On Sunday, the Palm LifeDrive that I'd ordered a week and a half ago arrived, tossing me into a tizzy of "new toy!" excitement. This tiny computer is a lot like any other Palm Pilot or similar PDA, but it's packed with high-end features like a 4 gigabyte hard drive, a (relatively) large color screen, sound recording, the ability to play music and videos, and (most importantly) wireless communication with other computers. Together with a fold-out IR keyboard accessory, this is meant to provide me with a computer to use for work when I'm away from home, since I have concluded that every affordable laptop in existence is far too heavy and fragile for me to enjoy as a travelling companion.

I've spent the past couple of days getting comfortable with it and my intended use scenario. This scenario primarily revolves around using pssh to invoke a Unix terminal to my main computer so that I can use the same exact programs that I normally use for work. The two hurdles to overcome, of course, are the reduced screen size and the fact that no keyboard can ever be expected to live up to the beloved tank of a 1980's-era IBM keyboard that I use on my desktop.

Surprisingly enough, the size of the screen doesn't present as much difficulty as you might think. If I set the font correctly, I can fit a very reasonable amount of text at a size that is just a hair above the barest threshhold of comfortable legibility. A more serious issue is the fact that when I use my preferred color scheme of white text on a black background, the screen becomes quite reflective. I'm not yet sure whether black text on a white background is a lesser evil than the leering specter of my own spectacled visage intruding upon the task at hand, but I have hope that I'll be able to get the hang of refocusing my eyes so that the reflection appears less obtrusive. A dark screen also makes it far too easy to be distracted by the air bubbles that are trapped under the inexpertly applied plastic screen shield which came with the device. I'll probably just have to bear the waste and replace it with a new shield. However, the biggest difficulty with the visibility has more to do with software than hardware. The terminal emulation of pssh is less than perfect, meaning that screen redraws don't always happen as they should and junk characters are left lying around the terminal. Tweaking my GNU screen settings might alleviate the glitches, and if not, I can always hack on pssh's source code to attempt some bugfixing.

The primary difficulty with the keyboard is not its size, as it was quite well designed to maximize key size while minimizing chassis size. I've gotten used to its general form factor after only a few days. Also, the fear that PalmOS would be difficult to use without constantly resorting to use of the stylus on the touchpad was quite unfounded. The keyboard driver features the ability to use nifty key chords to interact with the PalmOS user interface elements and quickly launch programs of my choice. Only older, crufty applications have trouble with keyboard-only usage. The annoying aspect of the keyboard's layout is its placement of the key for typing the slash (/) character. It is placed immediately to the right of the right-hand shift key instead of immediately to its left. The normal position of the slash key is occupied by the "up" arrow key. As a long-time touch typist, moving a key that's important to me is uncomfortable. But as an adaptable human being, I'm learning to live with it. At least it's not nearly as painful as the bizarre shape of the Return key on my sister's PowerBook (with its Israeli keyboard layout).

The only really serious problem with the keyboard is the fact that its "Ctrl" key is effectively useless in my primary application: a Unix terminal. Pressing Ctrl+x, for example, simply sends "x" to my terminal. I'm still not certain how much of this problem is to be blamed on the keyboard driver and how much is the fault of pssh. But in any case, it's a critical hit to me as a heavy user of GNU screen, which is controlled almost entirely through control-character sequences. Fortunately, pssh features a work-around which allows me to make a successful saving throw for half damage. It has a menu-item shortcut which sends valid control characters to the terminal, and my keyboard has a special "Cmd" button for activating an application's shortcuts very easily. The "Ctrl" shortcut was originally bound by pssh to Cmd+t, but I found the ergonomics of such a keystroke chord far too contorting for such a frequently needed function, so I tweaked the source code of pssh and recompiled it so that Cmd+z was bound to the desired shortcut. (Being a programmer is very nice at times like this.) Cmd+z is a much more comfortable combination since the keys are right next to each other. It's still not as good as having a normal Ctrl key, but it's acceptable.

