shabbat shalom 17.07.09

Hi everyone, It's been a hectic week, but blessed by oddly cool weather for July in Israel. The Galilee even got a few drops of rain, and the fog was heavy in the morning here in the Judean Mountains. Heavy cloud cover, but no rain here. The cool spell lasted all week, but seems to be breaking now. July and August are normally viciously hot weather around 35 to 40 degrees (Centigrade, of course, whatever that might be in F.) We'll see how it shapes up this year. It's weird, anyway. We migrated the big conservation database (half a million records) from Access to SQL this week. I'd been pushing to do this for ten years, so it is a major step. It only happened because I finally threw up my hands last December and told the scientists that we had passed the ability of Access to handle such large files, and we were getting breakdowns. I also couldn't do any corrections or improvements they wanted. After much jumping up and down, they took it to the director, and got approval to migrate. Even then, they tried to tap my EU research grant for the money to do it. I managed to dodge that grab, and the money came from the Ministry of Environment. It cost about $12,000 to do this work, so it was fairly important to our computer services also. I discovered once I migrated to our SQL Server that, apart from testing, I'm the first serious user on that machine. The stupid thing was sitting there for years as a curiosity, I guess. In the process, we had to upgrade to SQL-Server 2005 and the computer services "saved" money by removing the backup service from my regular data server (still several databases in ACCESS sitting there) over to this machine. I have to do backups by hand now. Incompetent idiots, they are....but that's what we've got. When the contractor was doing the migration, our network manager was yelling more or less nonstop for two hours, and then hid in the basement for two hours with his phone off. I had to pull him out of the basement supply room and kick him back upstairs. Seriously. He couldn't handle the heat of really serious work, I guess. I had to admire our outside contractor, a developer, for keeping his cool around this nut case. That part is done, and next week we work on connecting front end applications, just the contractor and me. And until now, I haven't had screaming fits or hid in the basement due to programming problems...... And you thought data management was a dull occupation, right? On another front, we had a meeting on Mt. Carmel with other researchers doing studies at Ramat HaNadiv (http://www.ramat-hanadiv.org.il/index_en.aspx). We've been ad hoc cooperating for a while now on remote sensing and biodiversity sampling because RHN is one of the sites for my European project. We wanted to tighten the cooperation. I called the meeting, actually, and had to run it (bah) but it went well anyway. My Dutch student and a remote sensing doctoral student from Technion both had some results on the site, and the Technion supervisor, the scientific manager at RHN and our EBONE team had to decide how to move forward from this. We did, too. Looks like I will be toddling back and forth to the Carmel for some time to come..... Four of us from Jerusalem made a half holiday of the trip. We went together to RHN and on the way stopped at Kibbutz Ein Carmel, an artist colony not far from Zichron Ya'akov, to see some craft work in action. Two of us were interested in getting minature fountains for our cats but found it was more interesting than that. We indeed met the stonemason who makes the fountains and got a couple. A few steps away, under the shelter of a bamboo grove he planted himself, was a Japanese craftsman who made metal sculptures and Japanese musical instruments. We were enchanted with him. (He had married an Israeli, which brought him to the country, and spoke fluent Hebrew.) He was doing real Zen art, which I love. We all made a mental note to go visit this guy again....he even was using samurai sword manufacture methods to make some of his flexible sculptures. He also hosts Japanese music concerts. Man, sometimes you think you can find everything imaginable in this little country. From there, we raced up the mountain to get to our meeting, wolfing down bread, cheese and orange juice before we sat down to work. Good bread and cheese is enough when you are hungry and busy..... This weekend I can relax a bit. The Jerusalem Film Festival is still going, and I have a ticket tomorrow for "Five Minutes of Heaven", a film about conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, based on real events. After the film, some of the people on whom the Irish film is based will sit in a panel discussion with some Israelis and Palestinians on conflict resolution. This could get interesting. I didn't know about the panel when I got the ticket, but I'm glad I'll hear it. What else. I have a new cat, to replace the one who died of kidney failure. This is a HUGE female calico cat that was going to be put down at the Tel Aviv SPCA (long story) and it was an emergency case. She is nothing exotic beyond weighing nine kilo, but she is friendly and very domestic - and healthy. She will settle down nicely. shabbat shalom, Linda