Last Friday my company updated its Priority installation to version 23.1,
as required by the new Israeli regulation regarding invoices over 25K NIS. I
won't go into all the problems that we faced but fixing them took a great
deal of time. On Monday, I along with several other people, finished work at
22:40 pm, only 6 hours after my normal finishing time. Some of the people
involved will be compensated for the overtime, whereas others (including me)
won't. There are few more changes and additions that I want to make today as a result of the past week's experiences.
More importantly, as I wrote a few days ago, a date has been sent for my doctoral viva exam. In spare moments, I reread my thesis; I have to admit that I was quite impressed. Yesterday I wrote to my supervisor, asking for a meeting a few days before the exam when we can go over what the examiners are likely to ask. During the previous exam I was asked several times why I chose something, so the thesis rewrite included in advance my rationale for whatever choices I made. They may simply want to go over the changes requested in which case there will be no problems. Whatever.
I would like to include a 'Where are they now' epilogue to the thesis. This was brought home to me whilst reading about the fourth case study that was touted as being the validating study. Everyone was very enthusiastic about this enhancement, so it took me a while to realise months ago that it wasn't being used! Yesterday I wrote to two of the people closest to the enhancement, asking if they can explain to me why the enhancement wasn't being used.
Something else that I want to note is concerned with upgrades: I had made one or two changes to the standard Priority installation that I hadn't documented and had in fact forgotten. These changes were overwritten in the upgrade, so it took some head-scratching before I remembered what I had done. Private additions are upgrade-proof, but changing the standard is regarded as a no-no, exactly because because upgrades might well revert to the unchanged standard.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about taking a medicine for lowering the potassium level in blood. Yesterday I had the blood test to see what progress I (or the medicine) has made: the level has reduced from 6 whatevers to 4.7! Now the level is somewhat on the low side. As we are about to enter the Passover week and then I'm going on holiday for another week, the chances of seeing a doctor (either my GP or my nephrologist) in the near future are negligible. All I need to know is whether I should continue taking this medicine; either I take it once a week (as opposed to three times) or I stop. I sent an instant message to the nephrologist yesterday evening telling him of the result, although I didn't think to ask whether I should continue, so his response was simply "Very good".
The replacement ceremony for the Seder was held last night; the evening was split into two halves, with the first being 'edited highlights' from the traditional Kibbutz Seder, and the second being a performance by the musical group. The first half went on for quite a while; as a result, many people already had had enough and went home before we got underway.
That said, the audience that stayed very much enjoyed themselves (those that didn't enjoy presumably didn't stay). One of the mild criticisms from our performance last year was that there were no songs for children; we took this criticism seriously, and as we knew that there would be plenty of young children around at the beginning, we decided to start with two - later increased to three - children's songs - although played in our regular style. What impressed me was how the children got up and danced in the clear space in front of the stage. Some of the dancing was quite organised! This certainly didn't affect our playing.In retrospect, I wonder how they knew that live music is accompanied by dancing - presumably they learn this in kindergarten.
We had good on-stage monitoring that certainly helped me appreciate our playing. I could also hear myself clearly for a change. The middle of one song was slightly messed up - not that anyone in the audience would have noticed; it turns out that some of us (including myself, I confess) forgot how to count to 16.
Coincidentally two of the songs that we played have lyrics written by
Yehonatan Geffen, who died exactly one year ago. Retrospectively, I can say
that this is our tribute to him, but that isn't really true.
As the evening went on, the audience thinned out, leaving only the 'hard-core fans', so one might say that the average enjoyment level increased. Towards the end, the spotlights suddenly turned into a light show; until then they had only been a source of heat. I don't know whether the ambient lighting was decreased or the spots suddenly starting changing colour; whatever the reason, my sensitive eyes swiftly became blinded. During the brief pause between whichever song we had been playing and the next, I whipped out the sunglasses that I had kept in my pocket exactly for this reason. Some people thought that I was playing the rock star, but my family at least knows my problem with lights.
I saw at one stage the son of the keyboard player taking pictures of his
father but I didn't know that he also took pictures of everyone else
(including the above picture of me). Incidentally the backdrop was a huge
picture of the harvest festival, which is why it appears that there are
people behind me. At the end, when we were packing up, we were all called to
the front of the stage when a few people took pictures of us. This goes to
show that I don't know how to smile with my teeth, or maybe I'm simply
embarrassed by the few crooked teeth in my mouth so I learned how not to
smile with teeth. Mind you, the keyboardist (on the far left of the picture) also didn't smile with teeth.
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Title | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 |
|
Strumming the guitar - stage one | Programming, MIDI |
| 246 |
|
Books and films | Films, Nick Hornby, Time traveler's wife, Hugh Grant |
| 699 |
|
Researching during the Passover holiday week | DBA, Psychology |
| 944 |
|
Programmers in MOBI | Programming, Computer, Kindle |
| 1023 |
|
Donating blood (2) | Health, Donating blood |
| 1123 |
|
70 years of independence | Israel, Kibbutz |
| 1605 |
|
Yehonatan Geffen (1947-2023) | Israel, Yehonatan Geffen |
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