Today has been hard so far. It is strange how certain things just set you off. I was taking care of breaking apart the family plan that used to comprise me, Idan, Katie and my mother.
Part of this was to disconnect Idan’s old phone. I had always imagined this moment so differently. I had imagined one of two things; he would decide to move back to Israel and I would need to turn it off or I would be moving with him and all the phones would need to be terminated.
I never imagined, sitting in my office, feeling like crap, triggered like this.
I am thinking back to how badly I missed him when he would be in Israel and how hard it was to be apart from him. This pain I feel right now is so much more intense, probably because I have to remind myself that he isn’t flying into Newark next week. More likely, we will not speak for a while to come.
The funny thing is that I don’t feel like I wasted 3.5 years on this, like I did some of my other relationships. I had a wonderful time with Idan; we did some cool things, were there for each other, and only in the end did it get bad. Maybe it was so good, when it was, that is why it hurts as bad as it does.
This might be an old commercial, but since I don’t watch much TV, I am only seeing it now. It is from IBM and it is a perfect picture of my work day, especially of late.
Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, Ph.D. program. Left after completion of 5 terms.
B.S. with High Honors and Highest Distinction from University of Maine in Zoology
Highlights of Recent Experience:
Publisher – Sr. Manager of Development in Technology
Built from specification a brand new site in the portfolio of sites
Composite of technologies to create a Web 2.0 style social networking site
UI in JSP with JSON, DWR, and Custom AJAX interactions with a bulk of the user interaction in
in Flex 2.0
Back end technology in primarily Spring and Hibernate with Oracle database
Media processing in PERL handing off to a JMS & Java based workflow engine that used various SOA techniques to convert video, audio and images to site standards
Built out several key clusters for the media processing subsystem in Solaris, Linux & Windows OSes
Private Bank – Vice President – Enterprise Architect
Architected and implemented a redesign of the asset management account opening process –
the first in 20 years. Highlights included: first portal type system, first IMS updated
from J2EE, and first project to use RUP.
Received 2 (personal and team) Excellence in Service awards for my work with account
opening.
Airline B2B – Team Lead Portal & Web Development
Migrated and implemented existing website into a content management system based upon ColdFusion, and JSP’s and EJB’s in WebLogic
Developed application architecture to facilitate rapid implementation of business processes and
for integration with airline’s and supplier’s existing systems using
Web services – XML, WSDL, Axis, ColdFusion MX, WebLogic
EJB’s – entity beans (CMP and BMP) data model, session beans with business logic on WebLogic and JBoss
ColdFusion MX and Struts based MVC system for page flow and front end rendering
Online Retailer – Senior Application Developer
Programmed in-memory structure for product information, which is very fast and efficient, added
in appropriate caching algorithms. System handles tens of thousands of products and over 400
servers
Hierarchical catalogue item retrieval – no acceptable point of failure
Preload of high demand items into cache on server startup
Meet the demands of 10’s of thousands of transactions a minute
Continually tested and reviewed new code as well as existing code to create the robustness and
scalability requires to handle over 60,000 orders and multi-million product information requests
daily
Yeah I know, you are thinking, “hmm 2 work posts in 6 months? What gives?” Sometimes you have to share.
This nightmare is about Jive Software and the hustle and hassle they have put my and my project through.We purchased a top notch license that includes source, implemented it on a supported platform, and followed all the rules. After a careful review of this multi grand implementation by their own consultants, at my project’s cost, one year later, it still isn’t working correctly.Their consultants had the nerve to say , “you should upgrade your software and your app server,” as a first and continual response. Give me a freakin’ break.
The final straw? My project paid one of their consultants to come to NYC to help resolve the issue once and for all. Including many phone calls with their tech support lead, blah blah blah. This magical consultant left 2 weeks later, my project’s wallet a lot lighter, and the problem not fixed. Not only was the problem not fixed, the code he wrote didn’t work!After numerous attempts to engage Jive Software, I finally seem to have someone’s attention.
Caveat emptor! Bad support = bad software.
Next time I want to vent about bad software companies, I will write about my experiences exiting contracts with IBM by replacing WebSphere with open source alternatives and thereby saving millions. Yes, millions. In brief: We found more than a few defects in WebSphere over the summer. I would guess that is about 250,000$/defect/year I am paying them! Paying for Java app servers is so 1990’s and paying IBM for software is so 1970’s.
Historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, accused Bush of twisting history. ‘It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,’ he said in a telephone interview.
‘We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,’ he said.
‘What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,’ he continued. ‘We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.‘ (em added)
Bingo. Once again. We on the left were correct. ‘Nuf said.
Today is a bad day for Jews. Traditionally we are all sad because we lost our Temple. In general, the more, well, modern amongst us, see this as a time to be insightful and think about the big plan as manifested through events then, now and in the middle - we are talking about 2000+ years of history.
Today I would like to talk about how we are all doomed.
While we Jews cannot get along with our cousins the Arabs, I have real faith that we will figure out how to be friends someday - by we I don’t mean Americans I mean Jews.
But, the real enemy hates us both and that is what we should come to terms with. We both should fear the Christians. Yes, the Christians hate us both, my Arab cousin.
These are the people who brought us the original terrorism in the form of forced conversions, holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, etc… all because they hate true-blue monotheists like the Jews and the Muslims.