One particularly nice side effect of having the LifeDrive around is that I'm no longer musically tethered to my desk. I can roam around my apartment and beyond, listening to music with my high-quality earbuds instead of my tinny-sounding speakers, and as loudly as I like without disturbing my neighbors. A good music-listening experience is actually quite important to my being able to work effectively, since my job is often too mechanical to sufficiently stimulate my brain into usability without the added spice of music. Because of this, I'm almost certainly going to have to purchase the deluxe version of Pocket Tunes. Although the basic version that was bundled with the LifeDrive is good enough for playing music that's stored locally on the device's hard drive, I have no interest in constantly schlepping large chunks of my music collection back and forth between my main computer and my handheld computer, especially since I can never predict what I'm going to want to listen to more than 10 minutes in advance. So the only reasonable solutions to my musical needs are to stream my own music via something like Icecast and to listen to Internet-based radio stations. And streaming music from the network is only supported by the deluxe version of Pocket Tunes. I've been using the 15-day trial of this deluxe edition, and despite my occasional surprise at it lacking some tiny little features that I would normally take for granted, by the end of the day it gets the job done very well.

Although the LifeDrive is primarily for work, it also promises to provide some very nice utility for me in other areas. I've already begun to enjoy the fun of playing little games, reading digitized books, and browsing the Web in a limited fashion while wandering around from room to room freely. Its ability to plug into any computer and act like a USB hard drive will make it blissfully easy to tote large amounts of data to and from other friends' and family members' computers over sneakernet. And I suspect I will also find it handy to be able to use my LifeDrive to read the memory cards from digital cameras.

While I'm generally happy with my LifeDrive, and I stand by my decision to stay away from the PocketPC platform, the weaknesses of PalmOS are not at all difficult to feel. Most prominent is its virtually complete lack of multitasking ability. Every time you switch to a different program, the previous program essentially quits. The impact of this is softened considerably by the fact that most applications are able to save and restore their state quickly and effectively, but an application like pssh maintains state information that is just too fragile to be maintained without actually running continuously. So I can't switch from pssh to another program unless I'm willing to lose my terminal session and log back in again when I want to return to it. Even within a single program, the severe inadequacy at processing information concurrently and asynchronously makes a task like Web browsing feel like an experience from ten years ago. I can only imagine the contortions that a program like Pocket Tunes must perform to continue operating in the background in a limited fashion, which is really a ridiculous fact when you consider that multitasking is a freebee for an application running under any modern OS. Listen up, Palm: you just can't deliver a Linux-based version of your OS fast enough. Don't drop the ball. In the meantime, I'll wait to see if a port of Familiar ever makes it to the LifeDrive.

All in all, I can deal with the few drawbacks to this handheld, and it fills my need for a mobile work tool effectively, while also being a fun addition around the house and beyond.

Thursday night, the third and final night of the Klezmer festival seemed a little less crowded than the previous two nights. Mark and I had spent the day touring art galleries in town, and so we were both well rested for the concerts of the evening. We started out at the stage near Rebecca and Avraham's house. The first act of the evening was very talented solo violinist. It was exactly what I was looking for in this festival, since I'd heard relatively little violin music so far, whether because there were fewer violinists this year or simply because of bad luck. Although this violinist was technically excellent, she didn't project a very charismatic stage presence so the crowd didn't seem as engaged as it could have been. She simply walked on stage after her introduction, played some songs wonderfully, and walked off.

This was a stark contrast with the next act, which was a brass band with at least half a dozen members. They prefaced their playing with a friendly introduction to the band to reveal some its character beforehand. Their boisterous playing expressed a style much closer to Louisiana Dixie than Klezmer, though they did include a good bit of singing in Yiddish. The real character of the band was a Californian who sang in English and played a washboard, a honky-horn, a kazoo, and a teapot (not all at once, but almost). Though they were good, it was too loud and brassy for me to enjoy for more than a few songs, and Mark was more interested in hearing Klezmer than Dixie anyway.

Further up the street was a big stage where a mother and son pair were playing accordion and clarinet, respectively. Mark had heard them last year and had liked them very much. It was hard for me to judge for myself, though, because either the sound engineer or the sound equipment for that stage was rather sub-par, and so you could hardly hear the accordion at all over the tinny interference. Despite this, the stage was still packed so tightly that there was no place to sit, and so we stood till the end of their performance. When the next band came onstage to prepare, I noticed an electric violin among the group. As interesting as that might have been, I had a bit of a lingering headache from the past day's heat and wanted to go someplace where I could sit down.

