BR-1138: Ice Breaks, Songs by the Campfire

A Chronicle of touring Israel with a Taglit-Birthright group: The first night

As joyful as this first day of my trip  had been so far, it seems our faithful tour guides were reserving the best for last.

After we were done with our dinner at the Beduim-styled tourist camp, we all gathered at our group tent in order to participate in the “Ice Break” group activity meant allow the American and Israeli group members to get to know each other better, the Americans were divide into eight small groups and each group was assigned one Israeli member and tasked with preparing a certain kind of act to introduce their Israeli to the rest of the group.

BR-1138: Desert, Camels and Polygamy

A Chronicle of touring Israel with a Taglit-Birthright group: The first Evening

Leaving the Dead Sea resort we made our way south along the shore eventually leaving the Dead Sea and the Judas desert behind and going into the Negev desert.

It was late afternoon when we arrived at our destination, a tourist camp styled after the Beduim (Desert nomadic dwellers) tent camps. We were instructed to quickly gather the cloths and other personal belongings we would need for the night stay and place them in our group’s designated tent. Following that we were led through the camp, to the place where we were to embark on a short camel riding trip.

BR-1138: Brain picking engineers and the Dead Sea

A Chronicle of touring Israel with a Taglit-Birthright group: The first day

On the morning of the first day of our trip, when we, the Israelis were getting on the bus and joining the American group for the first time, I was actually the last of the Israelis to get on the bus. As such, it seemed to me when I was getting up, that there were not many available seats on the bus, therefore, I chose not to venture deep into the bus, but instead sit at the first available seat I could find.

In the seat next to me there sat a guy with body proportions that seemed very similar to mine, a blue shirt and a goatee. That guy was Kevin.

BR-1138: Tiberias, Morning and a golden bus

A Chronicle of touring Israel with a Taglit-Birthright group: Meeting the group

I met the wonderful group of people I would spend the following 5 days touring Israel with on the morning of Tuesday the 20th of January 2009. I choose, however, to begin my story on the afternoon of the previous day.

On that particular Monday afternoon I finally left the office to go home and pack for the trip. Due to my minuscule yet, unfortunately, not completely unimportant role in some newsworthy events taking part in Israel in the weeks before, my going on the trip was not at all certain up to that point.

Oranim BR-1138

I’ve spent the last 5 days touring Israel, as an IDF representative, with the Oranim BR-1138 Birthright (Taglit) tour group (mostly) from California.

Needless to say, the experience was absolutely amazing, it was uplifting, exhilarating, moving and exhausting all at the same time, as well as truly emotionally and physically intense.

I wish to send my regards from these pages to all the beautiful, charming and absolutely amazing members of the tour group, you guys have moved me in ways I only now am beginning to understand.

I will most probably post more links, pictures and words soon.

All about Israel (Internet censorship) law proposition 892

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a while now, and have mentioned it in a recent post, but laziness and lack of time have prevented me from giving this matter the proper attention so far.

A kind comment to my above mentioned post implied that there wasn’t much written so far about proposition 892 in English, if that is the situation, then I’m more then willing to do what I can to rectify the situation.

Disclaimer: I am biased. Most of my information comes from web sites that are officially against law proposition 892. Having said that, I am going to make an effort to provide as complete view of the situation as possible.

Finnish political system

Justen seems to be attempting to answer my post however, I can’t see what his discussion of the Finnish political system has do do with my critique.

It is striking to notice though how similar is the Finnish system to the Israeli one, albeit, the tones are quite different, he claims that important public policy issues that are out of the general consensus aren’t throughly discussed, and blames it on the structure of the political system, in similarly-structured Israel, however, issues are argued upon quite violently.

I have no choice but to conclude that the tone of the political argument seems to have more to do with the character of the general population then the structure of the political systems.

Oracle RAC/Linux/ASM forum convention

I’ve spent Wednesday afternoon at ilOUG‘s RAC/Linux/ASM forum convention held at the Hilton Tel-Aviv hotel.

Without naming names, I must say that that overall, the level of lectures was so low to be embarrassing.

While the lecture material itself was interesting enough so that even an experienced user of the RAC, Linux and ASM technologies such as myself could learn a few new tricks, the manner in which the lectures were given was poor indeed.

Happy clock change day

For those of you who aren’t from the vicinity of my locale, I should mention that here, in Israel, we shifted the clocks to DST tonight.

DST rules in Israel being the hodge-podge they are, a clock shift is always a mess, especially since historical operating system bugs have made the ill-advised habit of manually shifting the system clocks rather then adjusting the time-zone or having it automatically adjusted using a zoneinfo file take hold.

Having had to stay up all night to fix problems essentially caused inadequate planning and testing made me realize once more just how crucial planning really is.

Needless to say, that in systems where proper planning was done, the clock shift was performed quickly, easily and efficiently.

Israel rebukes US: Our copyright laws are fine, thanks

WOW. This really doesn’t happen often, but sometimes my country really makes me proud.