Elon Musk, Mars Colonization, and me

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Imagine you have lots of money, what do you do? Do you give it all to charity? Do you keep it until you’re 80 and then let your children fight over the will? Do you perhaps setup trust funds with altruistic goals, that end up eating most of the money for management overhead after you’re dead? (hey, execs need their bonuses, right?).

What I like about Elon Musk’s choices and initiatives is that he’s putting his money and energy into humanity’s future. He is not investing in its present or past problems, and he is not getting his hands dirty with politics.

What I realized today, is that if I had all that money, I would probably want to join him as a co-investor, and at the very least, I would try to get involved into one of the projects, even if just to help him reach his goals sooner.

I think of the countless times in my childhood when I really wished I could travel to the distant future. I did not like what I was seeing around me as a child engrossed in Science Fiction books that described partially utopian futures. I spent a lot of time thinking about how far I would have to travel into the future until I reached an era that might be to my liking. I figured at least 200 years into the future until most resource and religion wars are behind us, and the majority of humans have evolved enough to become decent human beings, with advanced, friendly philosophies that promote exploration, science, and simply being good to others (humans and non-humans).

What Elon Musk is doing is admirable because his actions bring this future into our present. This is the kind of atmosphere I want to live and work in. When you actively build the future, you invite it into your present life, and you become part of that future as much as that future becomes part of who you are. And let’s not neglect the gadgets: When you build futuristic gadgets, you live in the future right now.

This makes me want to focus even harder on my own business venture, with the goal of making enough money to be able to join Musk’s adventures.

Let’s hope I succeed! But whether I succeed or not, I am at least proud to belong to a species that produces people like Elon Musk, who are constantly pushing the envelope. They stay a tree is as tall as its many branches, I say the tree is tall as its highest branch / leaf / flower.

 

Skyfall – The black sheep in the bond legacy

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SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE YET, AND PLAN TO SEE IT, DON’T READ THIS REVIEW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

SO, I watched the new James Bond movie, and I was unimpressed. Actually, I was quite disappointed and saddened. I wouldn’t normally write a movie review, but I am 39 and I kinda grew up with the bond movies. They were and still are a source of inspiration for me as a geek and gadget freak.

The people behind Skyfall have chosen to thoroughly break the James Bond formula, and they did so quite ceremoniously. To illustrate, imagine a villain taking all that we loved about James Bond, putting it in a bucket and defecating into the bucket, then taking a piss into the bucket, blending the whole thing for 10 minutes before throwing the concoction onto the public’s disgraced and disappointed faces.

Here’s a breakdown of the James Bond formula, and how each of those elements were raped and sodomized:

Gadgets

The new Q is a lame “hacker”, not only does he not give bond anything cool beyond a gun that only Bond can shoot, and a stupid GPS radio, he even tells Bond “What did you expect? An exploding pen? We don’t do that anymore!”. Argh!!!

Women – Part 1

There is only one really “beautiful” woman in the entire movie, and not only does Bond not sleep with her, he promises her he can help her, except he fails miserably as she gets killed in front of his eyes by the villain.

Women – Part 2

James Bond of the past is clearly an unrelenting womanizer. The new James Bond is perhaps secretly bisexual. The villain fondles James, and insinuates Gay sex as a form of torture, and that theres always a first time for everything. James Bond responds “How do you know it’s my first time?”. I have no issues at all with Gay men, or Gay sex, but this feels like an unnecessary step to try and seem more gay friendly. That’s bullshit. Gay men don’t need this kind of gesture, they are intelligent and can see through this feeble attempt.

Awesome Cars / Vehicles

What awesome cars? Theres no cool car anywhere. Very lame and disappointing. In fact, James Bond does not even drive the only Jeep in the movie during a pursuit. Money-penny drives the jeep, manages to break both visors, and with a snide comment from Bond thats all there is to it. Oh and there’s the really stupid bike scene where they drive above rickety roofs in Turkey. We are supposed to believe those roofs can hold more than a 10 year old child. Really?!

Grand weapons of mass destruction

The most dangerous weapon is some kind of massive supercomputer built by the villain. To a geek, It looks pretty cool at first; Like thousands of naked motherboards hooked up in a grid. It is apparently used to crack encryption and penetrated MI6′s firewalls. But we are not told anything about this computer or what it can do, which is pretty lame. The villain is supposed to be proud of his evil weapons. There is nothing threatening the general population of the world, and James Bond does not save anything other than MI6′s honor and mandate from a vindictive villain who is a product of the same agency(!).

