I am eternally grateful to BigWig of SiflayHarka for recommending a pub in Tel Aviv. Given that Gulf War II (coming to a country near you) is just around the corner I shall make a visit with 'She Who Must Be Obeyed' this weekend. While it's still there of course.

There I was, looking around the Web for a ‘blog of the day’ when I was musing on the need for a verb to describe the action of clicking on a link. Surfing we all know, but it’s too general. So, mustering what neurons are left to me after a lifetime of sampling the finest beers the world has to offer, I came up with ‘clink’. Yes, I know what you’re thinking; it has two meanings already. Never mind. English has a large number of plural words.

So here it is:

Clink ‘To click on a hypertext link’. Verb.
‘To make or cause to make a light, sharp ringing sound.’ Verb , transitive.
‘A light, sharp ringing sound, as of glass or metal.’. Noun.
‘A prison or a prison cell; a jail: spent the night in the clink.’ Noun. Slang
[After Clink, a district of London famous for its prison.]

Expect to see this shamelessly used in the future in a possibly vain attempt to get my own 15 minutes of fame..

Dialog Now is the blog of the day. DialogNow is a weblog designed to promote dialog between the peoples of India and Pakistan. It is not restricted to the peoples of India and Pakistan. Go for it. It makes a nice change to view somebody elses conflict.

Israel appears a lot in the news around the world. So why did CloneAid claim that the world's first cloned baby lives here? Could it be true? I doubt it.
After the noise and smoke dies down from the election, She Who Must Be Obeyed points out that elections are very low key compared to what she knew as a youngster. No stump speeches, parades, local gatherings. Just small groups of activists huddled in back rooms. I live near to Haifa, Israel's third largest city. It's traditionally been a socialist stronghold and Mitzna, the current leader of the Labour Party is/was mayor here. Well it's not any more. Likud got more votes. It reminds me of the days when the Iron Lady swept to power in the UK.
Lastly it rained yeterday. In fact it poured down.The local flooding was bad enough to stop me getting to where I wanted to go. Knee deep in places. Mount Hermon opens for skiing today. I shall pay a visit soon and let you all know how it went.
Comments are working again. Have a happy day.

Well done Joelle and Jonathan Edelstein from the Head Heeb for spotting that 'Vanuata’ is a real country and spelt strangely as well. Still , that's what I had in my 'Boy's Own Book of Really Strange Countries'.
However, they failed to spot that of all the organisations that Vanuatu is affiliated to, ICBM and DTMF are real acronyms but fictional organisations so no prizes this time I'm afraid. Tune in for another exciting country next week. I did ask 'Is everything above true?'

As for Israeli politics, how do you all fancy Likud, Shinui and Shas? Just 63 seats between them but enough. I also notice that all the MK's I have actually met (as in briefly shaken hands) have failed to make it to the Knesset. I call this 'The Curse of Egghead'. For a small elegant fee, I shall be available at the next election to meet and greet your least favourite politician and shake their hand. Certain failure is guaranteed.

P.S Anybody want 10 large redundant Meretz banners? Owner has no futher use. Only used once. Good condition. Low mileage.

Welcome to Greater Israel. Likud wins big time.

Comments are playing up again. I will fix this.

Well it had to happen. Workplace, having failed to convince customers of the exellence of our products, has decided to retrench. Bye bye to the nice converted apartment. Also , bye bye to a full salary. Wage cuts are the order of the day. Still, I'm still healthy, my kids are OK and the wife hasn't left me. I'm also being chased by a previous workmate, now director of $Other workplace$ so I have a choice. Should I stay or should I go? It's nice to have a choice.

Davezilla Is the blog of the day.. Seriously amusing.

I would like to sincerely apologise to BigWig at Silflay Hraka. He is not a network administrator and comparisons to pimps are uncalled for. He is almost certainly a a Bastard Operator from Hell. For those of you who are unaware that such a beast exists, you may read the full gory details here.. More recent musings from the BOFH can be found at Vulture central.

