Mishkin Berteig - Just Some Random Geek.

My full name is Mishkin Ben-Garry Vyordan Berteig. I have another home page. About Me

20030815: Well, we were hit by the blackout here in Markham. Power was down for about twelve hours. Not much to say about it - I was working on my computers when it hit and then I took a nice break. Christian was over at the time, and we went and fetched Jeanne so that we could eat dinner together. I had to pull out my Walkman so that we could listen to the radio to find out what was happening. CBC went off the air for a little while. And I got to bed fairly early (about 11pm). The kids seemed almost completely unaffected by the whole thing.

Of course, an event like this gets me re-interested in environmentally friendly housing. Here's a link to a company which sells solar heat and electric systems called Planetary Systems. This web site about a solar house is very interesting. If you don't know much about electricity, a normal lightbulb uses between 60 and 100 watts (W). If you use it for one hour, it uses 1 Wh of electricity. A computer and monitor typically use about 200 or 300 watts combined, and a hair dryer might use 1200 watts (but only for a short time!). Most televisions use power even when they are turned off in order to be able to display an image quickly. Try unplugging your television for an hour and then plug it in, turn it on immediately and see how long it takes for the picture to get to normal. I have also read a very interesting book about the whole subject (not just power) called Greenhome (CA$). It is about a house built in suburban Ontario using local materials, energy efficient construction and appliances, and ecologically friendly materials. They even considered the lawn (and found a strain of grass which does not require watering nor mowing - I want some of that!).

Melanie and I also have realized how ill-prepared we are for a longer emergency. We don't have any significant store of food or water, nor even a first-aid kit!!! Time to get serious! One interesting thing that I do have for power outages is a 200W inverter for my car. Great for long trips with a laptop or for recharging batteries, in a power outage.

I finally reached 192lbs this morning!!! It took three weeks to go from 193 down to 192. And of course during that time, I fluctuated back up a few pounds now and again. However, my minimums and maximums keep getting lower! Goal for next week: 191. By the way, 192 is the lightest I have been in at least 2 years. My maximum was about 212 so that's 20lbs lost! Oh, and I did 60 situps yesterday too. Now I just have to get to 50 push ups and I'll have reached my goals for the week.

I'm converting Melanie from windows to Linux. I've installed Red Hat 9 on her computer. I've figured out how to get my shared windows drives mounted on her machine. She normally uses only Mozilla, Open Office.org and Dreamweaver for the stuff she does. Dreamweaver is going to be a bit of a problem. Aparently some people have been able to get it working with Wine, but success is mixed. We'll see how it goes. Her computer is actually a little unusual in that it has 1GB of RAM - one of my motherboards blew up so I transferred the RAM to her machine. I also have to get wireless working on it since it is in a different room from my servers and she doesn't like the idea of exposed cables running all over the place. My friend Jesse tells me that it is easy.

20030813: I've been pretty busy lately thus my lack of posts here. I've been putting the Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah on the Kuro5hin diary section and there has been some interesting response and a little discussion. I'm not particularly suprised by some of the negativity: it is a fixture on many online communities. Nor am I suprised by the relative dearth of serious discussion, due to the religious and spiritual content. Nevertheless, I feel like I am learning about how to encourage discussion. One thing that is critical is to reply quickly to comments. Another is to provide my own comments about the passage that I am quoting. We'll see how it goes.

Recent events in my life? Not much.

I've been working from home learning about IBM's WS MQWF product (workflow). The basic ideas are really simple. I got stuff downloaded and installed, I've read a bunch of the documentation, and I played a little with the tools. More playing to do over the next few days. Fundamentally, I find it pretty boring.

I bought an interesting book: "Classical T'ai Chi Sword". I'm pretty excited about trying it out. I bought it because the explanations and pictures are of excellent quality and because I don't think I'll find a DVD to teach it :-) Christian has agreed to do it with me. We might also start an Aikido class together.

I've been appointed to a Baha'i committee. I can't go into a lot of detail because we deal with some confidential things, but the experience (three meetings so far) has been very educational. I am learning a lot about my own personality and some of my limitations and I am very excited about the future of my service with the committee. After one meeting, Christian (who also serves on the committee) and I stayed late to visit with Enayat Rawhani, a member of the National Spiritual Assembly. He used to live in Great Britan and he told us some very interesting stories about his service. One really basic point he made was that if we accept the call to service, Baha'u'llah will assist us in fulfilling our duties. This is the message of my favoriate prayer (from my memory):

In the name of God, the Victor of the most victorious, proclaim: God will assist all those who arise to serve Him, and no one is able to deprive Him of His majesty, His sovereignty, His dominion, for in the heavens and on the earth, and in all the realms of God, He is the victorious and the conquerer.