The MI6 Agency

In all previous movies, the agency is portrayed as this cool secret government organization working against evil forces and rogue states who are looking to either control the world, or destroy it, or die trying. Children used to WANT to be a part of MI6. Not in this movie! In Skyfall, the villain is a product of MI6 and is on a mission to kill M. It is insinuated that the organization itself is dangerous and flawed in its very essence. It’s almost like the script writer is a member of Anonymous, nay, maybe the script writer is Mr. Julian Assange himself! The agency barely survives to the end of the movie, moving to an alternative underground location after the HQ was compromised (from which the villain escapes as well!), with M dying in the end and being replaced by a male M (So first you try to appease Gay men, and now you slap Feminists on the face?).

What can I say. This was a sad, sad movie to watch. It offered no more action than a typical Bourne Legacy movie or a Jean Claud Van-Dam movie. Is this what the Bond Legacy deserves?

Music re-discovery

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A couple of months ago I upgraded my internal laptop drive to SSD. I’m very happy with the massive performance increase and the physical reliability. However, since the SSD drive is significantly smaller than my old magnetic drive (160GB vs. 512GB) I decided not to copy over any of my old music. This saved me from transferring almost 50gb of data.

The main reason for this decision was that I probably stopped listening to more than 50% of that music. I saw it as an opportunity to start from scratch, and only copy one artist at a time from my old collection, and only if I am reminded of them and really want to listen to them again. Another decision I made was to only transfer the tracks I liked (I made one exception so far with Yellow Submarine, because I love absolutely each and every track in that album). This would save tons of space, and increase the chances of enjoying a random playlist.

The first ones to make the move were: Kraftwerk, The Smiths, The Advent, The Beatles, and a bunch of Ambient tracks (Brian Eno, Steve Roach, Aphex Twin, Vidna Obmana, Zegunder, William Orbit, etc).

I am thoroughly enjoying the experience, and recommend it to anyone wishing to rediscover the music they love.

New York, New York!

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It’s hard to believe I’ve been living in New York for 16 months now! It’s truly mind blowing how eventful it’s been so far. In the space of 16 months I managed to get a divorce, I created my first US corporation, acquired a major customer, moved my Israeli business to the US, dated 20+ women in search of a new partner, found an awesome apartment in Long Island City and slowly furnished it (from scratch!), found an absolutely amazing woman and fell in love, got married again, am planning a wedding celebration (which will happen in November), launched am amazing startup and getting ready to work on another, and probably quite a few other things I neglected to mention.

I like this city very much. I always knew I like New York; Some of you may remember the story of the first time I returned to Israel from New York, and how depressed and empty I felt for a few weeks. I knew that some time in my future, I would love to live in this great city for at least a year of my life, and now I have not only realized that dream, but am in the process of realizing many other dreams!

I know how some New Yorkers have this love / hate relationship with the city, but one can only speak for himself; I can definitely say after living here for 16 months that my love for this city has evolved and become more substantiated, like good wine aging in a barrel.

You slowly but surely learn where to go that suits your mood at the moment. And this is where New York shines: There’s a place for every mood. If you want a crazy party, it’s there. If you want cheap trashy food, it’s there. Want classy, expensive food? It’s definitely there big time. Want classical music? It’s there. For money? Sure. For free? Sure, there’s free stuff too! Parks, Hotels, Palaces. Real life, Fake life, Real people, Fake people, Neon lights, Drunks pissing in the subway, People buying mangos and drinking beer illegally on the beaches, Lounging in a roof pool in a hotel with a crowd that’s 80% LGBT, listening to great music, dancing on the beach with total strangers, watching free movies in Bryant park, attending the infinite number of seasonal parades (Mermaid Parade, Caribbean Parade, Gay Pride Parade, Macy’s Parade, Israel Parade, etc.), the alternative crowd of St. Marks, the cheap vegetables of Chinatown, the tens of thousands of restaurants, bars and pubs, the amazing stores (shopping capital of the world!), and the list goes on.

This is all made even better by the fact that I have siblings and many friends in the vicinity. My dear brother leaves in Brooklyn, and my sister is not too far away in Philadelphia. I have friends in various boroughs, and other friends in other states. All of a sudden the US feels a bit more like a home to me. I feel like I’m starting to settle down again, and it feels good.

As an added bonus, New York turns out to be quite a hub for many, mostly for business, but also for pleasure. I have already had the pleasure to meet many friends who flew to the city for various reasons. This is another advantage of New York: When you are out in the city with friends, the city smiles at you, and you smile back at the universe and say, thank you, dear universe, for this wonderful time!

VMWare Perl SDK on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04 LTS)

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I have recently found interest in a system called OpenQRM to manage Virtual Machines / Appliances, as well as Cloud Machines (Public / Private). One of the plugins bundled with OpenQRM allows you to manage VMWare ESX Servers. It will scan the network and auto-discover VMWare Servers, However unless you install the VMWare Perl SDK it will fail to connect to the remote VMWare.

