(English translation follows)

And here is the English translation:

(This letter is intended to the Prime Minister, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and to the Minister of Internal Security, Mr. Yitzhak Aharonovich).

Dear Sirs,

I sent this letter to you on the 4th of December [should be September], and I did not get a reply - not even an automated one. Since it was close to the Jewish holidays season, then I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and hope you will reply to me this time. I whould be thankful if you can acknowledge that you have received this message.

Moreover, one should note that it is an open letter that is going to be publicised on my weblog.

My name is Shlomi Fish, and I am a software developer, open source and content activist, and writer of articles, essays and humorous stories. For a long time, I am sure that Israel (like the other countries of the world) is making a mistake in the fact that it enforces a prohibition on illegal narcotics (such as Marijuana, Hash, Cocaine, and Heroin). While I never touched these drugs, and I do not encourage their consumption, I believe that the prohibition on drugs is much worse than the "Drug Abuse Problem" itself, and even amplifies it.

In order to convince you, I am attaching an essay I wrote called "The Case for Drug Legalisation", in HTML and PDF formats. (In order to prevent the waste of paper, please don't print it.) One can find this essay in English and in Hebrew on my Internet home-site in the address:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/politics/drug-legalisation/

I will be happy to hear any comments you have on the essay. Please return to me with your opinion on my suggestion to make drugs in Israel, legal.

Best regards,

-- Shlomi Fish

---

I sent this message on 18-October-2009 (two weeks ago), and did not get a reply, an acknowledgement or a automated response. It is very unlikely that it would have been discarded as spam. How much longer do you think I should wait?

This is transcript of an MSN Messenger talk between peachuk and me.

Shlomi Fish: I did buy Shania Twain's Greatest Hits CD and liked most of the songs there.

Shlomi Fish: I also like many songs by Atomic Kitten.

Peach: now that's the sort of thing my mother would like !

Shlomi Fish: Including some that I discovered on YT.

Peach: Atomic Kitten - they have been and gone !

Shlomi Fish: Yes.

Shlomi Fish: Don't know what happened to their pieces.

Shlomi Fish: The Spice Girls are also mostly gone.

Shlomi Fish: Though they sometimes merge to produce another song.

Shlomi Fish: We have some temporary unites in Israel too.

Shlomi Fish: Kaverth keeps making performances.

Shlomi Fish: They were known in Europe as Poggy [actually Poogy] or something.

Peach: I've not heard of them

Shlomi Fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaveret

Peach: I know the ex Kittens all have solo careers now

Peach: mid 1970s ! No wonder I don't know them !

Shlomi Fish: Ah.

Peach: Girls Aloud are the new Spice Girls

Shlomi Fish: Yes.

Shlomi Fish: They're pretty good.

Shlomi Fish: What about the Saturdays?

Shlomi Fish: I don't like the Saturdays too much.

Peach: yes, they are the new Girls Aloud!

Shlomi Fish: Heh.

Shlomi Fish: Can I quote you on that?

Peach: of course !

Peach: Cheryl (from Girls Aloud) has a new song out (link to YouTube) - it's very catchy and played all the time here - sexy video too

Shlomi Fish: Seems nice.

And a recommendation for a film - the other day my mum and I saw Hearts in Atlantis on T.V. (also see its Wikipedia page). It is a drama with some fantastical elements, and an unexpected plot. My mother and I greatly enjoyed it, and we can recommend it.

Remarkable Customer Support as it applies to voluntary projects

One of my favourite Joel on Software articles is "Seven steps to remarkable customer service". While the article is oriented towards software shops it has universal implications. Quoting from the article:

Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literally—the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark.

Today I'd like to write about providing remarkable online help on the various online forums of Perl. Online help is similar to customer support, only we don't charge for it, and it is done by volunteers. Nevertheless, we do have an interest to provide good online help, because otherwise we will get fewer people who use our project. They are still our users/customers even if they don't pay us.

