Kadima’s recent “victory” (meaning barely 25% of seats, the largest bloc in the deeply fractious Knesset) combined with the discussion of 1990s crime perception in the US in Freakonomics, has reminded me of one of my most uncomfortable political agreements with the right-wing in Israel: the need for a wall.
A friend, Heather, recommended a book called Freakonomics–she suggested it focused on incentives, agency conflicts, game theory, etc., which is the part of economics that really interests me. The human behavior part, rather than market forces or industrial organization. A surprisingly fast read–I started and finished it on the three-hour…
Off to a good start already: wasn’t paying attention to the time and walked out of the house w/ four minutes to make it to the Bullet. I can bike it that fast, but not run it. Definitley not with luggage. And in the rush, I forgot to bring a…
All I can say is that it better NOT have been a firedrill. I just spent the last 30 minutes standing outside of Oracle Plaza. When I went out, it was just a few drops of rain here and there. It picked up a little bit, so I wandered under…
Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect, gave our keynote address at TheServerSide Java Symposium today (coverage in InfoWorld). Ted’s remarks reminded me of a fourth characteristic of open-source–or at least, of successful open-source projects–that I neglected to mention in my post on what makes open-source. Whether a project makes a tedious,…
InfoWorld reporter Matt Asay posted a column recently about Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE), our lightweight database product built on our commercial database engine that is completely free to develop, deploy and redistribute. In addition to saying some very complimentary things about a colleague of mine, Monica Kumar, Matt…
A brief addendum to my post about selling my Dad’s stamp collection. The man saved everything. He even saved an envelope I sent him when I was in the West Bank. Now, before I left Ramallah, I had planned to buy a few blocks of Palestinian Authority stamps, because I…
I’ve been debating about putting my last name and hometown on my blog. Identity theft is such an issue. Anyway, still won’t mention it in the blog, but it’s sorta obvious from the name of the newspaper… But my resolve evaporated with this interesting article by Marjorie Censer in one…
That’s what this fellow, Wayne Gehret, said of my father’s stamp collection when I sold it to him today. Joe started collecting as a kid in the 1930s, steaming canceled stamps off of envelopes and pasting them into a hand-made book. For many of the stamps, he had actually cut…
When I got in to P——-n last night, mom and I talked about my recollection of Dad’s last moments. Much to my surprise and amusement, she had a completely different take on what happened, even down to how much time elapsed (she thought it couldn’t have been two or three…
