Wow--I'm so thrilled. I don't have much to go on by way of excitement these days, so this is news for me. Slahsdot accepted my Oyez.org story. And the tech lead of the site is in the Comments--many times. It's nice to see an admin not explode and/or cry about the traffic generated by a Slashdot post. Yes, the servers melted, yes, he was suprised at the amount of hits, but he was also very happy and thankful. He even encourages people to download the MP#'s and host them on as many P2P sites as possible--trying to get those files -out-. Amen!

Sigh. Hadar and I are having a tiff about where we rent DVD's from. We recently downgraded our cable to the $12/mo. plan, as we just don't watch that much TV. I thought it would be cool to spend this "extra" money on Netflix. Hadar is happy with the rental card from Blockbuster. Bear in mind that Blockbuster is on to our hax0ring, so we're just getting the $2/rental rate now, not the obscene-asymptotically-approaching-$0.00/rental rate we had before.

Unfortunately, Blockbuster does not have Rififi. Or Waiting for Guffman. Or Stalag 17. Or Diva. They -do- have 400 copies of Catch Me If You Can. One more month of Netflix and it's back to picking out the gems in a store of sand.

I might start managing my own little venture here. There's a market for small-job HTML work and a lot of good HTML programmers looking to get experience so they can land the next $95k position that opens up (in 2007). I will be the middleman, setting up NPO's and othe tiny outfits that don't have a legit web development budget with the experience hungry or altruistic programmers that want to help them. It benefits the business, as they get a nice website, and it benefits the guru, as s/he gets experience and soul food. It's also for people that can't program under a gun--no deadlines here. You want a website for free, you might have to wait a little bit.

The pay's for shit--at BEST. But it's a living, and we're doing okay on Hadar's salary.

Pesach (that's Passover to ye olde English speakers) is a crazy holiday. Craaaazy. So crazy, the rabbis forbid you to make fun of how crazy other people get about Pesach. You can smirk at yourself, though. We cannot own, benefit, or even see (if we can help it) chometz. Chometz is leavened flour made from these five grains: wheat, oats, barley, rye, and spelt (buckwheat). Because it written in the Torah that we can't screw this up, we are extra super mega duper tnt guns-of-navarone careful to clean the chometz out of the house and sell anything we want to keep and nullify anything we didn't find. What does this entail?

• Boil water over in all the pots we want to use.
• While boiling the water, drop any utensils we want to use into the boiling water as well.
• Don't use anything that has anything plastic on it--even a handle--plastic cannot be de-chometz'd.
• Pour said boiling water over any exposed counter top and the sink.
• Seal the counters, tables, rangetop with aluminum foil.
• Have the stove blowtorched until it's red-hot. (If it's self-cleaning, you can just run a cleaning cycle--twice).
• Wash all the towels, dishrags, etc.
• Wash the floors, search the other rooms of the house for any bits of food--crumbs even!
• Seal any cabinets that have not been cleaned.
• Clean the cars (we ate in there).
• Seal off the dishwasher (plastic inside).

There's more, but this gives you an idea. Also, we aren't very strict--some of our friends won't eat here over the holiday.

Chag Kasher v'Sameach!

Sigh.

I'm still out of work, things still look bleak on that front (I am avoiding the grocery bagging route), and I'm trying to keep my mind from frying. What I -should- be doing is waking up early, working out, going to minyan, and studying Talmud. Back at the house for 11 AM when I can bone up on Perl, hack my OS X box, make dinner and watch a movie with the wife.

Instead, I roll out around 8 AM, check Maddox and Homestar Runner for new material, play GTA3 all morning (though I finally beat the bastard, maybe its grip will lessen), and forget to eat. Hadar calls before she comes home, so I know I have 30 minutes to make it seem like I was busy all day. It's a little sad.

I'll shake it off soon, we're getting ready for Pesach here, which is going to be maaaadness! I gotta get out there and get some local friends too--man, I'm an introverted freak. Shake it off shake it off! I am making some Sherlock channels. Once I figure out my hosting, I'll put them up.

So, Hadar and I have been in CA for about a month now. We have closed escrow on a house in Agoura Hills, a sleepy suburb of LA. There's one thing we've noticed more than anything else about the neighborhood: everyone is white. I'm not really one for White Man's Guilt or anything, but man, EVERYONE IS WHITE. It's a little weird. I've been referring to the area as the Unicultural Center. Ever seen Night at the Apollo, where someone makes fun of white people? It's really like that here. I see klatches of Moms making changes to the Swim Team Regulations, I see kids with $200 of protective gear waddling around trying to play street hockey, I have to move out of the way of horses from time to time. Stepford, here we come.

So, the wife an I are off! So long cold Chicago winters (it was 9 degrees today. Good old hard-to-understand Fahrenheit degrees. NINE. I pay good money to live here and that's what I get: NINE.)

The weather in Thousand Oaks is a balmy 66. That's worth paying for. Hadar accepted a job at Amgen, or as I like to refer to them: Soylent Industries.

We're getting the royal treatment, moving is covered, career assistance for moi, signing bonus, etc. Smoov. An added bonus: even more rentals on my broken 10-Rental Blockbuster card (up to 22 so far).

Browser of the damned

I work at a company that makes web apps that have to spec back to v4 of IE and NS. Let me tell you: development is 50% NS4.x, 50% EVERY OTHER BROWSER. We're in the education game, so there's still about a berjillion NS 4.x installs out there, but DAMN. Spent all day acting as guinea pig for some bizarro-world NS timing issue. Apparently, the CSS Auth call is not completed by the time the next request comes in (this is an issue only at dial-up speed--not a problem broadband). This next request sees that we are not AUTH'd, so it kills the session--boots back to login. Grr!

The wife and I have broken the bank at Blockbuster:
Discover, The Card the Pays You Back®, paid us back. We spent $20 of our cashback bonus on a 10-Rental card from Blockbuster. The last time we did this, we seemed to notice that it rented a lot more than the number of movies the card supposedly got us, but we didn't pay close enough attention. The card eventually did not work, but only after it expired.

There's all kinds of info the store is supposed to put on the back, and all kinds of supposed restrictions; but they never fill it out and they never look at the restrictions. We've rented more than one at a time (forbidden), we've rented from more than one store (forbidden), and we've rented on more than one account (forbidden with extra not-allowed-pants on). We're now up to movie #14 on our 10-rental card. I think it no longer works on my wife's account-store relation, but I think we'll prove successful with it at account-store#2.

UPDATE It's true. Account_store_rlt #2 resets the card. We are up to movie #16, with a ceiling of 40 rentals. There are at least three more stores in the area, making a potential rental tally of 100 rentals. Not too shabby.

I'm loving my new job. Working for Edison Schools [insert anti-corporate rant--whatever], making decent scratch, supporting technology and quasi-educating at the same time. karma modded up!

My wife is now my doctor-wife. Not medical, but she has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and is being wooed by some heavyhitters in the industry.

As of March 02, I am new to Slashdot. That's not really accurate. I actively avoided it as a haven for 1337 shitheads until they made apple.slashdot.com. Now I read that page regularly. Check out As the Apple Turns for more Mac info, and Ars Technica for generic geek news. Update: As the Apple Turns is barely updated anymore. Guy had a kid. Good for him. Visit MacOS X Hints for some poorly laid out, yet still handy Mac info.