I had some trouble installing the Perl SDK, and decided to share what I’ve done so others may have an easier time installing it on Ubuntu Lucid.

As a preparation step, install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install libarchive-zip-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libclass-methodmaker-perl libdata-dump-perl libsoap-lite-perl perl-doc libssl-dev libuuid-perl liburi-perl libxml-libxml-perl

Once that’s done, you need to download the actual SDK from VMWare.com – You need an account to access the download section. Once you are logged in, the URL to access the SDK is:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-download?downloadGroup=sdkperl50

When I ran the installer for the first time, it seemed as if it was done installing. There was a warning about HTTP and FTP Proxies not being defined, but I ignored it at first, thinking it was done but just complaining a bit. It turns out that it actually fails to install if those proxies are not defined.

To circumvent this, I just set them with empty values, and that did the trick:

export http_proxy=
export ftp_proxy=

Then unpack and run the installer:

tar xvzf VMware-vSphere-Perl-SDK-5.0.0-422456.i386.tar.gz
cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib
./vmware-install.pl

This time, the installer will install missing Perl module via CPAN, and after a few minutes (depending on how fast your system is), it will complete the installation.

Now when you add a VMWare ESX system within OpenQRM, it will manage to establish a connection to VMWare without a problem, and add the VMWare system to the Appliances database.

 

From Russia with Love?!

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When I was very young, Russia was this “grey” and “evil” entity. Having lived in countries mainly under the influence of the west, this is no surprise. The impression was that the government is not very good for the people, as in, not very democratic.

However this is my third or fourth time to Russia, and what I discovered has changed how I think about countries and governments in general.

The first thing that shocked me was how popular virtual money is. When you are in the wallet business, you learn that in Russia the most popular valid form of payment is “Webmoney” but the reality is that many russian companies have wallets! What really matters, is that you can walk a short distance from your home and convert your real cash to virtual cash, with which you can then pay for services online. For that, a rampant network of money collection terminals exists, with fierce competition in some areas. The machines only take money, and produce a receipt.

In some apartment buildings the machine is in the lobby so you can go downstairs in your PJ’s and convert money to virtual value without braving the elements (visualize the Moscow winter to realize how practical this is!).

What makes this business thrive in Russia and Ukraine? What is the government doing or NOT doing, which allows wallets to be so popular? Is it the lack of trust in Russians banks? Is it some Russian cultural trait?

I welcome your feedback on this one.

Single again!

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As Forest Gump’s Mother said: Life is like a box of chocolate. You never know what you’re gonna get. Aren’t mothers amazing?

I won’t get into the reasons here, but the plain and simple truth is that as of last Sunday, I am officially divorced. Since I married religiously according to the Jewish Faith, I also had to divorce the same way.

Just to clear up some confusion – I have not seen my ex-wife for 9 months. It just took forever to do the procedure, due to many factors (some of which are related to travel, some because my ex is in Israel and I’m in the USA now, and some just related to bureaucracy and logistics).

The procedure was quite elaborate! There were 3 rabbis who acted as “Judges”, one of them doubling as the Scribe (The “Sofer” in Hebrew, who is normally a separate person) and also as my first Witness, and yet another Rabbi, this one was to be my second witness (According to the Jewish Faith, you are supposed to have two witnesses when you sign your Marriage Certificate, and also two witnesses when you sign your Divorce Certificate).

There were 3 potential complications in my divorce:

  1. The fact that I am in the USA, and my Marriage records + ex-wife were both in Israel. This meant the Rabbis needed to communicate with the Israeli branch, and this took a considerable amount of time. However, fortunately, it eventually happened and I received a call summoning me to sign my Divorce Papers.
  2. If there’s shared property or children, or some disagreement between the sides, the judges would have to intervene and judge according to Halacha (Jewish Law). Fortunately, our decision to divorce was mutual, there were no children, and no shared properties that were under any kind of disagreement.
  3. The procedure itself, which is quite elaborate. The Rabbis must make sure you will not retract your request to divorce, and that you were not forced into the divorce, or paid money to divorce, and that no threat of violence is placed on me, etc. Fortunately none of that is true, and the divorce was allowed to happen.

I followed the ceremony, which I have to note, was wise and obviously carefully worded, in what I assume is the result of a few millennia of learning from bad experiences…!

Another interesting point, is how your parents are identified. I had to call my parents during the ceremony, so that the Rabbis can verify with them what they are called, by their community and/or circle of friends. It turned out this was not without merit, as my dad goes by 3 or 4 different names!

Following the conclusion of the ceremony, the Writer (“Sofer”) must go about his business, which is to write the Divorce Papers in my name. Once that was done, a courier was designated (turned out the Writer was also the Courier…). I had to task him with the job of notifying my wife that she is now no longer my wife. He accepted the task, and the ceremony was concluded.