I’ve always had an interest in my family’s history and geneology, and a few years ago I went around to all my grandparents and wrote down everything they could tell me about the family history. I initially misplaced the notebook I used, and although it turned up a few months later by then I had lost momentum and never got around to getting all my notes, diagrams and pictures all consolidated into one (digital of course) location. A few recent events have compelled me to finally move forward, so I dug up all my old notes, found a good open-source family tree program that runs on PHP and mySQL, and have started compiling data.
Now there are two sides to my family – the German side, and the sephardi side. The difference between the two is like night and day. On the German side I have specific dates for nearly every birth, death, and marriage since the mid-1800s. Both my grandparents, then in their 80s, could give me exact birthdays for every one of their parents, siblings, aunt’s, and uncles, most of whom had long since perished. On the sephardi side (Spanish descent hailing from Kastoria if you were curious), I had 3 living relatives who don’t even know their own birthdays. It’s not due to age related issue either – my grandfather essentially made up his birthday at Ellis island. My great-grandmother and her twin brother always argued about when they were born. (His response was that she was vain and lying about her age. Her response was that he came out first, so of course he was older). My grandmother appears to have different birthdates on her driver’s license and passport, and she claims to have been born on a third date.
Last fall Peter Jackson was on a panel at comic-con with James Cameroon and was asked about the lord of the rings trilogy coming out in 3D. He responded that he had pitched the idea to the movie studio, but they didn’t feel that there was enough of a 3D market (yet), and it was not hapenning. Apparently a small film called Avatar has changed that. It is now being reported that the success of Avatar is prompting studios to go back and resissue movies in 3d, and apparently lord of the rings (as well as some little indy flick called “star wars”), is on the list. That event alone may cause me to go and buy a new TV. LoTR was awesome, and being able to see it in 3D would be incredible. Imagine the balrog in 3d. How about Shelob the giant spider? How about even just the fireworks in the shire at the beginning? The best part of course will be the battle scenes that made LoTR great int he first place. Think about the battle of Minas Tirith – it’s essentially a circular fortress built on a mountain, so a 3D rendering will give it the depth it deserves. When the ring-wraiths fly overhead, they will actually fly overhead! There is also a lot of artillery and rock launched from catapults which will look for more realistic, and the charging Mûmakil (elephants for the rest of you) would look incredible. The battle of helms deep may always get the top billing in the LoTR trilogy, but the battle of Minas Tirith will be the scene that makes it worthwhile to get a new TV.
Now of course is time for the other shoe to drop – they’re not expecting it to be out till 2012. Arrrggghhh.
China has made it clear that if you want to do business in China, you play by Chinese rules – and that means things like no access to western media sources, information on falung gong, or anything else the Chinese government finds “objectionable”. In an effort to reach as broad an audience as possible, Google has voluntarily censored search results in China. Today Google announced that Chinese hackers had been targeting Google in an effort to spy on Chinese dissidents and human rights activists. In response, Google has basically decided to stop being a patsy and will no longer censor Google China. If this means they lose the Chinese market, so be it. Awesome.
I was digging through some old family photos when I came across this. It’s the program for an American Army run Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sevice in Passau German in 1945, which was attended by my grandfather.
It wasn’t long after I bought my house that I started plans for wiring it with cat5e cable so I could have an in-house gigabit Ethernet network. I made my first cable run several months ago and then got distracted by other things and never got around to finishing it. (Literally – I never terminated one end of the cable). With a long weekend coming up, and someone around to watch Aliza (that being my long lost wife), I’ve decided to do more work on it this weekend.
My method of making the cable runs has been to use the existing phone lines (which for some strange reason are run on RJ21 cable) as guides by tieing my Ethernet cables to them, and then pulling. This of course means that when I’m done there would be no more phone lines in the house, but I figured I’d just run two ethernet cables to each room and wire the second one to a standard phone jack. (Using cat 5 cable for interior phone wiring is apparently standard these days anyway). While we do not currently have a landline phone, it is possible that we will eventually, and I figured at the least I want it to still be there if/when we ever sell the house because future owners might consider copper wiring to be a necessity. However I’m starting to rethink that. When Aliza is old enough to demand a phone will we get a landline phone or just go for a VoIP phone for the house or a cheap cell phone for her? If we sell the house in 5-10 years will anyone care about the phone wiring or will everyone be on VoIP phones for houses by then? Add to this the fact that AT&T has apparently told the FCC that it’s time to set a deadline for eliminating all land-line phones. One fifth of US homes have no land line phone, and that number is only growing. So is it worth the effort to rewire the house for traditional phone lines or is it just a waste of time?