So let's start.

How not to lose a single soul.

One day (which happened to be my birthday) I chatted on Freenode #perl when someone with the nickname of sas123 joined and said he couldn't understand references. We naturally referred him to perlreftut, but even after reading it, he said he did not understand. Some of the channel regulars said that perlreftut was written well enough that he must have been able to understand. However, I recalled a a Hackers-IL thread called "Smoking out pointer-impaired minds?" where we discussed why understanding pointers or references is hard, and why many people will have trouble understanding pointers at first.

As a result, I invited him to #perlcafe, and we held a long discussion about what Perl references were. And he eventually was able to understand them. Such extraordinary willingness to help is something that people will remark upon and recommend to their friends. I do not think this discussion should have stayed on #perl because it would have reduced the Signal-to-Noise ratio and prevent other people from getting help (and it did take a long time). However, I think the #perl participants should have told sas123 that they will help him on a different channel right away instead of telling him that he's beyond hope.

Communities around FOSS projects should try to avoid losing even one newcomer. That's because people who've been disappointed by bad social treatment will rant about it to their friends, vent about it in their blogs, or worse. And naturally, several individual people add up to a lot pretty quickly.

I still recall an incident, where someone joined #vim, said he's been using GNU Emacs or XEmacs for many years, and that because the people on #emacs have insulted him and treated him badly shortly before, he decided to switch wholesale to the alternative - Vim. When I suggested that he could use a Vim add-on, that could make it behave more like Emacs, in order to ease the transition, he did not want to use it saying that he'd rather do the conversion properly.

So the Emacs people lost a long-time user, who opted to painfully re-train himself to use something completely different, losing years of habit and customisations. As members of the Perl community (for example) it is much more likely that we will lose a new member who can easily choose Python, PHP, Ruby, Lua or whatever. So we need to provide a remarkable online help to keep them.

It's not new.

Other people inside and outside Perl have been echoing similar concerns. See for example what Andy Lester wrote about "Don't optimize for yourself in communities" on Perlbuzz, and the Kirrily Robert's "Geek Etiquette" blog.

A tougher nut to crack.

A few months ago #perl on Freenode was frequented by a certain newbie who needed to use Perl for her site about role-playing games. She needed too much hand-holding and often made many steps backwards and as a result one of the ops has eventually banned her. One day, when I was on Freenode, she private messaged me and explained the problem, and I invited her to #perlcafe or #perl-cats to ask her questions and get help with her code there.

Now we help her at #perlcafe . She still requires a lot of hand-holding, often won't immediately understand why the advice we give her is good, and is often too much utilitarian and not focused enough in her quest for Perl knowledge. But she still seems to make some progress, and we now consider #perlcafe as an "incubator" for her (with all the Science Fiction implications) that will make her ready for public consumption on #perl.

Should her training stay on #perl? Naturally not. But, on the other hand, she still should not have been banned, and instead a few people should have volunteered to help her on a different channel.

How to do it.

The old adage of "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" applies to human communications as well. On help forums, we can expect many people who are tactless, non-native speakers of English, who may incorporate many paradigms from their native tongues or from popular Anglophone culture, with relatively bad English, in a bad mood, not very knowledgeable or clueful, with personality defects, and/or who have not read the FAQ or the needed documentation. On the other hand, we should always be friendly, polite, with the best English that we can emit, and being as helpful, accessible and non-laconic as we humanly can.

As annoying "clueless" newbies can be, they still can and often do improve and they are still human. And being hostile to them can have a snowball effect. By being courteous and helpful to newcomers, we can also further educate them on how to behave in our own or other on-line communities which will in turn make the long-term experience better.

As a pragmatist, I dislike what I call the "grand disciplinary" approaches, which say that people should have a lot of discipline to maintain a certain state. These things almost never work. I much prefer the more practical approaches of doing small and one time things like changing the channel's topic or trying to do it a few times, which ends up turning it into a habit.