ExpatEgghead is proud to bring you yet another educational regular feature. In our regularly delivered newspaper this week, a country was mentioned that I had never heard of. Nor, do I suspect, has anyone else. It struck me that it would be a public service to have a ‘country of the week’ entry, featuring one of the lesser-known societies in the world. To fully keep in with the essence of this blog, things shall be livened up by randomly inventing a new country once in a while. Readers are invited to state in the comments section whether this country is real or not. The winner, who will be the person with the most informative and amusing post, shall receive a valuable prize, value not to exceed 100 NIS (New Israeli Shekels). Bribery and corruption will only be tolerated if suitably disguised as ‘expenses’, ‘commission’, ‘consultancy fees’ and the like.

FAQ

Q: But I can check on the Internet.
A: We work on the honour system here.

Q: All these countries are made up aren’t they?
A: Not at all. Just the facts have been twisted.

Our first country is ‘Vanuata’. Located in Oceania, this fully independent nation state has a population of around 200,00 people. There are three official languages, English, French and pidgin. 15% of the islanders subscribe to the ‘Cargo Cult’ religion. With a land mass of 12,00 sq kms, there is a constant water shortage. It is also the only place on the globe where Prince Philip is worshipped as a deity.
Vanuata belongs to the following organisations.
ACCT, ACP, AsDB, C, ESCAP, FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICBM,ICFTU, ICRM, IDA, IFC, IFRCS, IMF, DTMF,IMO, IOC, ITU, NAM, Sparteca, SPC, SPF, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UNMIBH, UPU, WFTU, WHO, WMO, WTrO

So, is everything above true?

I see that comments are not available again. This is getting to be a regular Sunday event. I shall investigate alternatives.

Here's why I will not be voting Likud on Tuesday. A vote for Likud is a vote for 'a greater Israel and years of conflict and strife. Thats simple enough isn't it?

Here's why I will not be voting Labour either. I don't trust them not to go into coilition with Likud. I don't trust Mitzna and I don't believe they have the solution.

Here's why I will not be voting Shinui. I believe that Israel without the Jewish Religion would be an empty shell. The hatred that Shinui expresses for some sections of the religious community is revolting. Observant and Hredi Jews have a role to play.

Here's why I will not be voting Hadash. I'm not a socialist or a communist.

Here's why I will not be voting The United Arab List. I'm not an Arab.

Here's why I will not be voting Moledet. Facist extremists.

Here's why I will not be voting The Third Way. They seem to think that being a politician is a bad thing. It's not.
I won't be voting Shas, the Green Leaf party, or any of the others either. Meretetz is the only party that has a clear platform for peace and is not tainted by corruption.

Another interesting and fun packed evening at the Saturday night cross vigil. A lot of Gush Shalom supporters and Meretz people. The ranting right had followed us from the place we used to hold these demos. They missed us it seems. CNN and that reporter with the beard was there as well. I was annoyed that after two hours after the demo, just as we were packing up, they asked the organiser to 'arrange' a more viewable demo, then used that as a backdrop.

Around 60 peace supporters versus 5 settler supporters. I will not use the term left and right any more when applied to Israel. The terms have become meaningless.

Silflay Hraka would have made it to the blog of the day. However , I must point out that Bigwig, who is one of the contributors, is also a systems administrator and I quite agree with Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple.

“If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that’s fine with me. I hope he’s a good one and enjoys it and doesn’t get caught. I’ll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he’s out of the house and not part of my family.”

If you want a really vicious, no holds barred blog post on the French and you're feeling mean, there is no better place than silflayhraka . Link courtesy of Not a Fish.. That blog is worth reading and makes it into blogroll.

For whom the blog tolls is the blog of the day. Some powerful writing here and he's from the greatly underestimated Canada.
Scroll down till you get to the article starting with this:

Thousands of North Koreans were sent to hospital yesterday afternoon as injuries sustained at a pro government rally continued to mount. Several million North Koreans all spontaneously converged at a random location in the Country's capital to show support for embattled President Kim Jong Il.

