Fantastic coffee roasted in the Noga section of Tel Aviv. I barely even knew that was a neighborhood.
A Billion Indians Can’t Be Wrong…
A recent trip to India for a friend’s wedding revealed absolutely nothing. India is a fascinating mess with huge potential (that’s what they all say). In a way, it’s like Israel, in that some things make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but yet still seem to work. But India is much more of an extreme. Quite amazing that the country somehow functions with the mass of rickshas, cows, motorbikes and people competing for the same ground.
What’s certain though is that India is a very photogenic country. Even in Delhi, which is disgusting and overcrowded and smells rank, there’s tons to see in the everyday milling about of the populace.
Israeli Streets Finally on Embedded Google Maps
After years of seeing blank maps whenever you zoom into Israel, finally you can see street names and all other map data that you could see only on maps.google.com. This is a great step forward for Israeli consumer-facing websites, which can now use the industry standard map API instead of horrible YNet Maps and AtlasCT.
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Mazal Tov.
A Better Apartment Search for Israel
Why is it that with such an advanced tech sector, the Israeli consumer web industry is so underdeveloped?Â
Every time I go to one of the Israeli classifieds/apartment listing sites, I’m always shocked by how horribly unusable they are. You always hear that “location, location, location,” is the most important factor when considering where to live, and it’s even more true in Tel Aviv than anywhere else… There are a couple of major listing sites (Homeless, Yad2, WinWin) and even one aggregator, Zeh V’Zeh. Zeh V’Zeh is the best one and most usable, but still doesn’t provide any sort of useful API, or even an RSS feed… Even map search is hard to come by, with the most notable Kan Garim being pretty poorly executed.
Basic things to look for:
- Better quality data
- Search results on a map
- Easy way to filter/update results (think kayak.com)
I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot lately, and it seems that the biggest issue is data quality. After all, what use is a blurry picture of the bathroom sink?Â
This warrants some further investigation…
A Billion Indians Can’t Be Wrong…
A recent trip to India for a friend’s wedding revealed absolutely nothing. India is a fascinating mess with huge potential (that’s what they all say). In a way, it’s like Israel, in that some things make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but yet still seem to work. But India is much more of an extreme. Quite amazing that the country somehow functions with the mass of rickshas, cows, motorbikes and people competing for the same ground.
What’s certain though is that India is a very photogenic country. Even in Delhi, which is disgusting and overcrowded and smells rank, there’s tons to see in the everyday milling about of the populace.
Only in Israel…
Working in Herzliya Pituach
It might as well be Palo Alto*, with a few distinctively Israeli touches. The best one is getting off the shared taxi on the highway before the bridge, where the passengers climb over the guardrail and climb down to the road in order to reach the main street.
* Not that I’ve ever actually been to Palo Alto…
5 quotes by the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf: I don’t like programming, and I’m not a real programmer. - Axon Flux // A Ruby on Rails Blog
- I really don’t like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.
- PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?
- I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers. We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don’t care about this crap at all.
- There are people who actually like programming. I don’t understand why they like programming.
- I’m not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say “yeah it works but you’re leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.” I’ll just restart apache every 10 requests.
via en.wikiquote.org
Hat tip @igrigorik
via axonflux.com
And so it begins…
Today I quit my job. It was anticlimactic, really. Much moreso than I expected. Since arranging my aliya and getting confirmation from Nefesh B’nefesh, I planned to leave in July, so the end of June seemed like a good time to finish up my job. Originally, I was going to tell my boss next week, but this afternoon she called me into her office to talk about “my new remit,” or basically, how my role was going to change following the recent round of layoffs. After some talk of some newly reacquired tedium that would be basically tantamount to a demotion, I decided that it didn’t make much of a difference whether she found out today or next week. So I told her then and there. It’s official, my aliya has officially entered the execution phase.