Building a friendly and helpful environment is not that hard, and we can make a better one by several incremental steps. And it is worth it.

Some final notes.

A final note: I may have focused on Perl and Freenode's #perl here, I only did it because Perl is my area of expertise and because I'm an active member of Freenode's #perl ("The poor of your city come first", etc.). However, I think that #perl on Freenode is generally a great resource for beginners and experts, and I've seen much nastier IRC channels and Internet forums in general, including on Freenode. So don't take me the wrong way - all I'm saying is that there's still room for improvement.

Thanks to Andy Lester, Trashlord and Rick for giving some input and corrections about early versions of this article.

I took a walk in the neigbourhood on 3 September, 2009 with a camera, and took some photos and uploaded them to Flickr. The good ones are available with high-resolution, 4000*3000 images under the CC0/public domain

Aside from that, I've started working on a section of my homepage containing some graphic designs for slogans I've came up with, which are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) licence

Enjoy!

As has been the tradition on this blog for a few years, I'm spending part of Yom Kippur reading my blog posts from the past year. Yesterday's evening I read the blog entries since last year's summary and tried to draw some conclusion. This year, I didn't blog a lot on my non-technical blog (this one), and on the other hand blogged a lot on technical blog. I also published quite a lot of photos on Flickr.

I mostly worked on Perl packages this year, but also on Perl-Begin, where I collaborated with Alan Haggai Alavi. Moreover, I continued to work on Freecell Solver and related sites.

I published several new essays this year, and also worked on my homepage's humour section. Two of my web-site's features hit Slashdot this year - the "Mastering cat" April Fool's feature (which some people thought was serious), and Open Source Licences Wars. The web-site and server survived both of them. :-) Several other features were featured on OSNews.com and other news sites.

This year I accepted a for-pay project for an Israeli project, but had to cancel it because I got into a Hypomania (below-mania). This was of no fault of the people I worked with, who were great, or the project I worked which was very interesting, but rather of my psycho-medical condition. I should note that in order to maintain good faith, I did not demand any money for the project, gave them all the code and documentation I worked on up to then, and agreed to provide support for it to those who will replace me.

In any case, I decided that I should take some time-off to do some Cognitive behavioural therapy work on myself, to try and make a living (possibly small at first) from software development and from writing, and to relax.

This year, I sometimes got irritated at the computer for not working. I eventually was able to resolve most of these problems, but I should expect that, due to the fact that I'm working on Mandriva Cooker which is a development distribution. I hope to avoid it this year.

I got into several Internet-related disputes this year, but as a general rule, I've been doing OK. I also feel that I've matured in the sense that many things that once scared me or irritated me, no longer do.

So it's been a pretty good year for me. Gmar Hatimah Tovah, everybody.

I once skimmed through a blog post by a Ruby enthusiast, where I thought he meant that popular art was somehow inferior to more obscure one. I told him that writing good popular music was probably more difficult because it had to appeal to a larger audience, and he said that he realised that. Then I suggested that he should clarify it in the article, and that he should "be a bit more verbose". He said he didn't like it and said that "I don't think being more verbose is ever the solution in essay writing".

I'm not sure I had a ready answer then, but I think I do now. What I'm trying to say is that verbosity is not necessarily bad, but that it can be good sometimes.

As technical writers, we probably have been trained to believe that verbosity is inherently evil. I still recall Pascal's famous quote that said "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.". While it is true that it takes some effort to write essays concisely, I still think one should still make sure to cover all points, and sometimes be a little verbose, so the readers won't get the wrong idea.

While we can summarise many long essays in very little text, we would still find it impossible to summarise something like the English Wikipedia in say, 1,000 words. Our world is complex, and we often need a lot of data to accurately describe it. So if we want to accurately convey a given set of facts or opinions, we will require a certain minimum amount of words to convey it.

