Made Me Cry – Neda

Whatever it means, Neda made me cry, too.

Conspiracy

The question is not whether Iran is a dictatorship or a democracy.

The question is whether the civil unrest there is a Google conspiracy or a Twitter conspiracy.

Never

I shall never ever buy a book with Digital Restriction Management.

I buy a lot of books and i prefer to be buried in paper, pay more for moving, pay more for bigger apartments with bigger bookcases, than to buy files that i can’t copy any way i want.

No DRM book. Never.

MIDI

For years my geek friends forced me to listen to Dream Theater. I hated it.

Yesterday they played in Tel-Aviv. The reviews are good. Oh well.

I just listened to Pull Me Under on YouTube and now i finally understood what does it sound like: like a demo song of a MIDI keyboard.

Anti Stab

“Less Lethal Ammo“, meet “Anti-Stab Knife“.

Too Much Crowdsourcing

LinkedIn asked me to fill out a survey. And you know that i love filling out surveys!

They asked me whether i work as a translator. “Yes”, and i immediately knew where it was going.

“What kind of incentive would you want for translating LinkedIn – premium account / group leadership / i’ll just do it for fun.” And of course, they didn’t offer me money. I ticked all options except “fun”, ‘cuz LinkedIn is not that kind of a website which i’d translate just for fun.

The next question was even better – “How many hours a week would you spend as a volunteer translating LinkedIn?”

The success of Wikipedia made some people think that random folks really love doing things for free. Some people like some things, not all people like all things.

Violinist

I am living in a four-story house. In front of my window¹ there’s a fifteen-story house and it blocks the view.

It basically sucks, but a violinist lives in that house, and she² practices all day long, which is very pleasant.

¹ I wrote “Window” first. Why would i do such a thing? :)

² Does this make me sexist?

People Speaking – Woman

— “Is it a man or a woman?” (My ten year old niece Dasha seeing the opening sequence of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.)

Priest

Ray Ozzie, [Bill Gates’] successor as chief software architect, doesn’t have anything close to the confrontational approach that the Microsoft co-founder used to shape the company.

“It’s as though you’ve been running Italy using the Mafia for the last 20 years and you bring in a priest,” said Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service technology newsletter.

One year later, Microsoft feels subtle effects of Gates’ transition, Todd Bishop

The meaningless and the weak

“If it is just to prohibit a Jew from living in Samaria, is it also just to prohibit a black from living in Washington DC?” – Moshe Feiglin

I strongly, very strongly disagree with Moshe Feiglin on many points of his political platform. He’s a manipulator: he presents himself as “loyal to the principles of Likud”, but his own platform actually contradicts that of Likud. It doesn’t mean that i, heaven forfend, support Likud; it just means that Feiglin is a bit of a trickster. Not a liar, just a trickster: Many of his platform’s points are very religious and fundamentalist, but he only publishes them on his own website and not in the articles that he writes for Maariv.

But i strongly, very strongly agree with the point above.

“Stopping natural growth” of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria is, beyond being nonsensical, violent and racist.

But you know what? Barack Obama is himself a trickster. Worse, yet – he’s a puppet and the people behind him are tricksters. Obama is too good at pleasing crowds. He pleased the crowd in Prague saying that he wants to end nuclear weapons. I support that, but i don’t really believe that he means that. Obama tells a crowd of Jews that Jerusalem will stay undivided, but then a campaign adviser had to clarify, that is muddle it.

A campaign adviser.

At least Moshe Feiglin doesn’t seem to have campaign advisers.