Weekly update: God bless America, and the rest of the world too

This is the end of a long weekend, the "Martin Luther King" day was celebrated today in honor of this great leader that was assassinated for having a dream. Combine this with the upcoming inauguration of the first African-American president and you have a reason for celebrating human rights and equality in the USA. Is it so indeed? I still feel that there is a large gap between the poor and the rich, where the poor are usually members of the minorities and the rich are members of the white majority, and perhaps this gap is even increasing. In one of Cincinnati's more upscale shopping malls, the Kenwood Towne Centre Mall, we saw that almost all the shoppers were white, while the people cleaning the food-court area were black. This gap, in my view, with its widening and almost unbridgable distance, is one of the biggest challenges that the American society needs to overcome. You could claim that Israel is following the same example, with increasing gaps between poor and rich. To this I can say that: you're right, it does, as mentioned before. However, it is still not as bad as it is here. And, finally, except the bad example we have with Ethiopian-born Israelis, the difference is not based on racial discrimination or the tone of the skin. Again, this might change in Israel as well.

One of the customs of a long weekend is shopping. We have decided to follow the tradition and went shopping today. Part of it was the tradition, but more importantly it was Circuit City going out of business sale. The prices were not as low as one would expect from this kind of a sale, but still, I managed to buy a good Sony Vaio laptop for less than $700 (after taxes). D couldn't find the media player she wanted to buy, but we decided to get one online. There's nothing like tradition.

The previous week was full of work and studies, but not only that. D started working for a company that her professors have found. The people in this company are certain that D and her friend will continue working for them during the internship part of their studies, which starts in the summer. There is no guarantee of that, though, and D continues to look for internship options. I handed my first assignment in the degree. As I mentioned in one of the previous updates, the professor teaching this course is K. I don't get to go to the lectures themselves because I teach at the same time. However, it is easy for me to ask the professor questions regarding the homework, and occasionally help him correct problems with the solutions manual that accompany the textbook. Therefore, it seems to be beneficial to both sides of the bargain (or as some call it "the win-win spirit").

I also had time to play a bit with Windows 7 beta on my old (very old) laptop. You can read about my initial enthusiasm, and later admission that my archaic laptop is not cut for this. As a new user of Windows Vista (installed on the laptop I purchased today) I don't think it is horrible, but it does become a pain when it requires you to authorize every single thing you do. It seems that Microsoft has decided to eliminate some of the pain in 7, and perhaps improve the performance of the operating system. My conclusion is: if you have time to play with it on a spare computer, especially if it meets the requirements, you are welcome to give it a shot. It will probably be better than Vista. Perhaps it's Vista Service Pack 2. It is definitely similar to Vista in many aspects.

This week was as cold as your mother in law. The temperatures went down to -19 Celsius on Friday morning, when we left to the university. This is subzero even in Fahrenheit's scale, in which the zero measures the freezing of a water / salt mixture. This may mean that the roads will be frozen even with the use of salt to prevent it. I think it has been below zero Celsius for more than a week now, with the occasional improvement when it snows. There isn't much snow, though, only an inch or two when it really snows. That's disappointing for me. I want some accumulation on the ground to play with the snow, build a snowman perhaps, and make a snow angel. So far all we have is a thin white coating, which doesn't thaw since it's cold, but doesn't accumulate either.

One final note regarding Gaza: I'm glad that this cycle of violence is finally over, and I do hope that Hamas has learned its lesson. I don't feel we'll be that lucky though. Only time will tell who has emerged from this conflict with the upper hand, and what will be the Israeli response to every rocket, which will undoubtedly be launched. As I have been saying in recent years, Israel should react with full power to any attack on its citizens. I think that if we had done so 3 years ago we wouldn't have to cause so much damage now. I also think that the international community has yet again showed that it doesn't mind when Jews are being killed. Luckily, we live in a conservative state in the US, where the general public supports Israel actions, but we did have a Palestinian display at the students' center at UC. As I understand, the Jewish and Israeli organizations are working to set up a pro-Israeli display to counter that one.