I spent a great deal of my youth in France. I went on a school exchange and meet my lifetime friend, Christian. He taught me skiing and we spent lots of holidays together. I still see him and his family. Most of that was in Bordeaux but he went to Mulhouse near Basle later as a teacher and stayed. Handy for the Alps anyway. As most other blogs seem to have mentioned the French recently,it seems apposite to bring this up and to tell you that I spent the most boring three hours of my life last night listening to French 1950's popular music being sung by two French Israelis. I hate Aznavour. People who try to do cover version of 'je ne regrette rien' need either a great voice or a good orchestra. As a final insult, we had to pay for the refreshments and there was no wine. She Who Must be Obeyed dragged me along promising an interesting time. Bah. Humbug.

Cristian would agree with me. An evening to avoid. Oh, 'French politics!',' Iraq!', 'the UN!' I hear you say. Sorry. Not this blog. I expect somebody else has already done it.

'Quite contrary' is the blog of the day. That is not just because she quoted somethings I wrote either. It's a good blog.

It can be a bit confusing sometimes being both British and Israeli. You will no doubt forgive me I've I seem a bit UK centric with a large dollop of Israel thrown in.
So, for some UK news that has me scratching my head how about this story which suggest that the UK's future aircraft carriers may be built in France. Now don't get me wrong on this. During the Napoleonic wars, the French were very much better than England at building ships. It's just we got more practice at sailing and fighting than they did. It does seem a bit odd..
If that wasn't slightly disquieting enough, then here's a alt-humor-best.best-of-usenet post I shamelessly claim credit for getting into ahbou from a military naval usenet froup I hang out in.


So, to sum up. In the distant future, the Royal Navy will be swanning around the briney in Frog carriers controlled by 'Windows for Warships'®© and flying USA made planes. No wonder Nelson was pickled.

And now I've managed to upgrade to Blogger Pro. How painless. Yet more stuff to learn. As a special treat I shall share some of my Perl code with you. So much better than poetry.

my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new;
$tree->parse($CurrentFile);
print "\n\n";
print "---\n";
my $row2 = ( $tree->look_down('_tag', 'td' ) )[26];
print $row2->as_text();
print "---\n";
print "\n\n ---------------\n";
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
localtime(time);
$tdate = sprintf "%02d/%02d/%4d %02d::%02d", $mday,$mon+1,$year + 1900,$hour,$min;
print $row2->as_text();
my @word = split(" ",$row2->as_text());
print @word[6]; #the one we want
$tree->delete(); # clear memory

There. Wasn't that nice? However, my Blogger Pro spellchecker seems a little confused. I shall have to teach it how to parse Perl and C++.

So I have the Israel Ring code in . I'm not in the ring just yet. I've become more confortable with HTML than six months ago. As a long time programmer, I thought HTML was for those strange people who use Macs and make flashy graphics. Now I see there's quite bit to it. Learning perl is staggering along. Now there's a vast subject all in in its own right. My current home project is an automated googlefight program. Currently it registers the total number of hits each day for Linux and Windows. When I figure out PNG graphing and promote this blog spot to Pro, I'll put the graphics up.
My Perl work project was an automated builder for our client software. That's working now.

Lynn, the creator of Blogging Brits has pointed out that Blogging Brits has been nominated for an award this year. Check here for voting details of all the entries. Now, do I qualify as an Israeli blog as well? Yes , I think I do.
I was rejected from blog snob so I'm feeling a little tender about rejection. We'll see.

Blogrolling has also been nominated in two categories. I don't have any of the nominated best of the year blogs either in links or favourites.

As you can see from the link down to the left, I have found a new religion. Thanks to Blogger heads who also has a snazzy picture showing the relationship between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush. Viewer discretion advised.

Tripewriting by Shelagh (how do you pronounce that?) is the blog of the day.
Ahh, if only I could follow her example.