Furthermore, sometimes, as writers we will sometimes need to spend some words in conveying relatively extraneous things so our readers won't reach the wrong conclusions.

There is a word for brevity that is bad: "terseness" (as opposed to "conciseness" or "succinctness" which are generally consider to be virtuous). I think there should also be a word for good verbosity - maybe "comprehensiveness", "clarity" or "completeness").

Is it also true for source code? Definitely. For example, Joel Spolsky says in "Seven steps to remarkable customer service" that "Sometimes that means adding more intelligence to the software or the SETUP program; by now, our SETUP program is loaded with special case checks.". All these "special case checks" require more code, but they are needed to make the user experience better. A program that does a lot will require more code (given a certain implementation programming language and its accessible APIs), than a program that does very little. So we can expect that if we want our code to be functional and user-friendly, that it will need to be longer and take more time to write than a program that does very little such as the "Hello, World!" program.

So to sum up, sometimes one needs to write more, and there is no need to be afraid of writing more. Sometimes these extra words will be beneficial, and you would not need to remove them.

(English translation follows)

Now in English:

(This letter is intended to the Prime Minister, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Internal Security, Mr. Yitzhak Aharonovich)

Dear Sirs,

My name is Shlomi Fish, and I am a software developer, open source and content activist, and writer of articles, essays and humorous stories. For a long time, I am sure that Israel (like the other countries of the world) is making a mistake in the fact that it enforces a prohibition on illegal narcotics (such as Marijuana, Hash, Cocaine, and Heroin). While I never touched these drugs, and I do not encourage their consumption, I believe that the prohibition on drugs is much worse than the "Drug Abuse Problem" itself, and even amplifies it.

In order to convince you, I', attaching an essay I wrote called "The Case for Drug Legalisation", in HTML and PDF formats. (In order to prevent the waste of paper, please don't print it.) One can find this essay in English and in Hebrew on my Internet home-site in the address:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/politics/drug-legalisation/

I will be happy to hear any comments you have on the essay. Please return to me with your opinion on my suggestion to make drugs in Israel, legal.

Best regards,

-- Shlomi Fish

In this open letter I'm trying to make a humble start for some political activism. I'll blog about any responses I get.

I finally uploaded all the photos from a walk I took in March to a field near my neighbourhood to my Flickr account. They include high-resolution, 3072*2304 versions for your downloading pleasure. Best of all, they are public domain. Share , re-use and enjoy!

The reason I delayed so much was because KFlickr broke, and I didn't have the tuits to fix it and couldn't find anything usable enough. I even started working on my own alternative Flickr uploading (which I wanted to call UperLoadr). Eventually, however, the most criticial Flickr bug has been fixed, and I was able to use it to upload it there.

I now suspect that part of the reason why I'm not receiving too many comments is because I haven't send them to too many Flickr groups. So I'll probably join more and submit some of my relevant photos there.

I'm also sorry for neglecting this blog in a while. Hopefully, I'll have interesting things to blog about in the future. If all else fails you can try my Plurk account.

I spotted the song "Things Will Grow" by the Sweethearts of the Rodeo (which I really like) on Amazon.com. The price was reasonable and it was an MP3 that was promised to be "playable on iPod and all MP3 players". I decided to buy it, but after I pressed the "Buy MP3" link, I got to this "We are sorry…" page informing me that:

We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

WTF? Do they really not want my money? And the ironic thing is that I can watch (and listen) to the video of the track without limits on Yahoo Music.

Do I really have to ask an American resident to buy this song for me, and upload it to a server where I can download it from, and then compensate them? Why can't I, as a non-American resident buy mp3s from Amazon right away?

buu from Freenode's #perl had this explanation: "Silly copyright cartels being silly." Silly indeed.

