The Rationalist Manifesto

We’ll be signing the contract on Saturday and hopefully also moving in!

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We were called yesterday by the landlords of the lovely Elsternwick apartment, and they wanted to meet us today to review us in person. We met them (a very nice young couple, by the way) and while they informed us that they still must go over all the applications, they believe ‘it looks promising’. We’re very happy but cautious as we don’t want to be disappointed… Wish us luck!

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Five days have passed since Shelly’s surgery and she’s almost completely free of pains. Tomorrow it is back to work for both of us, and we hope Shelly will not have too much of a hard time working all day.

We saw several places for rent over the weekend and have applied to one apartment in Elsternwick that we particularly liked. We hope that our application will be a successful one as we are growing tired of staying at the hostel, although it is a friendly place. George was kind enough to write us a reference letter and we hope it will aid our chances.

This is going to be my last week at HSB and I’ll be starting my new and exciting position with DiUS Computing on the 2nd of April. The guys there seem like a very smart group and I believe it is going to be a pleasure and an interesting challenge to work with them.

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Shelly is back at the hostel, resting and recuperating and I’m back to work. Now available in the usual channels…

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Shelly is being discharged soon, she still has pains but a bit less than yesterday and hopefully will feel completely well in a couple of days.

Thanks for all the well wishes by eMail, phone and SMS- we appreciate it very much. We’ll be able to reply to the eMails soon, but it is a bit difficult from the cellphone.

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Shelly is out of the operating theatre and is resting in the room. The operation went very well and she is in very little pain. Shelly is being a very brave girl :-)

I’m posting this from the phone, so it may be a little weirdly formatted, my apologies.

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Excellent article about technological superstition by Jeff Raskin.

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We are still looking for a new residence, but our applications keep getting rejected. Some in our Israel-bound family is blaming anti-Israel sentiment, but that is not the case. I believe it is just that it is a landlord’s market at this point and the fact that we have no Australian history. Landlords don’t want risks, and they won’t take one on a couple from the other side of the world when they have many other applications to chose from.

Shelly is due in surgery this Tuesday, and will hopefully be out of the Hospital by the next day. She has had just two more attacks since the original three, but the latest one was the worst she has had so far. The solution is in sight, so we’re just hoping for no more attacks until the procedure.

All hostels in Melbourne have been booked solid for the Gran Prix weekend some months in advanced and Mary and George were extremely kind to invite us to stay in their house while they are abroad. We’ve been staying at their very lovely house for the last two nights and will return to the Green Backpackers hostel this afternoon. Although Mary and George invited us to stay the full ten days, we rather got used to our little room at the hostel and would rather be in our ‘own’ place.

The night between Thursday and Friday was quite unpleasant for Shelly as the A/C broke in our windowless Hostel room and she couldn’t sleep. Naturally Shelly was too tired to go to Friday night dinner at George and Bella’s who kindly invited us.

Yours truly, however, slept through the heat like I sleep through any other calamity. I almost got into trouble as I tentatively accepted George’s invite before consulting with Shelly. I had no idea how tired she was as we left at different hours to go to work…

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Maybe I’m misguided, but I couldn’t find a mention of the embarrassing ambassador in any of the Israeli news sites nor in their archives.

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Some of you may have heard about Amie St, the online DRM-free music store that recently signed major artists (such as Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Paul Van Dyk and others) to sell their music without any of the foolish DRM restrictions that the iTunes Music Store imposes on music bought there.

Following the coverage on Digg, I’ve decided to try out the store. I was pleasantly surprised with the selection and quality of music there, but I was encountering some trouble listening to samples because of the high loads the site experienced following the news coverage. Frustrated, I wrote to their customer service about my hardship–

Not even twenty five minutes later, I got a response from an actual person, Elias Roman, who apologized for the issues, offered credit to my account and indicated what Amie St was doing to resolve the issue:

“What is your user name, I’ll add some credit to it so you can
enjoy it when the samples are working (We are actively adding more
servers to our grid to get rid of that issue).” - (Partial Quote)

One eMail from me later (with my user name), and no longer than fifty minutes from the time of my initial contact with them, the following message landed in my inbox:

“Hey Tal, I added some credit to your account. The site should be
running alright by now, I would definitely check out Au Revoir Simone,
the Shake, Waterlog (definitely check out The Onion by waterlog).”

While I am still having issues at time listening to the samples (which might be related to my own Internet connectivity) they are less prevalent than before and I’ll definitely check out and purchase music from Amie St, if only because of their remarkable customer service.

From my short time at the site, I already found some songs I like– allow me to recommend the song Unravel from the group Drawing Down the Sun.

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