Listening to the BBC this morning while driving to work, I heard an interview with some body from the US State Department. At the conclusion of the interview he said 'When the President decides in a few weeks, then we will see who is with us and who is against us.' Presumably he meant France and Germany.
Anyway, my mind flashed back to the last Gulf War. I was surviving yet another contract with a large UK defence company doing work for a large US defence company. At the time, the French Defence Minister was a founding member of the French-Iraq Friendship society. He didn't (gallic logic) see any conflict with this and prosecuting a war against Iraq. He was replaced much to everyone's relief before the active war started.
Well, I was wondering. If the US needs allies, perhaps it could look elsewhere? Possibly the South Koreans would like to help out. After all, they did in Vietnam and were well regarded.

Lastly, Hezbollah has got frisky again with another artillery attack. Now there's an enemy I wouldn't mid seeing the back of.

Joe Job

‘The impersonation of an innocent victim by a spammer. In an attempt to retaliate against those who report them for their abuse, spammers have been known to impersonate the spam reporter, trying to get the victim's Internet service terminated... even going so far as to send out millions of fictional, forged emails. Believe me— I know from personal experience that the results can be hellish. This kind of attack is a violation of virtually all Internet service providers' contracts, and can even be illegal. This is one reason why giving your address to the spammer for "removal" can be dangerous... especially if the spammer can associate your removal request with an abuse report that you previously filed. This is also one reason why spam-reporting services like SpamCop remove your address from ("munge") spam reports you send through it. See also mail bomb.’

Thanks to Cluelessmailers for the definition.. That site is worth keeping around in your links somewhere.

This is currently what is happening to me. Somebody is forging my hotmail address when sending multi level spam. How do I know? What happens if hotmail decides to cancel my account?

I’m getting ‘bounce’ messages my inbox. These look like

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.isni.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

someisp.net>:
Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)

I’ve changed the real email box that didn’t exist. Some of these bounce messages contain the original sent email with headers. Here’s a sample: @ symbols have been replace with to avoid mail scrapers.

Received: (qmail 24607 invoked from network); 19 Jan 2003 07:34:28 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO 13-mo3-4.acn.waw.pl) (62.121.107.13)
by 63.219.183.61 with SMTP; 19 Jan 2003 07:34:28 -0000
Received: from mx1.hotmail.com (dynamic-62-99-161-252.804.inode.at [62.99.161.252])
by 13-mo3-4.acn.waw.pl (Postfix) with ESMTP
id 725EC161BE; Fri, 17 Jan 2003 08:18:41 +0100 (CET)
Message-ID: <000066013a19$000056a5$00007272mx1.hotmail.com>
To: hotmail.com>, ifilm.com>,

From: "myemailaddress hotmail.com" hotmail.com>
Subject: Had Enough of the Corporate Scene, But Too Smart for Franchise or MLM Deals? HSWV
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 21:12:32 -2200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reply-To: myemailaddresshotmail.com
jggkrfh: boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0039_01AS14.Cui3215C0"

.here is the secret:
If you decide to make $5000 in your first 30 days! PART TIME! - ...just read on...

Looking at the second Received line, I can see an IP address. Using Sam Spade, a general purpose internet tool I can check that the IP address does in fact match the provider unknown (HELO 13-mo3-4.acn.waw.pl). This is an open mail relay in that it will accept email from anybody. In this case a spammer has found it and used to to try and hide the real sender. He/she has also used by hotmail address as a forged from address so I get all the bounces and complaints by people who think I sent it.
As the Url end in .pl this email relay is in Poland. This list of countries tells me what the suffix means.

This ip is now listed in 'relays.ordb.org' and any ISP using this blocklist will refuse email from this source until the owner either fixes it or the universe dies a natural heat death.. Anyone can submit ip addresses for relay testing on that site.