Yesterday while I was playing with Aliza I flipped on the Giants-Panthers game. The Giants scored a touchdown, and hearing the announcement from the TV Aliza promptly said “touchdown!” and then broke in the first line of “Fly, Eagles Fly“. Later as I channel surfed over to a different channel as Star Trek: Generations was on. Aliza saw Jon-Luc Picard on the screen, pointed and said “Daddy!”
The real reason I bought a house was so I would finally have something to wire up into the ultimate nerd-home. I’ve been slowly assembling the home theater. The TV has been in place since the beginning of football season. I got a blu-ray player on sale after thanksgiving, and recently set up a Home Theater PC to watch internet video on. The best part? I can now watch my entire star trek collection on the big screen TV. My entire collection of divx discs will play on the blu-ray player, and CBS Video has the original series online for free. (Which ties nicely into Windows Media Center). Now, every night can be a star trek night.
Since facebook includes a “status” field people can edit, it becomes natural that some people want to update it as soon as their relationship status changes. Some people take that to the next level. Seriously – just watch this video.
I just finished The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman about centralized and decentralized organizations. In it he relates a funny anecdote from the early 90s. It seems that Dave Garrison, the then CEO of Netcom, was meeting with some venture capitalists in France to try and raise money. Since it was the early 90s he spent a lot of time explaining what the internet was. One of the investors asked him who the president of the Internet was. He tried explaining that there was no one in charge – it was a decentralized system run on a set of standards that everyone simply had to conform with to join. The French investors didn’t get it. Dave tried every metaphor and explanation he could think of – a network of networks, all the shoppers in a store reorganizing themselves, and everyone sharing the burden of communication. The French investors, convinced that either Dave was withholding information from them or that their message was being lost in the translation kept pressing – who decides?
Eventually Garrison, not wanting to offend the investors (whom he was trying to convince to hand him millions of dollars), gave in. He admitted right then and there than he was the president of the Internet.
This morning in shul I was playing with Aliza in the kids room, and she brought over “Hanukkah ABCs” for me to read. I obliged and was promptly met with the following:
A if for Antiochus, the Syrian king who….
Say what? Antiochus was a Seleucid Greek, not a Syrian. I don’t think there even was a place called Syria at that time. I also remembered back to my younger days – ancient history isn’t really taught at the elementary school level, and I remember never being really sure who exactly it was that the Maccabees fought against. Was it the Greeks? The Syrians? The Romans? The Borg? To that end, I now provide you with a very short answer to the question of just who was it that the Maccabees fought, and how it fit into the larger historical context of the time.
Alexander the Great was a Macedonian Greek who conquered a huge empire – from mainland Greece to the edge of India. When he died in 323 BCE, he had no obvious successor. After a few decades of fighting amongst the various attempted successors, his empire eventually fell out into four stable pieces – The Ptolemies, Seleucids, Pergamon, and Macedon. (map here). For our purposes the Ptolemies and Seleucids are the most important ones. The Ptolemies controlled modern day Egypt and parts of Africa, and the Seleucids controlled the area made up of modern day Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. These two powers did fight numerous wars with each other, with Judea caught in the middle. Antiochus III was the Seleucid king who conquered Judea, and was actually a pretty nice guy to the Jews. It was his son, Antiochus IV, who ultimately outlawed Jewish ritual and tried to force the worship of Greek gods in the temple. This angered the Maccabees, and the whole Hanukkah story occurs. As a postscript to the story, the Seleucid empire didn’t have too much longer to live, and just a few decades later it’s power was negligible, although they continued in independence until Pompey the great decided to turn them into a Roman republic in 63 BCE.
The main issue of course is Antiochus. He was part of a line of Seleucid kings. The Seleucid empire was clearly Hellenistic, and was a direct descendant of Alexander the great. Calling anyone at that time a Syrian seems to be a bit of s stretch as Syria is a far more modern construct. I really have no idea how the whole Syrian thing crept into the elementary school curriculum. (Subversive anti-Syrian propaganda perhaps? :-)). The Jews were fighting against one of the Hellenistic Greek empires that existed at that time.
update: In the comments Yehuda points out that Herodotus used the term Syrian as early as 5th cent BCE, so my initial comments above may have been somewhat overstated. Thanks for the correction.
Every so often Google maps and streetview find some of the most interesting things. They are usually posted to the internet, and then removed from Google within minutes (killjoys). This one however, may be one of the best ever. (Google already took it down, but you can see remnants from here and here and the original people took screenshots).
That event alone may cause me to go and buy a new TV. LoTR was awesome, and being able to see it in 3D would be incredible. Imagine the 
