Balmer talks about Yahoo, Work / Life Balance, His Heritage

The original Hebrew version of the article is much longer and has more depth than this abridged English version. "...float like a butterfly, boom, boom, boom, sting like a bee."

Microsoft Language Translation on the web

We (Microsoft) finally have a decent, competitive translator up on the web:

http://www.windowslivetranslator.com/

Check it out! 检查它! ¡Compruébelo hacia fuera! فحصت هو خارجا! Vérifiez-le !

Photos of "Wings of Eagles" Track Meet 5/10/08

I am also putting videos on youtube.

Eitana likes trees

Eitana has become more intense recently, constantly busy, initiating "projects" (mostly crafts) and pushing forward with ideas. A few days ago she took out crayons and paper and drew a series of trees that she hung up on the walls of her room. She asked me to photograph one of them.

Then she folded up paper to make a trunk, folded up more paper to make branches, taped them all together, and made a cool tree. She didn't like the first one so she made a second one. She was quite proud of her idea and the result of her work and asked me, again, to photograph the sculpture.

Encode Videos for phone

I was trying to get DrDivx settings tweaked to encode videos for my phone and I started looking online for the optimal settings when I found a French program called "Pocket divx Encoder." It does exactly what I want and it is very fast. You just point it at the video and it creates a divx encoded version optimized for the smartphone (or other hand-held device). Cool.

The Seattle PI Published My Letter

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/362501_webltrs12.html

Israel's population is 7.3 million. 5.5 million (75.5 percent) are Jews, 1.46 million are Arabs. The population is expected to reach 10 million by 2030 at the same ratio of Jews to Arabs.

There were 2.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) in 2004. Israel's Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained remarkably constant since 1967. Today Jews make up a 3:2 majority over Arabs in Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria. Jews comprise 67 percent of the population of Israel including Judea and Samaria and nearly 80 percent of the population outside the Palestinian Authority or hamasstan (Gaza) areas.

The Arab demographic time bomb is a fiction.

Maddie the swimming retriever

EItana and I went early to pick up Yofiel at Hebrew school; the lake shore on the grounds of H-NT is a great place for Maddie to go swimming. It was cold, windy, and rainy today but Maddie still went swimming and had a great time.

Mitch and Eitana have dinner at preschool

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Eitana and I did crafts (made Mothers' Day gifts), played outside, ate dinner, sang songs, ate dessert, and had a wonderful time at her pre-school last night.

Ender's Game versus Harry Potter

Orson Scott Card published an interesting article about J.K. Rolling's new law suit. I never realized how much alike the Ender's Game story and the Harry Potter books are. I suppose it is to be expected according to the "seven basic plots" theory of archetypal plots in story telling. Interesting.

Yom HaShoah - May 1st 2008

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Tonight we light candles and chant the mourner's prayer to remember our relatives and the other six million who were murdered in the Holocaust. I hope my children and grand children, whose ties to Holocaust survivors are much more tenuous than mine, will also light candles every year and keep the historical facts straight among non-Jews in the generations to come.