There is another IP address in the email. This is 62.99.161.252. Using Sam Spade, I can find out that this belongs to 'inode.at'. That's in Austria. Using the 'whois' command, I get this:

01/21/03 09:37:58 whois 62.99.161.252@whois.ripe.net

whois -h whois.ripe.net 62.99.161.252 ...
% This is the RIPE Whois server.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% Rights restricted by copyright.
% See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/copyright.html

inetnum: 62.99.161.0 - 62.99.161.255
netname: INODE
descr: DIALIN ACCESSERVICE 0804 Dynamic
country: AT
remarks: infra-aw
admin-c: PA64-RIPE
tech-c: MG121-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
notify: christian.steger@hm.inode.at
mnt-by: AT-INODE-DOM
changed: christian.steger@hm.inode.at 20021130
source: RIPE

route: 62.99.128.0/17
descr: inode Internet
origin: AS8514
mnt-by: AT-INODE-DOM
changed: christian.steger@hm.inode.at 20010820
source: RIPE

person: Peter Augustin
address: Feldgasse 3/3
address: A-1080 Wien
address: Austria
phone: +43 1 4094909
fax-no: +43 1 409490949
e-mail: acpinode.at
nic-hdl: PA64-RIPE
notify: acp@inode.at
mnt-by: KNIPP-NOC-MNT
changed: at-dom.adminnic.at 20000330
changed: at-dom.adminnic.at 20000405
changed: hostmasterknipp.de 20000613
source: RIPE

person: Michael Gredenberg
address: Feldgasse 3/8
address: A-1080 Wien
address: Austria
phone: +43 1 409490990
fax-no: +43 1 409490949
e-mail: mikeinode.at
nic-hdl: MG121-RIPE
notify: mike@inode.at
mnt-by: KNIPP-NOC-MNT
changed: at-dom.adminnic.at 20000330
changed: at-dom.adminnic.at 20000405
changed: hostmaster@knipp.de 20000613
source: RIPE

So, mike at inode.at gets an email with a complaint. No reponse so far. I also check a web site with the domain name. That site lists known abuse email addresses and I find 'office at inode.at' and 'postmaster atinode.at'. There doesn't appear to be anyone home there either.

Lastly I check the openrbl site to see if inode.at have any history. Sure enough, they're listed at one block list as being unresponsive to open mail relays. Unless they take action, the IP addresses they own will appear on more and more public and private block lists and they will start losing legitimate customers.
If you've been patient enough to get this far, you're probably asking me 'Do you do this all the time?'. No. Only for special cases. In general I use Spamcop for most of it. I take the trouble to manually track about 1 in 50 spams. I also have two pet spammers but that's another story. Sending a complaint to an ISP is called a 'lart'. That is an acronym for 'loser attitude re-adjustment tool'. To date, I have been instrumental in shutting down around 40 web sites and having around 70 people lose their internet accounts. That's over a three year period. Some more professional spam fighters manage thousands.

idleworm: games - gulf war 2 A fascinating and funny Flash game. Could have done without the missile strike on Haifa though.

Dan Bricklin Log. Nice to see one of the computer greats blogging. Dan invented VisiCalc, one of the first killer apps.

Matthew Yglesias. Another blog of the day. I've been reading this for a while and it also makes it into blogroll. 'Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist'? Hmmm....

More on Yossi Beilen…

During the evening, he spoke passionately on why it is important to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. By the year 2010, Jews will be in a minority and the world will not tolerate a Jewish minority dominating a Arab majority in the West Bank and Gaza.
Last year was one of the lowest for aliyah in Israel’s history. He pointed out that a majority of Argentinean jews did not come to Israel. They went to every other country in greater numbers. He was appalled that Israel could be seen as less preferable than Germany (2,700 Argentineans emigrated there last year).

He made an interesting point on the longevity of the forthcoming Knesset. If he is right, and Labour will join Likud in a coalition, then there will be no more elections for 4 years and 10 months. If, in all that time, there is no agreement, then it will be near to impossible to reach one.

He and Professor Chazan both argued that an agreement is ‘doable’. Not easy, not without problems but far, far more preferable than doing nothing.

