Sruli's blog

Wow, what an interesting experience at Hadassah Har Hatzofim yesterday. As I reported earlier, we are trying to get Akiva accepted into the clinical trial of a new kind of back brace for his scoliosis. Yesterday we went through the beginnning stages of the process. I'm told Akiva will need a CT scan of two portions of the spine so as to measure the exact angle of the rotation of the apex. This is milder than the usual CT scan for this kind of thing, because it only focuses on two small spots, so he gets exposed to less radiation. He'll also need a similar scan at the end of the program for documentation purposes. One of the many things we were told by the doctor in charge of the program was that if Akiva's angle gets even 5% worse, we get booted from the program and he has to start wearing a conventional brace. Even though it's not uncommon for rotation to increase by 5% on even a conventional brace, they're not taking any chances. Fitting the brace The guy in ...

I guess I'm sure to update this once in a while because sometimes I forget to bring a book with me on the bus. That doesn't mean nothing ever happens, just that when things *do* happen I am usually too busy to take note of them here and by the time things calm down enough I don't remember (or care?) enough to blog them. Actually I have more to say now that I am here, but it deserves a separate entry. Meanwhile the search goes on for an affordable but useful digital camera for Leah and ditto MP3 player for Akiva. I have leads on both, let's see what develops. And my nephew still hasn't managed to visit, so I still can't comment on the Linksys wireless access signal booster as I had hoped to. I met with a potential new client for web hosting. He's going to need a small site but a big database and a nice chunk of bandwidth. I'm going to have to develop a special package for him but it's probably worth it for exposure. Business has been slow, and it ...

I really should update this thing once in a while or give it up altogether. But b"H life has been busy. Between the 9-5 and the evening/other work, plus a family life, things are kind of crowded. I know, excuses, excuses. But the other factor is that honestly, other than work and day-to-day living, not a lot has been happening. I've been getting settled in to the (still) new 9-5 (hah) job. I've been making long term plans to make life easier for Tzirel when she takes over more of the other business. Both are sort of fun. In my day job, I'm starting to see how I will fit in long term. Rather than being involved at this point in new development, I'm more on the operations/client side, responsible for cleaning up mistakes made, whether by us or by the clients, gathering information for reporting to the client, and in general being responsive to short term requests. The whole thing is kind of exciting. I can see where I will be an important part of the team as...

Well, the hurricane means we can't connect to the VPN in Florida today. Or probably tomorrow, for that matter. Let's hope that I can be productive here via locally copied data and schema which may be a bit out of date. I brought my own pepper shaker today! Yay! Oh, and by the way: the XP SP2 installation doesn't seem to have hosed my home PC. The downstairs PC and my PC now have it. Interestingly, the service pack seems to have installed some kind of firewall on the as yet defenseless downstairs PC, and complained that it doesn't have a virus scanner. On my desk upstairs, it seems to know that I have Zone Alarm Pro and PC-Cillin, and it's leaving me alone.

I've decided to load XP SP2... here goes nothing.

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.

It's been busy, so I've been neglecting my poor blog. And the machine I'm working on is so fast that compiles don't take long enough to make a real blog entry. Still, a blog is worthless without the occasional contribution, so I'll try. Important stuff: I got a job doing C# and VB.NET. Wow, now maybe I'll be able to pay my mortgage! What a concept. I'm training Tzirel to do the web hosting, but I'm spending plenty of time on that after hours until she can get up to speed. Still haven't swapped out sneezy, may have to postpone that. But it self-rebooted again, which is a good thing. I've visited the USA twice recently and will probably go again soon. Once for Tani's bar mitzvah (he knocked 'em dead) and once for the job. Next will again be for the job. I've got some more pictures to post, will catch up on that when I can. I will have to learn to post here from the Treo 600 one of these days, pictur...

Well, my DTA is working after about two days of being "broken". Turned out it was on their end after all. While trying to figure out how to migrate "client B" from below from sneezy to bashful (dopey isn't online yet) I remembered that the new Redhat Enterprise Linux (and I think Fedora too) doesn't support user names with dots in them, so for example sruli.the.grate@alsonetworks.com wouldn't be allowed. Sneezy is my last Redhat 7.3 box, so all clients with those kinds of addresses are on that box. Eventually I found a patched RPM here... http://ftp.pslib.cz/pub/users/Milan.Kerslager/RHEL-3/RPMS/ ...that solves this. Who knows what it means for future upgrades? Why would Redhat disable this? So many people use the format first_name.last_name@mydomain.com as an email address! Gonna move the client as soon as I have tested. In the mean time there was a 15 minute period of down time on sneezy AGAIN today. Phooey. Tzirel got to do th...

This day was a contender for one of the most stress filled days in a long while, starting in the morning when I needed to go visit Stuie's house, about an hour away. I checked my servers. They're running fine. Armed with cell phone (for SMS messages just in case), Tzirel and I set out. About 10 minutes away from the bus station, a phone call comes in to my cell phone... sneezy is down. Usual checks, yep, it's really down. :-(. Not again... well, I'll check in to the Internet Cafe in the station in a couple of minutes. I bought an hour's worth of time, and they had a promotion available for a free 30 minutes (today only). I used that. Got the DC to reboot. Client says "it's up, thanks... but BTW, you should know that client B spoke to me and he's REALLY unhappy". He's right to be, too. I called, tried some damage control. In the short term he'll let me deal with it, but not sure about middle term or long term anymore. Wha...

She's sleeping now, but she brought home lots of stuff, including Dunkin Donuts :-). It's good to have her home. I let her sleep in this morning (of course) and got the kids off to school.

Volume 1 of The Dreamers , remember?   More of the same stuff.  Story somewhat different, though many of the same elements.  Because it's Eddings, the characters are easy to get to know (in fact, you sort of know them already) and the story is an easy read.  But because it's Eddings, you've seen it all before.  It worked great the first time, and okay the second time, but they should really come up with new characters.  Leah and I were talking about this last night and offhand we were able to come up with several "favorite" authors who wrote new, interesting characters  every time that were easy to tell apart.  Here you're saying to yourself, "hey, that's something Silk would do" or "she sounds just like Polgara there" or "sure, just like Belar".  Oh, and there are at least two powerful, magic jewels in this one.  That's new, at least.  Oh, wait, it isn't.   You can skip this one and you won't ...