I am not certain exactly why they hate us both, cousin, but I think it has to do with the Trinity. Can you think of a larger pile of shit than saying, oh there are three g-ds, but really one, they are just parts of the same, equal parts, one the g-d part, one some kind of ghost part, and one a earthly man part. Um, what? That is a pantheon if I have ever seen one.
This isn’t even respectable Zoroastrian dualism, which is arguably monotheistic (well I will say I don’t know enough to argue either way). This is POLYTHEISM.
We, cousin, simply know how many times we are told by our prophets and by our historical rejection of adulteration by the Romans and Greeks that we are told to not only to eschew this notion, but to completely reject, dispel, and run away from this notion.
This is what I am thinking about on my 9th of Av. How come my cousin, who I share so much with, and I cannot get along, but my best friend is only waiting to off me in the name of his eternal salvation at the hand of his g-ds.
And the icing? I tell a tale:
Sunday morning I was at a local NJ diner having my eggs and toast. I was there with my friend Patrick. As I munched away I started to overhear the neighbor at the next table. Oh be warned, Tablemans are ever constant eavesdroppers! She was talking about how this lady she works with had perpetrated a series of unspeakable acts against her in the workforce as well as in their intersecting social lives. The issue at hand seemed to be that both parties were about to be fired for their inability to work together. The coup-de-christ? My neighbor diner lady made the following statement:
She acted in the most un-Christian way possible and I can never forgive that. I will never forgive that. I will make her life miserable for what she’s done.
*sigh* and I mean it, I almost said something to her. I almost did. But instead I thought about how so far her attitude is from the teachings of her lord and redeemer. About how much redemption she must need right now. About how probably no one has ever shown her what it really meant or felt like to act in a truly Christian, eg forgiving, way.
Fossil fuels are bad for us, bad for the fish, bad for the GWOT.
We need to reduce our dependency on them.
We also have a labor/farm/immigration issue here in the US of A.
How are these related?
Well, as we need more grains and crops to make alternative fuels, we increase demand. When demand goes up you can see a rise in prices. And we are:
Bioenergies have become a key factor in the functioning of agriculture markets.
This is really perfect how well they fit together.
We will see a resurgence of farming activity in the USA as a result of a higher demand for biofuels. This means farmers can make more $ and support families and communities from farming again. Then it means we will see the labor correction which will solve immigration: wages will go up and Americans will be able to work on farms and make a living.
We simply need to keep illegals out & not make them legal out of guilt or some misplaced pandering. By letting laborers into the USA to do farm work, we remove all wage pressures and thereby hand jobs to foreigners and not our next door neighbors.
We need to stop screwing up our economy at the expense of the “little man” and let this happen.
It has been a while since I posted a Talmud tidbit. This is partly because I have been traveling and because work has been killing me. Not since a certain South African took over my company have I battled such usurpers. On top of all this, I am in the midst of Yevamot which is a deafeningly boring romp through a matrix of relationship charts. In general this mesechet deals with levirate marriage, which is now defunct, I think. The prior mesechet was chagigah, in which the 4 sages travel to the gates of heaven, aka pardes, aka paradise. It was an absolutely spectacular mind bending esoteric tale. Shavuot also occurred near the end of the tractate, where a colleague presented a redux of the tale and I presented on demons and angels in the Talmud.
But in the midst of redaction of the laws governing how long after a man dies childless his brother can take the widow in yibum appeared a debate on the finer points of consummation. The gist here is the consummation must occur and the thought behind the word consummation was very present in the Talmud definition of marriage to the point were marriage was broken down to many steps and kinds depending upon the level of consummation.
If it occurred while the man was sleeping, it isn’t legal
If a man fell off the roof in such a way that he penetrates his potential wife it is questionable if this is valid consummation
If an idolator pressed him against her and he penetrated her, this is coercions and therefore not consummation
If it happened while he was dozing, does it count?
If he intended to “press against” an animal and missed, instead pressing against his wife-to-be it counts.
Then it proceeds to talk about how much of the penis has to go inside the woman before it counts
This goes on and on (as the Bavli Talmud does) and the whole time, as I read this, I was giggling. Yes, I know this is very adult! But you have to admit it is interesting to come across this level of graphic detail in a holy text.
I never talk about work, notice that there is not a single post on here about my job. It isn’t because I hate my job. In fact I love it! I have read far too many stories about people who vent about a boss, mine is pretty good, nothing to vent, or accidentally give away a trade secret, or you name it. I plan on that never happening to me! So here goes my first blog post about work.
I suffered through 2 days of the worst training in my 34 years of education. The purpose was to be enlightened by a search engine expert.
I learned 4 things:
why my dad cannot find anything useful in Google
why I have to go to page 2 to find what I want in Google
why the 3rd page is always in Japanese
all web sites should look like Edmunds.com
Beyond the sexists and culturally irrelevant stories about cars and hairspray, we listened to a total of about 2 hours of ranting against WikiPedia’s ranking in the top 5 of almost every search. It was obvious this man has a white whale and his name is Wiki.
My take on this: he hates it because he cant game it and he cant game it because it is actually useful information on a topic.
This will ALWAYS be one of the fundamental pricipals of subject expert directories versus automated link collectors: humans are better information aggregators, synthesizers and judges of the final product. Sorry Google, I love you. But I know where to look when I want information versus when I want to buy a desktop fan.
Oh yeah and when branding yourself, there is a point of obvious, then annoying, then tacky, and somewhere you end up at classless.
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