Mexico City

Hola,
Just found a place (hostel moneda), packed with tourists from all over (except for Israelis), with things going on every evening and lots of fun. Mexico DF is amazing, of course, and not as dangerous as I thought. Of course, there are streets where you have a 99% chance to get robbed in them at night, but people know where is safe and where is not so it's not really a problem. In the morning I wake up to the sound of the 'rochlim' on the street just below me screaming something like 'chekereke chekere' (Nadav, stop smiling), and they go on like that until it gets dark. Funny people.
In Ofer's house (a place that the Jewish community here offer for the Israeli backpacker), I got a lecture about the Haredim being the only Jews that are able to conserve Judaism. But despite their offer to join the local workforce (legally, as a Jewish trader), this place is really nice. They offer a nice place, things to think about and a worm feeling. Even though, I'll pass for now...
Next week I'll start sailing to Yucatan,

And now - some photos:
This is the new me you'll have to get used to (I know, something has changed... But can you tell what it is??? It took me 3 days to find out :)


They have really fast internet here...


Some Mexicans recreate an ancient indigenous ritual (The guy up there plays a flute, and the rest just spin around getting closer and closer to the ground... If anyone have an idea where I can store the movie - tell me about it):


This one is back from Chicago. Apparently they have built a pizza tower small brother. The scale is about 2:3.


You can find all kinds of people peeping in the holes of this box. This turns the whole scene into quite a funny exhibition. Try to imagine a fat woman crawl to peek at those holes beneath the shelf, or a serious businessman jump to a hole he can not reach (the Mexican are quite short. I feel like I'm above the average here)


This kind of p-touch appear beneath some of the holes. A free translation: "Paradise: After the expulsion from paradise"


And when you peek in this one, you can see this miniature sculpture:


You can also find this photo in one of the holes:

And the whole thing just make weird sounds... Real fun.

Some kids play in a fountain in the neighborhood where Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo lived:


And, I'm sure there were a couple of more pictures, but I just can't find them now... So till the next blog...

(And, I have just read this and this interesting articles, so allow me to share...)


Cheers,
Eitan.

Cyber tools for the road

My name is Eitan, and I use RSS readers for about 2 years. I know. I'm an addict :). But, no deny it's a simple idea that really boosted the effectiveness of my stralling in news sites and blogs. So, naturally, I was a terribly frustrated about all the RSS readers I knew. None of them offered a solution for a muchilero that travels between internet cafes in Central America. None until I met my little friend called BlogLines. Surprisingly, I quite like his interface, and - I can now read RSS feeds just like I read my mail. With any simple browser on the world.
Yesh!.
(Geeze, I can start writing "testimonials" for firms who need PR...).

Webshots also turned out to be more useful than I could imagine. Since almost any tourist attraction on the globe was already fed to Webshot's databases, I can now compare the ruins of Oaxaca with those of Yucatan with a simple query on their search engine. It does kill the surprise. (I think). No more arriving to this small vilage only to discover it is a thriving city fed up with tourists (or the other way round). Still, it is fun to do a Siyur Makdim before the actual thing.

I know I haven't put up photos yet, but they will come. Don't worry :)

Body Worlds

This one is not for kids. Beware.
Neither eat before you read this.

As many of my stories, this one has also began on the train. Luck has struck me with a beautiful 17 year old girl who was on the phone with... her boyfriend. Anyway, I happened to overhear her telling him about these bodies she saw on the Science Museum. "Interesting", I thought to myself. I know of only one exhibition in the world that shows bodies. And what are the chances of me and "Body Worlds" to be in Chicago exactly on the same time? Well. Luck has its own ways, and so I googled "Body Worlds" to find exactly what I wanted, which was - this. Hurray!
So, I took Mom and Dad to see a bunch of opened up, taken inside-out, real, plasticated body-parts of real (dead) human beings. And this description doesn't even start to describe the feeling of seeing it in real life. It surely was a mistake to get filled up in the museum's restaurant just before the exhibition. A big mistake. I could feel really good how the stomach worked while watching it opened up on display when we got inside. (I warned you this wasn't for kids...). Through the exhibition Gunther von Hagens starts with displays that look educational. For example, "the muscleman" is someone that was taken apart in a very interesting way. You can see the full skeleton of his body, and standing just 2 steps ahead of it, in the same position - his full muscular system. Breath taking. Another example is "the running man". A body of someone in a running position, whose muscles were taken apart and look like they were pealed from his skeleton, but left attached to it (of course, without all his skin getting in the way). Gradually the exhibition become less and less educational, and more and more artistic, as the "swimming woman", "the archer" and the "horseback rider" (with his pealed horse) appear in full size.
I just kept hearing people around me saying "so this is how it looks like", and people start to talk about their implants and their diseases. I got some myths shattered myself. Always thought that my kidneys are much lower, and that nerves aren't that visible. And the small intestine. Oh, the small intestine. Isn't as small as they drawed it in my "Human Body" book from 2nd grade. Fascinating.