Two days ago I had an eventful day. During the second walk I took that day (in the afternoon), there was a car that passed through the roundabout at a big speed, shortly after I crossed the road there. Then, at the park with the many cats in it, there was this woman who found a lost kitten. She held him in her hand and said he had many fleas. Nearby, there was also the corpse of a dead cat, which I had seen in earlier days, and we also discused it. This woman was not from the neighbourhood and was looking for the lady who was feeding the cats.

Anyway, there was little I could do and so I walked away, and on the way back, in a different park I saw a pretty girl walking in the opposite direction from me.

Later that day, I decided to go biking, and this time took my longer ride through "Park Hayarkon". There were many people on the streets which was expected of a holiday. When I passed through the southern end of Tel Aviv university, I saw the grey-and-white cat (which I told this blog about earlier) sitting on the fence, and stopped by. It was in a friendly mood and I was able to pet it, and it even rubbed my foot.

When I returned home, I bathed and ate and was in a good mood, then I decided to finally get to the task of forward-porting my Amarok per-song-volume script to Amarok 2.x. This took a lot of trial and error and took me the rest of the evening, but I now have it written and it works nicely. Hopefully, I'll tell more about it in my tech-blog.

Recently, a prominent use.perl.org blogger (and a Perl contributor) started posting many political posts to his blog, which I found annoying and disturbing. After commenting to him about it, it started a conversation and I ended up writing a comment about the importance of meeting your blog reader's expectations. I'd like to copy it here:

You say you only want to have one blog where you'll post about everything, including political posts. In that case, let me tell you a story from my own experience.

I used to have only one blog - first at Advogato and then at LiveJournal. I posted everything I wanted there whether technical or non-technical. At one point I received some important input in which that particular reader said that they were not interested in my technical posts (like vim tips, Linux bugs, etc.), and would rather have them separated. I commented (later in the link) that I agreed, and so started a separate blog for technical matters. I also mention (in the previous link) the fact that a blog I used to read and enjoy deteriorated after its owner became a mother, and started posting exclusively about her motherhood experiences. As a result, I unsubscribed from that blog's feed.

This separation of my blogs proved fruitful afterwards, because several planets have opted to syndicate only the technical blogs (or in the case of Perlsphere, only the Perl subset of them).

Moreover, when I discussed blogging with a certain famous blogger, he said that he reached the conclusion that specialisation of blogs was the key to success, and that people will only subscribe to blogs that concentrate on topics that interest them.

My point is that in blogging, you need to meet your readers' expectations. I am subscribed to the feed of all of use.perl.org's blog entries, because I'm interested in reading what Perl enthusiasts say. I don't mind the personal posts (or otherwise posts that are tangential to Perl) but I find political posts disturbing and annoying and would rather not read them.

So far your blog has received no special treatment as I read it along with all the rest of the posts. But if you don't guarantee that you're not going to post political posts here anymore, I will filter it out, and stop reading everything you have to say, including the Perl-related, and other non-political posts. So you'll lose me as a reader and possibly some other people who will opt not to read your blog.

It's your blog and you can post what you want to it, but I hope you understand that your subscribers may opt out of it, if they feel your blog no longer meets their expectations.

I received quite a lot of heat in that discussion, in what seemed to me like an innocent intention on my part to warn someone of an unpleasant trend in their blog, before I unsubscribe. Eventually, he didn't take my advice, and as a result, I wrote a script to filter posts from use.perl.org based on the author and am now filtering out his posts from the feed I'm reading.

I unsubscribed from some blogs that started not to meet my expectations before, but this was the first time I tried to warn the blog owner about a bad trend.

I should note that once, before blogs became popular, I was subscribed to a mailing list, where I've written many posts. At one point, I had written many posts of a similar theme, only to have learned later from someone else, that many people disliked them, and as a result decided to filter out all of my posts to the list, while receiving the posts of anyone else (using mail filters). I felt offended by this fact, and wished they would have told me (or the list in general) how they felt.