So we went even further up the street, where I heard a good violin performance playing on the speakers of a boom box set behind a CD vendor. The player turned out to be Ayal Shiloach, who is apparently famous enough to have his posters pasted up all over the place at the festival. The man selling CDs behind the table told us that he was currently playing on the stage up the street, so we hurried over to catch it. But we were a little too late, as Mark spotted him packing up when we got there, so we continued on to the next stage. There were no seats set up directly in front of the stage that night, but there were some seats to be had in front of the restaurants in the square in which the stage was set. After bumping into Avraham and Rebecca and giving Ashira a kiss-attack, we managed to grab a couple seats on the side of the square opposite the stage. The music playing was something that made a pleasant background for a light dining experience, and featured a mandolin. Mark treated me to a milkshake, forbidding me from paying because I was giving him a place to stay.

The top of the next hour rolled around, and my program guide told me that Ayal Shiloach would be playing again at the earlier stage. We were more successful in catching him this time. The tiny amphitheater was fully packed, but I resourcefully found seating with a good view in a small tree. Mark managed to follow me up with a bit of athleticism that was impressive for a 48-year-old. The show took its sweet time to get started, and while we waited a young lady asked me to take advantage of my position to snap a few pictures of the performers preparing on stage. More than a couple people also found our arboreal perch amusing enough to snap a few shots of us. The music was good when it finally started, and the musicians certainly knew how to please an audience. They played some original music, but more of the songs were popular tunes that everyone would sing along with. There was also a medley of the score from "Fiddler on the Roof". It was fun, but I preferred more technically challenging material over the popular ditties, so after the first hour of the show, I was ready to go home. Mark wanted to hear more, so he stayed on for another hour while I sat in bed and read.

All in all, I had more fun at this year's Klezmer festival than I'd had in previous years. Since I was living in town this year, I felt like I could browse and pick through the available performances with more leisure and more freedom to simply drop out and go home whenever I felt like I'd had enough.

My previously mentioned friend, Mark, arrived in town at around 5pm yesterday. He got a late start on his travels from Jerusalem because he got occupied with finishing up at his job, where he works overnight hours. Despite the fact that he hadn't slept for well over 24 hours, he still showed no inclination to sleep. I made chili for dinner and showed him how I did my job. He talked a lot about his workplace. He's a manager at a big communications company that has a big branch in Jerusalem. The work itself is pretty meaningless to him, and he's sick of being forced into the role of pointy-haired boss. Unfortunately, he's been completely unable to find opportunities in his original and preferred profession of social work in the several years that he's been living in Israel. Eventually, Mark got his work stress out of his system and he gave me a little gossip about the old neighborhood over dinner.

A little before 8pm, we could hear the preparations for some musical performances, so we went to the stage set up in the nearby miniature amphitheater to take in what the festival had to offer. The first program of the night on that stage was entitled "Niggun v'Agadah", meaning "Tunes and Tales". It started with instrumental performances from a clarinetist and a keyboardist, and after a short while they were joined by a storyteller. We stayed around long enough to listen to two stories and associated accompaniment and musical interludes. The storyteller had a theatrical flair that I found amusing. My Hebrew is good enough to have followed the gist of the stories, but not good enough to recount them in detail. The first was allegedly by the famous storyteller of the Eastern European shtetl, Shalom Aleichem, and was about his passion as a child to learn the violin despite parental opposition. The second story was about a group of Klezmer musicians who found themselves playing in a very non-Jewish venue and the hijinks that subsequently ensued.

I had to pee after the second story, so we broke away to return to my apartment, since it was close enough for me to prefer to avoid the port-a-potties and pay toilets that have been set up for the festival. As we approached my door, Mark confessed that his need for sleep had finally caught up with him. I thought it was about time. He thought there might be a chance that a few hours of rest might restore him enough to enjoy the final hours of the night's festivities. After putting Mark to bed, I went out to wander a bit on my own.

However, I didn't get any further than the little plaza in front of my apartment building. A bunch of my neighbors were sitting around the food stand I mentioned yesterday, and two were playing instruments. Mordechai was beating a drum and Moshe was strumming a banjo-like instrument of Turkish origin whose name is weird enough that it failed to stick to my memory. At first I just sat around and listened, but eventually I made an attempt to sing along with the tune. It was difficult to follow the slightly exotic melodic style, especially since the drum tended to overpower the stringed instrument, but I think I did a half decent job. Mordechai passed the drum to me after a while, and I later passed it along to someone else to head back to my apartment to fetch a surprise. Treading carefully so as not to disturb my snoring guest, I collected my kerosine bottle and fire-dancing accoutrements.

