to make its way to me - and time is running out. Work related, I have now been assigned two reports to look at. Of course, I didn't get the prerequisite software installed on my machine until pretty late Friday, so it'll have to wait until Monday morning for me to start digging into it. But it doesn't look like I'm...

Wow, becoming a real world traveller, in an extremely limited sort of way. The guys here all think Delta Skymiles is the best to join, so that's what I am doing. Some of my travel is credited automatically, some not, so I have to save my boarding passes. I think you need a special training course to understand frequent flyer miles. Anyway, I'm here again, and this time I am in the mirror image room in the same hotel I was in last time.