An evening with Yossi Beilin and Naomi Chazan

I got to ask to ask the last question. ‘Is Oslo dead?’ It was also the last question answered by Yossi Beilin. In a sparsely attended hall in Tel Aviv he answered that it was legally dead in May 1999 when it should have been replaced with a final status agreement. Dr Beilin also answered my other unspoken question when he said there was one major mistake in the Oslo agreement he regrets. That is that there was a five-year gap until the final talks. This, he said, gave extremists on both sides time to kill it. He particularly mentioned Bibi Netanyahu.

Both Dr Beilin and Professor Chazan spoke on why vote Meretz and why you should not vote for anyone else. Interestingly he predicts that after the elections, the Labour central committee will vote to join a Sharon government and offer Mitzna the choice of coming aboard or taking a one way train ticket back to Haifa.

Beilin’s central theme was the need to reach a final agreement before the Jewish people become a minority governing a majority in the West Bank and Gaza. He spoke movingly about the alternatives bringing an end to a Jewish democratic state.

I noticed a few sly barbs coming from Professor Chazan his way. She pointed out the advantages of never having been in the Labour party and of having a degree in political science rather than biochemistry. She went through the social legislation that Meretz has introduced in the last Knesset and what was planned for the future.

Dr Beilin also spoke on why he thought it was a mistake for Labour to join a unity government and why Shimon Peres made a mistake on accepting the post of Foreign Minister. He also explained why he left the Labour Party.

Finally, in answer to another question, they both pointed out that now there is no direct election for Prime Minister, after the elections. The President, after consultations, will ask the member of the Knesset most likely to be able to form a government to try and form a government. It doesn’t have to be the leader of the largest party. This idea was rejected during the progress of the amended election law. Another proposal, that the leader of the largest party become the Prime Minister was also rejected at this stage.


Later this week, Shinui. At last I get to find out what they stand for (apart from not liking the religious Jews here). I hope to attend a Likud meeting if I can find one.

Israel Waits for Godot. Nice article by Thomas Friedman on the Israeli elections.

For example:

Maybe the most telling fact in this coming Israeli election is that at this moment of intense crisis, a tiny Israeli party, Green Leaf, which advocates the legalization of marijuana, could win one or two seats in the new parliament. Green Leaf's motto might as well be: since every other solution has been tried and failed, why not just get high?

and...

Israelis are skeptical about peace right now, but they badly want a border," says Moshe Halbertal, an Israeli philosopher. "They want a border so that any Palestinian in the West Bank can't just walk over and kill an Israeli. They want an end to this war of all against all where there is no front line. They don't expect peace with the Palestinians, but they want a front for the war with Palestinians. They want a border for a Jewish democratic state. . . .

It's worth going through the sign up hassle if you don't already get the IHT.

Spam raises it’s ugly head above the parapet again. It’s bursty these days. Some days I just get one or two, but other days it can reach 20-30. This isn’t many. Some of the inhabitants of nanae (news.admin.net-abuse.email) get over 100 per day. These are long standing email accounts over ten years old, which appeared on one of the original ‘million CDS’. This was a famous spam tool sale of scraped emails offered for sale. Nowadays you can buy a spam package consisting of 10 million plus emails, a spam generator and a mail open relay list.

Pink Contracts

Here’s an extract from the Acceptable Use Policy from a USA based ISP.

Spamming -- Sending unsolicited bulk and/or commercial messages over the Internet (known as "spamming"). It is not only harmful because of its negative impact on consumer attitudes toward BIGISP, but also because it can overload BIGISP's network and disrupt service to BIGISP subscribers. Also, maintaining an open SMTP relay is prohibited. When a complaint is received, BIGISP has the discretion to determine from all of the evidence whether the email recipients were from an "opt-in" email list.

Sound all right doesn’t it? But there is nothing in this clause that stops you from hosting a web site with this company and sending your emails via another ISP or open relays. This is called ‘spamvertizing’. Some companies in the past have written ‘pink contacts’ which allow a customer to spam via another network and the ISP will turn a blind eye. Some ISPs will terminate a web site very quickly when this kind of behavior is detected. Some prefer to cash the cheques.

