Yankee/Seinfeld/Jewish Programming Note

Tomorrow at 11PM, Larry David will be on centerStage on YES Network. Set those DVRs!

Mixed Emotions

Well, it's finally here. Tomorrow is my last day at Big Blue. I'm sad to leave as my experiences at IBM have almost always been great--except for bonus day just about every year. :-)

I've never left one job for another so that's a new experience for me, plus it's not as if I'm leaving for a competitor or a very similar job. I'm not sure how to feel, aside from gratitude to the people I've learned so much from and sadness for the inevitable lost friendships.

Blackberry, Treo or Other?

Coincidentally, I'm coming on two years with my current phone at the same time that I'm starting my new job. I'm thinking the timing is perfect to finally dip my toes into the Blackberry waters. I am waiting to hear what the policies, etc. are, but I'm leaning towards the Blackberry World 8800ish. Anyone have that? How about a comparable Treo?

How was your fast?

Mine wasn't bad at all. In the last 3-4 years, I've really gotten a good handle on how to make it through unscathed. I find Tisha B'av to be harder because it's longer and in the summer, but these tips help there too:

• Begin heavy water consumption the day before erev YK
• Consume slightly more sodium than usual on day before erev YK
• Light lunch on erev YK
• Limit salt intake on erev YK but not entirely
• Chew parsely after you're done eating erev YK dinner
• Force glass of water down after erev YK dinner
• Gargle very well with Listerine after erev YK dinner

Hope you find this helpful next time around. A zissen yur!

I Love Samantha Brown

Well, maybe love is a strong word but she sure is adorable. For those of you who don't know who this charmer is, check her out on The Travel Channel website. She's witty and cute and gets to do cool things in cool places. What more could one want from a TV fantasy crush?!

The Business Uniform

I guess it's my prep schooling, but I've always been partial to the light blue shirt, tan or gray slacks and blazer look. I just came from an IBM event where Steve Mills, the master of this look, was once again decked out in this combo. My question is this: does he have like 10 or 15 blazers or just 1?

Relatedly, what should my new wardrobe consist of? Now that I'm switching jobs to one where my clothes are more important--how could they not be?!--I'm thinking I need to clear out some of my old stuff and really work on my basics.

Social Bookmarking

Caught this cool clip from my friend Jeremy Epstein's blog and I wanted to share: Social Bookmarking rocks

iPod Video?

Do you have an iPod with video? Do you enjoy watching videos on a 1.5" screen?

I was riding the NJT back home yesterday evening on a SRO train. There was a guy standing in front of me watching The Office on his iPod. I loved the theory of video on an iPod from the day it was announced, but I watched for about 45 seconds and it became apparent to me that it was not that great in practice. I'd like to hear some feedback from any folks out there who watch video on their iPod regularly.

Lev Leviev in NYT Mag

Sunday's NYT Mag had a profile of Bukharan-Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is among the biggest Jewish philanthropists in the world. It was an interesting piece in general, highlighting some of Leviev's quirks and vague contradictions and also shedding light on his upbringing and business acumen.

One aspect of the piece that struck me as odd was its treatment of the Chabad movement. As some of you who know me know, I am a big fan of Chabad, so I would be remiss to admit that it's hard for me to be unbiased, but I will try.

First of all, the author (or editor?) likely mischaracterized Rabbi Eliezer Shach's (zt"l) feelings about Chabad. While I am not familiar with the exact quote, I find it highly unlikely that a Chabad critic like Shach would call it the sect closest to Judaism...Christianity perhaps, but not Judaism--note that this is not my feeling but my understanding of the misnagdic Shach's thoughts.

My bigger issue with Chafetz's piece was the following:

Most of the 300 rabbis are Chabadniks, adherents of the Brooklyn-based Hasidic group Chabad — fundamentalist, missionizing, worldly and centered on the personality and teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. Chabad is anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues.