Segways in Chicago

They offer here a tour of Chicago's architecture with a Segway for 65$(!). A group of 8 people with a guide for 2 hours. Here's the state of bureaucracy in Israel. My calculation shows me that this is simple money printing. Anyone joins me for easy money here? :)

(Didn't join the group, they were already closing when I arrived. And 65$(!?)).

Cheers,
Eitan.

Events account, April 11th.

Personally I usually hate these event accounts, so you can just skip reading this - I won't be offended. On the contrary. I will be offended.
Just kidding.
I won't be offended.
When I'll write about interesting stuff in this trip I'll warn you.

So, I took off at 5:45 Friday morning, heading to Chicago with Iberia (Spain's El-Al). For some reason, they decided that 50 minutes should be enough for switching planes in Madrid's airport. So, I landed 20 minutes late, just to get to gate 8A and have the flight attendants there telling me that my plane had already taken off (I tried really hard to hide my smile) - which means that I got to spend unexpected 24 hours in Madrid, all expenses included! A 5 stars hotel, 3 meals each with at least 3 servings and vino tinto (red wine), a free phone call to anywhere in the world, free Spanish lessons from the bored clerk at the front desk, and a metro station to downtown Madrid just a couple of blocks away. Kipi-ka-yey! Madrid is definitely my number 1 choice of cities to get 'stuck' in for 24 hours. The streets are full of joyful people, and the city is decorated just to my taste.
So, I started scanning the Madrid-tour-book for places where I can meet girls :) For some reason the Reina Sofia museum of modern art seemed at the time like a reasonable choice. And it actually could have been, if it wasn't for my barrier of flirting with my teeth broken in Spanish. So I only got to hit on an Australian girl that turned out to be married :( Oh well. Sent a dash to Picasso and a couple of other exhibitions of NYC and FD Mexico, and headed straight to Madrid's Shinkin St.. Looks exactly as Tel-Aviv's Shinkin St., except that I couldn't find that Haredy guy from the Agvania Pizza. Now, if you don't know, the Madridians have some very weird customs. The floors of all the cafes are just full of used napkins. The more filth a restaurant or a cafe has on its floor - it means that it is more popular, and more people come to filth it even more. It's a vicious cycle that leaves you no good place to enter without getting your shoes filled with stuff. So I couldn't find a good bar where I could rest my backpack on the floor. At last I gave up. Anyone knows a good dry cleaner in Chicago? :)
On the plane to Chicago I got to sit near a guy called Mina. Apparently, Mina holds the name of one of the Pharoes from ancient Egypt. I spoke to him in Spanish, he answered in English, and then we found out he's a Christian from Egypt and I'm a Jew from Israel. The rest of the conversation with him continued in English. Mina won the lottery and was lucky to be one of the 55,000 people who get a green card each year. At age 27, he left his previous life as a single accountant in Cairo, and got for the first time on a plane, heading to a brand new life. I let him take my place near the window :)
Well, this is it for now. I thought that shopping from the internet in Chicago would be cheaper, but apparently netaction.co.il give better deals for flash memory mp3 players. Maybe it's the taxes. I don't understand this.
Well... That's it for today,
Cheers,
Eitan.

Miscakes

I know, I know I should write about my crazy nights in Madrid and Chicago, but I have this debt I wanted to write about before I left Israel. So for now this is it... Next time I guess I'll be blogging about my trip.

A couple of gays ago I discussed with Vider the problem of spill checking. We all know that spill checkers can't catch some of the spilling mistakes we cake. Actually, than they can leave us with some humiliating and funny mistakes that show the world we can not tell the difference between 'then' and 'than'.
It immediately reminded me what Watts Humphrey suggested to do with a similar problem we have in software engineering. Every programmer knows that automatic tools (compiler, lint) catch many mistakes we do when we program. Still, these tools leave us with problems in the code that are similar to those that the spell checker leave us with when we Word something.
So, what can be done about it? What tools are there that can help us eliminate those mistakes? Well, there is no replacement to using our brains. A review is probably the only real solution. So, the suggestion is to start with self-reviews, turn to the automatic tools, and finish with peer-reviews. Notice that the self-reviews come before the other techniques. There is a big advantage to this approach. You learn much more from mistakes that escaped your self-review and come up at the automatic tools and peer-review phases. These are not typos, but real mistakes. Eliminating those mistakes on future work will save valuable time. This promotes the habit of "doing it right from the first time" which should become a second nature in order to improve quality in anything we do.
Keeping statistics of these mistakes and categorizing them, as suggested in "Introduction to Personal Software Process" (a recommended book for all SW practitioners...), can become a quite valuable source of defect data. I guess these strategies can work even when you write a book, a blog or a letter. But for now it would seem awfully square headed to try to do these things. Oh well...