The blog of the day is Stand Down - The Left-Right opposing a war in Iraq. I shall read with interest. This also makes it into blogroll.

Somewhere. on my hard drive, I have a partial list of 100 things I love about Israel. I was reminded today that I haven't finished it but here are two that will go in.

The view. From workplace, the air was clear and still today. I could see Mount Hermon very clearly from the balcony which must be over 100 km away. Apart from the Alps , I don't remember seeing a distance like that before.

Windows. Unlike the dohble glazed windows in the UK which were a pain to clean, especially the upstairs ones, here, they lift out of the frame for easy cleaning. The doors have lift off hinges as well which is stunningly useful when oversized furniture needs to be moved.

I was following the excellent series of articles from The Head Heeb, and then came to Letter from Gotham and finally ended up here where transfer was discussed..

Well, there is a political party in Israel that supports transfer and you can find it on this Moledet web site.

In a comment on Kesher talk, I mentioned that transfer has already started. A series of advertiements in local Arabic newspapers has offered help to any family that wishes to emigrate to another country and Moledet will help. A friend brought me a cutting and a translation. Reading further on the page also mentions.
' 1. Voluntary transfer – we will encourage the Arabs of Judea, Samaria & Gaza to desire transfer, through financial means and other incentives.'

The other is happening right now. The last part is more interesting. It talks of 'transfer of rights', not 'transfer of people'. The idea is that Arabs who choose not to join Israel will have Jordanian citizenship. A lot of them already do and Jordan's nightmare is an outright war with tens of thousands streaming across the Jordan. Jordans very firm view on all this is that the 'Palestinians are Israel's problem'.

Fianlly, Moledet says 'we can establish two parliaments, one in Amman and one in Jerusalem'. What's with the 'we' stuff? I thought there was one. Not brilliant but better than most Arab countries.

Private Eye Pseuds Corner. Ahh , good old Private Eye. When it comes to exposing pretentious rubbish they are good. I mean, who would write this and expect to get paid for it?
The state of holiness that Catholicism inspires has parallels in the state of wholeness that holistic therapies promise. Both require faith and the suspension of disbelief. Both use oils, water and incense to induce a sense of mysticism. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. Carole Caplin scrubbed the toxins from Cherie’s body.
MARY ANN SIEGHART
The Times

Iain Murray, the author of the well known blog The Edge of England's Sword has been fired for blogging from work. Elternal perdition to his employers, It appears there was no warning.

This is upsetting. I do many things at work and at home and the two blur interchangeably. In the meantime, I shall continue with my efforts to learn Perl and refrain from posting from work.

This spiked article on blogging says a lot. Link from Jezblog.

For all that, I actually like blogs. Really I do. Some are funny, some alert me to interesting articles, some even say original things. But the biggest revolution since the birth of the printing press? Blog off.

and:

Glenn Reynolds, an American law professor who runs the hugely popular weblog InstaPundit (6), claims 2003 will be the 'year of the blog'. 'For Big Media', says Reynolds, '[blogging] is going to produce an increasing degree of either conscientiousness or paranoia, as it becomes apparent that the megaphone now works both ways…' (7).

So, everyone, get out there and blog.

The New Math from the NYtimes says something worth reading.

But if there is no separation, by 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories. Then Israel will have three options: The Israelis will control this whole area by apartheid, or they will control it by expelling Palestinians, or they will grant Palestinians the right to vote and it will no longer be a Jewish state. Whichever way it goes, it will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

Quite right. Nobody who loves Israel should vote Likud. It clearly states on the Likud web site that they will 'pursue the goal of a greater Israel'. This will mean the end of Israel as a democratic modern state.
One other point from the Likud web site. They are committed to a strong economy with the use of 'cheap labour'. Now, who are those people working on Sharon's ranch? Oh look, they're not Israelis. The standdard riposte to this is 'Israelis won't do dirty hard work'. Oh yes they will. What they don't want to do is to do it on starvation wages just so businessmen can make greater profits.

