Category: Life

This week’s recommendations

Podcast: The Daily, by the New York Times. A 20 minute daily podcast that doesn’t sum up the news of the day, but instead gives interesting insights into a few top stories. There’s a very good reason that this podcast has become so popular even though it’s so relatively new.

Book: If you’re looking for an easy summer read, try M.C. Beaton‘s Hamish Macbeth or Agatha Raisin mystery novels. They’re dirt cheap, even in dead tree format, short, not too trashy, not too violent — the beach books.

Tea: if you haven’t watched this delightful YouTube TED Ed video by Shunan Teng, I highly recommend that you do. It briefly goes through the history of tea: youtu.be/LaLvVc1sS20

And also: Monument Valley 2 is out and it’s as awesome as the first one was. Really taking my time to enjoy it.

IMG_1092

Summer is here. Get thee to the beach.

IBM Watson Tel-Aviv Summit

I was at the IBM Watson summit in Tel Aviv today. A very impressive event, with a slurry of local celebs taking part in it. 


Yair Nizani, an Israeli comedian, MCed.


Marina Maximilian Blumin “sang” (lip synced).

The usual buzzwords were thrown around: disruptive technologies, cognitive learning/age, Software/Product/Infrastructure as a service. 

What wasn’t said was:

These technologies cost people jobs, without providing them with alternative means to proved for themselves.

These technologies have deep social implications, but the people making them and funding them give little to no thought to what is the true cost of these technologies. 

Machine learning/cognitive learning can improve our world, but they can also cause immense suffering. Unless we constantly consider the ethical implications of these advances (as best we can), we will be the creators of our own dystopia.

The caterpillar 

This ravenous beast has been wrecking havoc on my Nasturtiums. Anyone recognise him?

This week’s recommendations

Podcast: Download. Jason Snell, with Stephen Hackett as a editor and a rotating pair of guests talk technology in what is the most charming, informative and polished of tech podcasts. Worth listening to if only to hear the “story you might have missed” segment.

Book: World War Z, by Max Brooks. Forget the movie (it has nothing to do with the book), and forget that this book is “about zombies,” because it isn’t really. It’s an “oral history,” very well written and researched, of a plague of the kind that exposes our humanity to the very core — all the good, all the bad, laid bare. A facinating and disturbing read precisely because it is so very realistic.

Tea: Lately it has been nothing but Yorkshire Tea, in dependable teabags, brewed stronger than you would believe possible and taken with milk-and-sugar. My aunt died last week, and at times like this I look for “comfort tea,” simple and soothing in its familiarity.

Also this week: Nasturtiums are hanging in there, despite the hot weather.

IMG_3487

Tabletop Day

Tabletop Day was a huge hit today – we were 9 people gathered in my brother’s apartment, and we played:

  • Sushi Go (twice)
  • Tsuro
  • 7 Wonders
  • Resistance (twice with the regular rules and once with the expansion, which made it much better).
  • Hanabi
  • Sheriff of Nottingham

Not bad for 8 hours, including a lunch break 🙂

I hope that you had a great Tabletop Day. Play more games!

Buying

I couldn’t sleep last night for no good reason other than the noise from the neighbouring synagogue and my terrible late night iPhone Twitter habits. The iPhone addiction is on me, but what can you do about French tourists being obnoxiously loud obnoxiously late when they stand outside a synagogue long after closing time, far past midnight? I considered throwing a bucket of water or hefting a shoe at them, but I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. Meanwhile, they outshouted the closed windows and air conditioning. Only American tourists get any louder.

I saw an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine tonight that hit close to home regarding to my spending habits. Unlike Jake Peralta I am saving money, and I have never even considered buying one massage chair, let alone six, but I can get carried away sometimes buying junk that I don’t need and will never use. There is a collector’s bug that runs in the family that doesn’t help, and FOMO is a real thing when it comes to limited editions of things that I like (mostly pens and stationery), but mostly I just need to learn that buying stuff online is not a good coping mechanism for a bad day at work or a sleepless night. Money spent on experiences, like races and trips and escape rooms with friends, is better spent, period. And maybe more than me needing to learn to just enjoy using what I have, I need to accept that whether it’s headphones or pens or mechanical keyboards, there is no true perfection out there — there is only what there is.

Winter Clock

 

Today we switch over to winter clock. Days are already getting darker sooner, and even in sweltering Tel-Aviv the coolness of autumn is creeping in.

At work the clock change is a big deal, with thousands of servers having to switch timezones automatically, not all of them doing so smoothly or successfully. While everyone at home will be having an extra hour of sleep, dozens of my colleagues will be hunched over keyboards, working into the small hours of the night, coaxing stubborn stragglers to rejoin the fold.

A few servers tried to jump the gun two weeks ago, moving to the winter clock way too early and without telling anyone. As it was in the middle of a holiday weekend, it could not have happened at less convenient time. The guy that accidentally made the change that started that whole chain of events is probably going to have bad karma for at least a month after that.