Happy 1st Birthday!!! This Blog is One Year Old!!!

Today, the 25th of January 2008, is Urikalization’s first birthday!!!

The past year has been a great experience for me. After a few years of ignoring the phenomena, I finally joined the Blogosphere. It was a great fun, even when it kept me up till 3:30AM when I need to wake up at 7:30AM.

During this year, I created 40 posts, that’s an average of about 1 new post every 9 days. I admit this rate of publishing is quite low relative to other blogs out there, but the truth is that many of my posts require me to do some research before I write them. Sometimes, while researching, I’m getting tossed to another subject, and completely forget about the original subject I was going to post about; sometimes, I simply don’t have the time or mood, and sometimes I’m just being lazy.

A few thousand visitors from all over the globe dropped by this blog, resulting in a total of 14,000 visits. Some of them even stayed for a while, read the posts, and left some very interesting comments. Got myself some great reviews, some surprising awards, and best of all - some new cool friends.

It’s hard for me to define Urikalization, but I think I like what it turned out to be.

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p.s. Why build a space shuttle when we can simply fold paper 42 times?

Sand and Steel - Field Artillery Training

I just came back from army reserve duty doing a few days of field artillery training. December is definitely not the best time of the year to hang around in the deserts of southern Israel.

Pros: the guys at artillery battalion 8157, the endless wind-sculptured untamed view, the undisturbed round rainbows, the unpolluted night sky, and the extra time to think.

Cons: missing the family, the extreme cold, the threatening weather, the dirt on your hands, the sand in your eyes, and the extra time to think.

My Hebrew is much better than my English (which I mostly got from watching episodes of MacGyver), but I think this came out ok:


~
The son of autumn starts to mumble, sending his amoeba fingers through a cloak of mist, reaching for the open neck of the unsuspecting sun too busy melting away into the hundred shades of the foam of the sea.

A long metal snake sails through the vast sandy plain claiming its territory with a spray of gasoline; its camouflaged scales are moaning and clashing in a mythical fencing duel of a thousand brave knights.

A frowning cloud roars an ice-cold command, and its army of drops silently forages the city, transforming stone into marble, asphalt into granite, a shattered street lamp into a treasure of diamonds.

The steel serpent raises its head to the rhythm of drums of adrenalin rush, praying to the lord of man-made thunder, spitting gifts from Prometheus across the pastel horizon, carving coffee trails in the pale porcelain of the Milky Way.

Motion-blurred figures sniff the wet ground through cracks in the pavements, howling to the ivory moon through arrow slits in their Babel glass castles. Skyscrapers piercing through heaven; angels bleeding tears into the winds of the west; chain tracks as far as the eye can see.

Rust in peace ol’ tank.
Scrub the gray ol’ man.
Let us have our rainbows again.

~~~
p.s. Isn't Natalie Portman the ultimate proof to Intelligent Design?

Cap’n, Me Cap’n! Yer Lads Be Jumpin’ Ship!

Assaf Koren a.k.a. “Suffik”, left my company this week to pursue his dream, founding a new startup named WebSpeakup. Apart from being a very good off-work friend of mine and a personal loss, it’s been the third ultra-talented guy leaving us in the past few weeks. “Boogie”, “Suffik” and “Shorty”, have all jumped overboard to their own startup boats, leaving the rest of us dangling on the deck of our old leaking tub.

It’s only a few hours ago that I finally realized why the big boss a.k.a. “Mr. close-talker” is unable to keep the crew together. It’s the language! It seems like no matter how hard you try, you just can’t inspire people talking in Hebrew. English is not bad. Old pirate English is even better. I’m sure Bartholomew Roberts didn’t have this kind of problems…

So boss, instead of just complaining like all the other employees, I’ve created this version of a motivation speech you can use. Just before you start, note that this speech was intended to be read out loud with an exaggerated accent, rolling R’s and a generally rough pirate-like voice damaged by long years of salty air and spicy rum…

Here goes…



~
Ahoy mateys!
Arrr, in th' scuttlebutt 't be whispered some lads among us be havin' swallowed th' anchor t' become lubbers fo’ a piece o’ eight! Garr, as yer cap’n 't shiver me timbers! Fair winds ye bilge rats, ye scurvy dogs! Th’ cat o’ nine tails shall flog ye, ye scuppered swabs! Avast me hearties, do nay follo'! Ye ol’ sea dogs, yer daddles, yer gulleys, yer barkers be raised! Oi, let th’ Jolly Roger be hoisted! Damn yer eyes, aye, t’ Fiddler’s Green we be sailin’!
~

Now try that in Hebrew…

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p.s. If i had a dollar for every time someone gave me his two cents…

Hello World - Birth of a New Blogger

To be honest, I’ve always thought blogs are just pink static HTML pages designed by 13 year old girls with pigtails writing about how they love Britney Spears. Although pictures of Spears are probably considered well spent kilobytes by most of the Y chromosomes on the western world, writing about her seems to me like a complete waste of good hosting server disk space. I never read a blog and never posted a comment in the first 32 years of my life.

The last war between Israel and Lebanon changed all that. During the war, I’ve found myself almost every night surfing several popular Lebanese blogs, exchanging thoughts and ideas, while we all tried to understand how things are perceived on the other side of the border, striving for a sane solution for an insane situation. Towards the end of the war I was drafted too. I've spent two weeks actually fighting in northern Israel, and another two weeks on the Golan height on alert. When I got back home to my family, I already knew - I will soon become a blogger myself. Oren Ellenbogen, a colleague and a friend of mine, with his excellent and popular blog on software development, gave me the last push, and the rest is history.

In this blog, I will present some ideas of mine (and others) about computers, biology, philosophy, mythology, physics, math and science fiction. I'll try and keep my posts short, sort of like an introduction to a subject, and hope for an interesting debate on the comments section. I hope you'll like my blog. If not, please tell me and I will delete all the text and just post pictures of Britney.

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p.s. PETA officials continue to insist armadillos do not taste like bananas.