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.

I've added a few new features for you beloved diary readers. Yesterday, I activated the ability to add your own comments to each entry. I don't know if anyone will actually care to use this, but it was requested by a vocal minority.

I also enabled a mechanism that allows you to automatically get new entries from this diary in your email inbox without having to visit this Web site at all. You just need to ask me, and I'll add you to the list of people who receive these updates. Safta Sari is the first person on this list since her difficulty in reading the Web site was the motivation for this feature.

Finally, to get the above-mentioned email feature to work the way I wanted, I enabled an RSS 2.0 feed in addition to the RSS 0.91 feed that was already available. If you don't know what RSS is, it's a way to get information from a source that provides new pieces of information on a regular basis (for example, a news publisher) without having to manually check a Web site to see whether or not any new information has been published. A good RSS reader (like RSSOwl) can aggregate the information provided by all your favorite news sources, providing you with a convenient way to read what you want without wasting time on things you've already read. Recent versions of well-maintained Web browsers like Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari also include features for working with Web sites that provide information through RSS.

After over a year of procrastination, I've placed the finishing touches on version 1.5.2 of Moosic. There's nothing terribly exciting about this version, which is why it incubated for so very long. I didn't want to release a new version until I'd added a significant feature or two. My particular goal for this release was to implement support for a configuration file that would alleviate the need to specify options on the command line if you happened to always use the same options. The most significant reason why I never did this illustrates what is probably the weakness in this program's development model. Since the only real motivation for development is to satisfy my own personal wants, any issue that doesn't affect me personally probably isn't going to get that much attention in the long run, no matter how much a particular idea appeals to me theoretically. And since I, the author, get to set the built-in defaults, I'm just never going to care *deeply* about making it convenient to override those defaults. I suppose the exception to that rule is the program's documentation, but we can attribute the painstaking work done in that area to my own private little obsession.

The other reason why configuration file support never got very far was because I wanted it to have a future-proof design that would be able to cope with some fairly major internal changes that I was planning without plaguing the user with backward incompatibility when those changes were actually effected. And now that XMMS2 is on the horizon, I don't think that I'll be making any radical changes to the design of Moosic any more. All the really nifty-keen features I had been contemplating for Moosic can and should be implemented more effectively with XMMS2's client-server architecture, so I think my programming energy would be better spent by pooling it with the XMMS2 project in the form of MadCow and whatever patches I might feel like contributing.

Of course, I'm not exactly abandoning Moosic. Although I hope to replace it in my daily life with MadCow and XMMS2, the day that will happen is still firmly in the future. And I'll remain committed to fixing any bugs that are discovered and to adding minor features that people might suggest.

After Tisha B'Av ended, Avraham invited me home to break the fast with Becca and Ashira, as we found ourselves both at the Abuhav shul for evening services. Together with Guy and Tiferet, who were visiting from Jerusalem for the "holiday", we dined upon Becca's delicious delicacies, including her amazing-as-usual challah. A fun time was had by all, and I got the opportunity to be impressed with Rebecca's and Avraham's newfound obsession with the Kotel camera, continual live video and audio straight from the Wall, running full-screen on two monitors. There was still quite a crowd leftover, apparently lingering even after the completion of services.

After we began to wrap up the meal with the introductory Psalm of the after-meal grace, we were surprised by some guests who were lured in by our singing. These were apparently some friends of Avraham's parents in Chicago who were touring Israel. I gathered that they had contacted Avraham earlier and were showing up for a promised tour of the gallery. The delightful part for me was that these were the four most obviously gay men I had met in a long, long time. The first two, Ronnie and Greg, were the really obvious ones. I may kvetch about the pitiful weakness of my gaydar, but they set it off with clear bells. The other pair, Barry and Richard, were the more subdued type. I thought at first that Ronnie and Greg were a couple, but I turned out to be wrong as Greg later mentioned his partner back home in the States (and how he didn't want Greg to be coming home with his arms full of gaudy and ostentatious Judaica).

After the guests were settled, we quickly finished bentching and chatted a while before migrating upstairs to the gallery. I found it amusing to be in a rare moment in my life where the queers in the room outnumbered the straight folk. It was a fun feeling for me, being part of a belonging kind for once. So when the gallery tour was about to begin, I inserted myself into the group. After all, I never had actually fully participated in one of Avraham's famous gallery presentations, despite how long I've known him. The tour was as enthusiastic and exciting as rumors had promised.

After we left the gallery, I offered to show the our intrepid tourists to their next destination as it was in the same direction as my house. After diffusing the customary protests against going out of my way, I became a bit of an impromptu tour guide myself, explaining what little I knew about the various sights around town that we passed, and just generally chatting and schmoozing. Too bad the gang left the morning after for Jerusalem, as I wouldn't have minded hanging out a bit more.

...or, you know, the night after tomorrow night; because Tisha B'Av.

The abandoned buildings that dot the countryside around here do make me wonder, why did people build these isolated structures so far out of town? Were they places for shepherds to stay out overnight? Were they out-of-the-way storage locations? Did some people simply prefer a home that was separated from town by an hour or so's walk, a sort of early precursor to suburbs?

In any case, I kept following the white-blue-white trail as it ran closely parallel to the creek. When the trail started to diverge from the creek, I decided to stray from the path and stay close to the water. I followed a faint pseudo-path that was probably created by animals. It very quickly led through a thicket of bamboo, where it started to narrow abruptly. It was a tight squeeze, but I managed to slip past the bamboo and continued following the damp bank, which seemed to have a defunct cement aqueduct running along its side. The treetop-filtered twilight was the perfect frame for the root-encrusted hollows that decorated the terrain.

Almost out of nowhere, I spotted a perfectly plump blackberry. I was a little surprised since all the blackberry vines I've seen elsewhere have been too dry to put out more than the feeblest berries. Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised since it was growing right next to a creek instead of in the middle of a summer-baked valley. Even still, there wasn't an enormous amount of fruit on the vine. I took the one berry, which was scrumptiously tart, and went on my way.

After a rather short while, I exhausted even this ghost of a path. Since I was almost completely out of daylight, I crossed to the other side of the creek, where I correctly expected to find the white-black-white trail running parallel to the other side of the stream. Getting past the streambank was a sticky task, however, hedged cunningly with blackberry brambles. My scratches from the thorns are almost completely healed by now, but that negotiation did require no small amount of patience and perseverence.

By now, it was all but completely dark, but the scenery was no less beautiful in the starlight. I continued on the winding trail until I encountered signs promising the Meron river valley and a parking lot. I rested for a bit in an the boughs of an old tree growing out of a concrete platform next to a dilapidated building whose purpose I couldn't discern. The tree's bark was worn smooth, presumably by a myriad of passersby climbing it over the years. The road I chose for the way back turned out to be a detour that took me pleasantly out of the way, through a valley that was separated from the one in which I started by a single large hill. The path was mostly quite wide and well-lit by the moon. A few parts were so heavily shaded by trees, though, and I made very handy use of my cell phone as a remarkably effective make-shift flashlight. I eventually found my way back to the part of the creek where so many trails cross and reversed my original route back toward home.

This leg of the trip is generally the least fun, as it's all uphill back to the town limits, with the glare of the artificial lights interfering with my night vision. I finally got home quite exhausted, my pants legs smelling heavily of licorice from shortcuts through some herbaceous fields.