It seems to me that the writer--knowing the typical NYT Mag reader is left-leaning--is trying to unfairly paint Chabad. Yes, Chabad may be officially anti-abortion--like nearly all of traditional Judaism--but in the US at least, it almost completely avoids politicizing the issue. Furthermore, regarding homosexuality, Chabad, again like all of traditional Judaism, regards male homosexual acts as abominations, but the choice of the word, "perversion," creates an unfair bias in the reader's mind, in my opinion. Chabad is generally considered to be the most moderate of all haredi and hasidic groups, especially in the US and Leviev's association with them is tainted by the choices of words and phrases to describe Chabad.

Puke: The Final Frontier

Well, it happened, finally. One of my daughters puked on me last night. Now I know I am a bit squeamish, but I thought I handled myself well. My wife gave me a hard time for wanting to clean everything ASAP, though. :-)

Do you go to message boards?

I had a conversation with a friend on Monday and she confided that she'd never been to a community site (message board, chat room, etc.). I'm not talking illicit stuff here, but the kind of thing you might find at Maplewood Online's forum, for example. I was shocked, as I've been an avid message boarder since 1996 or so, and I've worked in businesses where that was the bread-and-butter. Am I the weirdo or is she? OK, OK, I know I am a weirdo, but I mean specifically with regard to this topic.

New techmology from our non-friends in Redmond

Well, MS finally released Wallop, and it looks pretty cool. I'm still waiting on my invite, hopefully coming from my friend Jeremy, but from what I've seen and what my friend Alantells me, it looks like a nice next-gen hybrid of Flickr and some other cool social networking stuff. I don't think it's groundbreaking, but it looks awfully polished, in a good way.

http://www.wallop.com

Flooring update

By the grace of Hashem, it looks like we won't need to replace any of the hardwood floors, just refinish them. However, it's still going to cost an arm and a leg and maybe a finger on the other arm too. Maybe techmology isn't all it's cracked up to be. The floor guy gets to inhale polyurethane AND make money?! Wow.

Chicken or loose change? You decide.

It's that time of year again. Kaporos is afoot and we're faced with the age-old (well, maybe just a hundred or so years old) dilemma of whether to use a chicken or the spare change we find around the house.

For those of you unfamiliar, as part of the 10 days of repentance between (and including) Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews are to engage in a pretty curious ritual. It's called kaporos, or in my family, "zoys challie foosie."

Here's a pic, it tells way more than a thousand words: Chicken head face!

So, anyone out there use a chicken--other than barseff?

Dealing with contractors, 21st century style

So we just bought an old house in the suburbs, and we're refinishing the floors. The previous owners had the brilliant idea of carpeting the whole house, which is verboeten in our Yuppie milieu.
So the floor guy--Is there a fancier term for him? Hardwood Re-engineerer perhaps? Floor pie baker?--says that the wood under the carpet doesn't look so good at first glance. Great, I'm thinking, and I'll have to shlep back out here today again to see each spot that looks like it's in need of replacement. While that dreadful thought was still lingering in my head, he says, "when I find a bad spot, I'll take a digital pic and e-mail it to you for your thoughts." Now granted, this is not a state of the art concept, but we're talking about a contractor here. They may be one of the last bastions of ludditic (ludditudinal?) behavior in the professional world. I was pleased as fruit punch. Needless to say, though, I hope not to get an e-mail from him today!

Introduction to my blog: Irreverence on technology, Judaism and a bunch of other carp (maybe whitefish, too).

So, I've finally dipped my toes into the cool blue waters of blogdom.

I realized that I spent too much time on message boards, perfecting my answers, but there's no sense of permanence, and of course the best reason to post is to impress your Internet friends, right? Well, I figured that now I can post and get some props...and they won't go away when the post leaves the first page of the board!

I plan on posting mostly about technology and its impact on our personal and business lives, which are closer than ever before. I also hope to touch on Jewish stuff as well, plus sports, travel, cooking Hungary, New York, Miami...

Now what happens?

Using techmology to ask for forgiveness

An old friend asked a similar question back in the late 90s, when e-mail was not yet ubiquitous. Now that e-mail is just one of many techmological methods to communicate, I'd like to revisit it.

The basic idea is, "how legitimate is asking forgiveness of your friends before Yom Kippur via e-mail, IM, text message?" Is there a hierarchy of acceptability? E-mail without a reply yes, text message with a reply yes, but IM without a reply no? How do you do it?