As expected, the new flyover has managed to move the traffic jam some hundreds of metres. I shall have to find another way round.

The Invisible Hand is the blog of the day. I wish I could sign up for Yaccs commenting. He also mentions:

There are snowmobile drive-through lanes in Sweden and cashless technology programs in America.

Snowmobile McDonald drive ins? Shurely shome mistake....

Today we are blessed with a visit. In the North of Israel, we don’t see as much as we would like of the top people in Israel. This changes for one brief day as Mitzna, Arik Sharon (the PM), the finance Minister, the Transport Minister, the Infrastructure Minister and various others all drop in to officially open a new flyover to the north of Haifa. This has been built mainly to move traffic congestion a few hundred meters up the road and came with a new bus station and railway station nearby.

On this flyover is the name of the place in extra large English, Arabic and Hebrew letters. When I first visited here I learnt that the Hebrew word Quiryat meant place. So we have Quiryat Yam which means place by the sea, Quiryat Motzkin and so on. No longer. I see that the official spelling is ‘Qerayot’. Now I would not have commented on this except that I would have expected the word Junction to follow. This mass of concrete is sitting on one after all and I thought that the Hebrew word Sonnet meant junction. Wrong again. It’s an interchange now. How can I tell? Because some soul has written ‘Intchng’ in 40 cm high letters on the side. As an abbreviation, that is offensive. What was wrong with ‘Junction’ apart from having one more letter?

Lastly, as you will discover if you need to tell a taxi driver where you want to go and this was the destination, don’t bother. This whole junction has been known as ‘check post’ ever since the Mandate days when British soldiers manned a permanent guard there and presumably will continue to be called that for millennia to come.

Enetation is down again so no comments. I think it's time to upgrade but I'm not sure in which direction. Blogger Pro perhaps?

‘Her indoors’, my friend, confidante, lover and sometime heavy duty critic once pointed out that she ‘preferred men with long delicate hands’. Slightly hurt, I gazed down at the offending things at the end of my arms and mused on my evidently peasant upbringings. Well it’s true. I may be semi civilized now, and have my head in a book when it’s not in front of a computer but my early life was different.

Owing to an unexpected vacancy in the parenting section of our family, the need for the kids division to ‘help out’ took on a more urgent note. This mainly involved many hours with a wheelbarrow, pitchfork and the partly digested excretions from ruminants. Later I progressed to the joys of hammers, screwdrivers, lambing, and, joy of joys, power tools. When cars arrived in my life I was unfazed by expiring engines, gearboxes or the problems involved with flipping a car onto its roof at speed. Everything could be mended. Things could be fixed.

This, however, took a toll on my hands, which at the best of times, looked like I had been laying barbed wire without gloves. When girls finally and belatedly arrived on the scene, I was completely flummoxed. Even having an older sister had not prepared me for the difficulties involved in a relationship.

My hands have improved but females haven’t changed much. Still difficult to understand but oh, so delightful when you get the hang of them. I just wish there had been a Haynes manual for them.

Now this site/blog is interesting. Plenty of good stuff about design/usability of Web sites. Click here to see Adrian Holovaty's site. We even share a name.

Heavy articles from Baraita. IE users may need to resize to see it all. The post on LOTR is well worth the read. I agree with her point on the elfs arriving at Helm's Deep. This is todays blog and will probably make it to a perm link once I've got them reorganised away from blogrolling.

Recently, the lecture I went to, featured Theodore Tso. In it he said 'The USA Patent system is broken. This web site explains why he is right. A USA company PanIP claims it owns the patent rights to 'conducting transactions via a computer'. It is suing small companies across the States who can't afford a legal battle.
Similarly, Divine claim to own the idea of a shopping cart on web sites. Both these claims would founder if challenged in court as there is plenty of prior art examples before the patent was granted. I don't know what patent clerks are doing in the USA but they need to wake up. Note. neither of these patents is valid in Europe/Latin America or Asia with the exception of Japan.

I see