Unsubscribing from a blog is probably less of an issue due to the technological nature of web feeds, but I still think that if a blog that you used to like has deteriorated in some respect, you should let the blog owner know, and I hope to continue in doing this.

Coldplay have a new record called "Left Right Left Right Left" available for download on their site only today. So head over, and download it. I'm not sure if this record is legally freely redistributable in the Creative Commons-sense.

I downloaded it and listened to it and like it very much. The "Viva La Vida" track is especially good.

First of all, happy Passover to everybody. If you're Jewish - have a happy Seder today.

We once showed writing in the Hebrew alphabet to an English IM-friend of ours, and she called it "Tetris". As a result, the nickname stuck and our circle of friends keeps referring to the Hebrew alphabet as "Tetris".

One day we were discussing Jackals, and someone linked to the page about them on the Tamil wikipedia. Then she said that Tamil "looked like a drunk spider walked across the page!". Then I asked her to nicname it in a similar manner to "Tetris" and she said she would call it "curly wurly".

And the obligatory media recommendations: I really enjoyed listening to Rob Costlow's "Woods of Chaos" album on Magnatune.com. Costlow plays the piano, and he has very moving and original melodies, with excellent quality. Magnatune is a music publisher that publishes freely distributable music, and you can listen to the album online.

And I also recently became addicted to this song by Rihanna (which isn't free), so you may enjoy it too.

Happy Passover!

Among my many sins, I am subscribed to "I Can Has Cheezburger?" (the Lolcats photo-blog), and noticed this photo. It featured a photo of a cat that someone I'm talking with on MSN Messenger sports as his user-pic.

I bookmarked it, and after I saw him on MSN, I gave him the link. However, he told me he cannot open the web-site. Now, he happens to live in mainland China, and I asked him if he suspected that it was the Great Firewall of China's doing and he suspected that that was indeed the case.

And indeed it is - the Chinese government has blocked access to the LOLcats site. How funny! (And sad.) Blocking Wikipedia was bad enough, but I don't know how the Chinese can survive without LOLCats.

I've been to an Israeli Python-Web meeting on Tuesday, and it took place in the Google Israel offices. They had a piano there, and I tried playing "I Will Follow Him", which I used to be able to play right-away on the electrical organ. However, no matter which tone-distances I tried, it did not sound exactly right. Maybe I've become rusty.

Today when I slept, I had a dream where I heard some wonderful pop/rock music to a melody I wasn't familiar with (at least not in the dream). Now I cannot remember what it was. Oh well.

My Internet friend referred me to Ronald Jenkees, who is an indie musician featured on YouTube, who plays on the electronic keyboard. He has recorded many melodies he composed and performed, and it's a great listening. Highly recommended.

Last time I blogged, I mentioned Kina Grannis, and after the post, I discovered her original sing and performance called "Gotta Digg" (about Digg.com) which I can also recommend.

In case, you've been wondering why I didn't update this blog much, then it is because I've been mostly updating my technical (= computers-related) blog. I didn't have many ideas for interesting non-technical entries, so I didn't blog here much.

BrainBashers.com is a great site I found with many addictive puzzle games. So far I liked tents, Fillomino, and Rectangles, and there are some puzzles there that I was already familiar with. One thing annoying about it is that the order of switching the states of a square in its Nurikabe puzzle is the opposite from Logic Games Online's. Is it time for another small Greasemonkey script to fix it? ;-)

And some YouTube links:

• Sweet Home Alabama vs. Country Grammar
• Nitzan444 singing "Different Person" (an Original song) - found it on the promoted videos
• Kina Grannis singing 1234 (One Two Three Four) (Feist Cover) - found it in a search I conducted for "one two".

I'm still unemployed, and lately I've been feeling like I don't want to do anything productive. So I spend most of my time chatting on IRC, browsing the web aimlessly, editing wikis, etc. I recall having such periods before, so I think it's just a mood.