I returned downstairs, and without much introduction I started spinning my poi (a pair of chains with kevlar wicks on the ends) in time with the music without any fire. This built up enough interest for me leak out the fact that they could be set on fire, which generated more interest. I gave several burns worth of performance with poi, double staves, and single staff. My favorite is still the single staff, but I managed to discover some new variations on my two basic double staff techniques (in-sync double figure-eight and out-of-sync double-figure-eight) which looked pretty good from my perspective. It's pretty hard to keep your actual spinning in time with music, but you can compensate for this by carefully matching your footwork to the rhythm instead. A satisfying crowd was drawn by the impromptu performance. I'm sure they would have appreciated more of a spectacle, but I got tired, sweaty, and thirsty. I hung out in front of the building a while longer in hope of finding a second wind, but it didn't come so I meandered home.

I flopped into bed and read more of George Orwell's 1984. Mark woke briefly and we both decided that we'd rather stay in bed than go back out again. And thusly the night concluded.

Yesterday I helped Becca learn how to successfully shrink movies recorded with her camera, including an overview of the fundamental concepts of digital video encoding. It was a bit frustrating for a while, since Apple's QuickTime encoder seemed to think that her movies contained no audio track and MEncoder's Mac OS X wrapper is just generally rough around the edges. But we eventually figured out how to produce a file that balanced size and quality and compatibility. Afterward, she rewarded me with lunch at the Canaan Gallery where a couple of her friends work. We enjoyed sandwiches and quiche and a mango milkshake, while Ashira entertained us endlessly, snatching at everything within reach and blowing bubbles into her water bottle with a straw.

In the evening, the first night of the annual Klezmer Festival began. If you don't know what Klezmer music is, think of the sound track to "Fiddler on the Roof" and you'll have the idea. Lots of violins and accordions and clarinets in minor keys and either jaunty or schmaltzy rhythms. The name is a Yiddishized form of the Hebrew "Kley Zemer", meaning "song instruments", and Israelis tend to pronounce the word with three syllables like the original Hebrew instead of the two-syllable pronunciation I've observed among English and Yiddish speakers. I was given to understand that, unlike previous recent years, this year's festival would feature only actual Klezmer music instead of a mix of all sorts of Jewish music.

There are stages set up in the various public squares found around town, and most every stage is surrounded by clusters of vendors' booths which sprang up overnight like mushrooms. Spaces normally used as parking lots have been transformed into open-air oriental markets hawking wares ranging from comestibles to cheap flashing bits of plastic to apparel to tattoos to cell phones. Lots of local residents take advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunity by setting up amateurish tables on their doorsteps to sell cotton candy or popcorn or whatever else they can. I visited each stage in turn, listened to about one musician on each stage, and browsed the merchants. I didn't trouble myself to learn the names of the performers that I saw. The last stage I visited was the one right in front of Avraham and Rebecca's house, and after a truly excellent violinist finished his set the fireworks display started. It lasted for about 15 minutes, and my favorite parts were the blasts that left a gold glittery cloud lingering for about five seconds after the initial colorful burst.

When I got home, one of my neighbors was selling hot, home-cooked, Indian-style food by her front door. The pizza and beer I'd picked up by the first stage I'd visited hadn't quite filled me up, so I got a dish full of lentil soup, saffron flavored rice, potatoes, and a cup of chai.

I went shopping for a bigger fridge. The little counter-top fridge I've been using for the past couple months, while cute, just isn't cutting it. I can deal with its tininess, since a life filled with an excess of playing Tetris has trained me well in the art of efficient packing. But it just isn't strong enough to wage battle against the Israeli summer heat. After a day of heat soaking into the environment, its internal thermometer hovers around 20 degrees Celsius. The new fridge uses more conventional refrigeration technology rather than a dinky little Peltier engine. It should be delivered either tomorrow or Sunday. In preparation, I moved the dead washing machine that came with my apartment out of the way by sliding it next to the kitchen stove, providing a pleasant side effect of a little more usable counter space in that area.

I ordered a boat-load of computer equipment: including a Palm LifeDrive PDA, a keyboard for said PDA, a DVD drive, and a laptop hard drive to replace the one in my iBook that died. I reviewed the instructions for replacing the hard drive in an iBook: they're scary. I'm gonna need to find some rather uncommon tools for this major piece of computer surgery.

I noticed some platforms being built for next week's Klezmer Festival. I've started to steel myself for the frenzy that will suddenly overtake this otherwise incredibly quiet town. My friend Mark Heilman is planning to come to the festival from Jerusalem and I'll be hosting him.