Author: mradwin

Cooking Latkes and Listening to Falco

I’m in the kitchen cooking some Latkes for the first night of Chanukah. I think we should rename it the “Festival of Grease.” While I’m cooking, I’m listening to Falco: the Remix Hit Collection. It’s not his best album, but it’s got an awesome beat (maybe I’ve still got Blue Man Group on the brain). […]

Being a Vegetarian on Thanksgiving

Ok, so I know it goes completely against American tradition, but I’m going to be eschewing turkey for dinner tomorrow night. As we discovered last year at Thanksgiving, there are actually two mass-market turkey substitutes: Tofurky and UnTurkey. Last year Cousin Diana bought both, but there will be a smaller number of vegetarians this year, […]

Chanukah joke

A woman went to the post office to buy stamps for her Chanukah cards. She said to the clerk, “May I please have 50 Chanukah stamps?” The clerk asked, “What denomination?” The woman replied, “O my G-d, has it come to this? O.K. – give me 1 Haredi, 2 Hasidim, 8 Orthodox, 12 Conservative, 16 […]

Thanksgiving and Chanukah back-to-back

I’m quoted in today’s issue of Newsday in an article entitled Twice As Much Stuffing: Hearty appetites will be thankful for back-to-back holiday feasts. The story, written by Erica Marcus, is entertaining and well-researched. She even spoke to my favorite Jewish Holidays expert: Rabbi Michael Strassfeld (author of The Jewish Holidays: A Guide & Commentary). […]

Back at Home

After a long week in Vegas, it’s wonderful to be back in LA tonight. Ariella arrived late Thursday night, and we checked out of the Alexis Park hotel on Friday morning. We got a cheaper (and nicer) room at the Monte Carlo, so we checked in, walked along the strip, and enjoyed a leisurely brunch […]

ApacheCon: LinkRot

Sander van Zoest started off by describing three commond causes of link rot: Redesign/reorganize your website Switch dynamic page language (for example, from JSP to PHP) Typos (user hand-edits URL and makes a mistake) Consequences? Link rot can be distilled down to one thing: 404 == bad user experience. van Zoest spoke about some ways […]

ApacheCon: Thursday Lunch

I got together with Ze’ev Suraski for lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe (just across the street from the Alexis Park Hotel). We spoke about the matzav, how difficult it is to be a vegetarian during Pesach, Israeli politics, and our respective businesses. I got to practice a little bit of my Hebrew, but before […]

ApacheCon: Closing Keynote

In his keynote address “New Ways of Thinking About Security: Open Source Thinking in a Bunged-up World”, Richard Thieme spoke about the contrast between linear thinking and network thinking in society. He posits that the Open Source movement represents a new kind of freedom and that chaotic and continually evolving. Thieme spoke about how members […]