I spent some time working on my "Optimising Code for Speed" article, and when I mentioned it to a MSN correspondent, he read what I have now, and keeps encouraging me to finish it. As a result, I've made even more progress.

I also had a long period where I felt shivers in the upper part of body. This made me unable to bike or jog, which may have made my lethargy worse.

I released a new module on CPAN, which wasn't too much of a technical challenge, but still scratches an important personal itch, so I'm glad I completed it. The documentation is still very scarce. I also worked on Config-IniFiles, and closed many of its SourceForge.net bugs.

So that's it for now. Hope you are feeling better.

Here's another personal update. It's the Autumn Jewish holidays period now in Israel, we spent Rosh Hashanah in my Aunt's house in a Kibbutz near the Sea of Galillee. We had the holiday feast in the back yard, with the family, which was tasty and lovely. My aunt's daughter's son (my second nephew) was there, and he can already talk, and could tell us what each animal in his large collection of toy animals was (in Hebrew).

I initially feared that I won't have a lot to do there, so I brought a lot of puzzles from the newspapers to solve. But I found it, my aunt and her husband had an Interconnected computer, which I could use and so did a lot. It ran Windows XP, still had only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (can you say no tabs?) and pressing the Windows Update menu-item did not appear to do anything. I guess it was likely already pwned by Malware, so I didn't use it to login into sites.

While I was there I discovered this Flash game called "Dig It", which I've been playing since, on and off. I think writing an LM-Solve backend for it wouldn't be too hard and will probably yield good results.

I've been biking lately, about once every two days, and been taking walks in the neighbourhood. I'd like to do some photo-taking-tours sometimes, and upload the photos to my Flickr account, but I keep forgetting to take a camera.

Otherwise, I discovered a bag of instant Majadra (a rice with lentils dish) in the closet, which was slightly overdue, so I decided to prepare it. Then when I tasted it, it had a strong leftover flavour, so I had to throw what I prepared away.

Now for some musical recommendations. In case you've missed it on my homesite's blog, I now have a free (and legal) musical downloads section in the links page of my homepage. It's still incomplete, but I intend to work on it.

Here are some YouTube videos I've liked recently:

1. My Boyfriend's Back from American Dreams
2. Ghostbusters' Theme Song
3. Neil Sedaka - Oh Carol!
4. Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
5. And the obligatory song from the Muppet Show: Hugga Wugga

This is this year's Yom Kippur summary. As has been the tradition for several years, on every Yom Kippur, I'm going over the blog entries from the previous year and try to draw some conclusions.

Well, I'm going to be brief today. This year, I quit a job that I didn't like (that had me writing email processing code in PHP with Sendmail and MySQL running on the computer), and worked for 4 months in another job, which I first liked, but then I found of its ugly side, which caused me to stress out completely. I eventually got fired from it.

The second part of the year starting from April was characterised by many periods of stress and anger. Part of it was due to me losing the job, part of it was due to me trying to get involved in the August Penguin conference, which was mis-managed, mis-organised, and where there was too little essential communication, and part of it was due to my decision to run to the Hamakor (the Israeli FOSS NPO) board (which I since cancelled).

This year, my Mandriva Linux Cooker system has caused me a lot of problems, with a lot of elements of my computer working-environment that used to work before, stopping to work for a time. I was able to fix most of them, but it still caused a lot of aggravations. I should note that Cooker is the Mandriva bleeding edge and is supposed to break. At the end of the year though I was able to fix many bugs: with fonts, with the broken router I had that blocked the Internet for my Linux machine, and now everything is mostly back to normal.

I continued to contribute to open-source software this year, including many things to scratch my itches, which I decided to release to the world. Often the programs caused problems, or the co-developers were not communicative, but as a general rule, I'm happy using Linux and other free software.

I worked on some stories and essays this year, which feels good.

So, that's it, I guess. Gmar Hatimah Tovah, everybody, and happy Sukkoth.