Melanie and I continue to work on our personal finances. Last night we updated our balance sheet and started work on an income statement for July. The big news is that we seem to have positive net worth! However, it is still so small that a slight emergency could easily obliterate it back to the red.

I've added a "Top Movies" section to my list of stuff over on the right. These are my all-time favorites that I have actually watched multiple times. There are lots more that I would love to put on the list but I'll just put them here for now since I'm limiting myself to the top three: "The Last Emperor"(CA$), "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"(CA$), "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"(CA$), "The Fifth Element"(CA$), "The Fugitive"(CA$), "Lady Jane"(CA$), "Koyaanisqatsi"(CA$), "Office Space"(CA$), "The Princess Bride"(CA$), "Pulp Fiction"(CA$) etc.

20030809: Well, it's the wee hours of the morning now. Alexei left for China (via San Francisco) this morning (the 8th). I drove him to the airport. We left my house at 4:30am!!! Suffice it to say, I went back to bed when I returned home. This afternoon Melanie and the kids and I went to get a chiropractic treatment. We go to a Dr. Charleton in Toronto whom we have a long relationship with. He is both an excellent chiropracter and becoming a bit of a pal as well. Maybe we will invite him and his family over to visit sometime. Anyway, today he did more adjustments on me than I have ever had before. I mentioned to him that I have been having problems with my left foot ever since my visit to New York with Alexei and Cal. So he did some manipulations of my foot - cool stuff. Also, my right hip has been giving me some minor problems when I do my stretches every evening. So he did some stuff to it too. Also my mid-back, neck and ribs all of which have been giving me trouble. I may have mentioned this before, but Melanie and I reserve the use of chiropractic treatment to when we have significant pain that we feel needs to be relieved quickly. However we both try to do various exercises to avoid the use of chiropractic. I have a small set of stretches (neck, back and legs) and situps and pushups. Melanie does yoga or ballet.

We bought three DVD's today: What Women Want (CA$), The Color Purple (CA$), and 12 Monkeys (CA$). I've only seen What Women Want and I think its a fairly good romantic comedy. Melanie really likes it.

Yesterday I figured out how to set up my computer with 4-speaker surround sound. Star Wars Episode II sure sounds good!!! My newest computer has up to 5.1 surround capabilities by "overloading" the integrated sound card jacks. Alexei let me use his computer speakers so I set those up as my rear pair.

20030805: Arg... lots of days gone without writing!!! Well, another month has passed and it looks like August is set to be a pretty good month. I should be starting my new project sometime in the next few weeks (I hope!) and that will mean some more travelling. In some ways I miss it. I really like seeing new places and I have to admit that the aloneness is sometimes nice. However, if it goes on for too long, it gets really hard.

Alexei is going to China in a few days. We have been spending a lot of time together working on a giant Lego spaceship with some really cool features. I'll take pics soon. There's some neet stuff we are doing with pneumatics.

Last week Melanie and I didn't get around to working out our weekly todo lists. We still had our meeting on Sunday and we are now back on track. My todo list for this week is pretty substantial. One thing that looms large is that my Mozilla installation is broken so that I can't send email. That sucks big-time!

Over the weekend my family came down from Sudbury for a short visit. On Saturday evening we had a big dinner party with Mom, Rob, Lex, Kristine, Celine, Benny, Linda, Fanny, Christian, Jeanne and of course the kids and Melanie and I. It was a lot of fun. After dinner we played some games including rummy (the card game) and Scrabble. It was one of the worst Scrabble games ever - the top score was 115. I've played games where all the scores have been over 200. The last half of the game was painfully slow.

Today I went on a good starter bike ride. I haven't used my bicycle in any serious way since 2000. So although I've taken little jaunts on it now and again, they have always been physically easy. Today I rode to a mall about 15 minutes bike ride away. Up one very long gentle hill, down again. The ride was nice and my thigh muscles are a little weak to show that I actually did something. Definitely not bragging here about my cycling prowess :-)

I bought the DVD "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" (CA$). Melanie and I really like romantic comedies. We've heard some good things about this one. We'll see.

Older entries: October 2002, November 2002, December 2002, January 2003, February 2003, March 2003, April 2003, May 2003, June 2003, July 2003, missed Sept., October 2003.

Top Sci-fi and Fantasy:

1. Ship of Magic (Robin Hobb)

2. Songmaster (Orson Scott Card)

3. The Real Story (Stephen R. Donaldson)

Top Software Development Books:

1. Agile Software Development (Alistair Cockburn)

2. Software Craftsmanship (Pete McBreen)

3. The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)

Top Movies:

1. Run Lola Run (CA$) (with Franke Potente)

2. Strictly Ballroom (CA$) (by Baz Luhrmann)

3. Groundhog Day (CA$) (with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell)