Thursday was a good day at work. I woke up needing some peace, quiet and no interruptions, so I stayed home to work. I went into hyper-productive mode and finished the things that needed finishing in record time, and then around noon went to the office. At the office, I had a couple of interesting conversations with co-workers with regards to future kernel related projects. As it happens, due to some curious twists and turns in its design, my current project has no kernel work for a kernel hacker such as yours truly to do. I’m doing design, and architecting, and researching stuff, all of which are important – and all of which are in luserspace, which is not where I should be working. Been there, done that – I need a challenge, the kind the kernel provides.
Also on Thursday, I gave an impromptu demonstration of syscalltrack to another co-worker which went quite well. He seemed quite impressed, asked many good questions, and said he wants to implement “rule counters”. Rule counters (“how many times has this system call been executed by all processes owned by UIDs less than a 1000?”) have been on our TODO list since the beginning, and a patch for them will be very nice.
On Friday, ladypine and I went to sign the rent contract for the house with the huge garden in Kiryat Haim we saw last week. The signing was to take place at the owners attorney’s office, after a mutually agreed upon contract was negotiated the day before between ladypine and the owner’s daughter. When we got to the attorney’s office, however, we were presented with a contract that was different from what was agreed upon. Discussion ensued, which pretty soon turned into an argument. The other side wasn’t willing to remedy the contract, or explain the significance of their choice of phrasing as opposed to ours. As far as I’m concerned, someone who makes a verbal agreement with you and then turns back on his words is not someone you do business with. We got up and left.
The back up plan is to rent Itai’s parents apartment. It’s small and quaint, in Dubnov street where I used to live once upon a time. It’s also pretty cheap (which is important, as we’re saving money for buying our own place) and belongs to my best friend’s parents, so I don’t believe there’ll be any monkey business of the type mentioned above. We’ll go see it again today or tomorrow and decide.
After the contract negotiations blew up, Orna and I had a great breakfast, and then drove around to do errands. Unfortunately, parking was non-existent. Fortunately, none of the errands were time critical, so I just left them to a less crowded, and we went home. At home, we had lunch, slept a little, went for a walk on the sea shore, went to Orna’s place to feed the cat and watch a movie, started watching the movie, the TV blew up, drove to Orna’s parents place and picked up a spare TV, discovered the spare TV is dead, drove back to my place to watch the movie (“Men of Honor”, recommended) and finally fell asleep. The kind of day that leaves you simultaneously exhausted and feeling like you haven’t actually done anything.
Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal 
Good move, dropping the apartment for such provocation
A similar thing happened to me, a few years back. However, instead of dropping the apartment, hubby & I negotiated them back into the deal we had originally wanted.
In my case, the main issue in question was a clause stating that our landlord would refuse to agree to the construction of an elevator for the building during the time we lived in his apartment. Seeing as I was pregnant at the time, it seemed to be a good thing to insist upon – the idea of having a baby awake all night and then having construction (including a hole being punched into the wall of our apartment) seemed like a good thing to insure against. He had promised to avoid signing any consent to construction, and signed the contract that stated that.
So I was alarmed, six months later, when the construction of the elevator began. Huh? Did they do this without his permission? Nope, he’d consented. Despite the contract. Despite the ageement betwen us.
So we halted the construction (it was easy – there was no permit and no safety engineer), had all the neighbors furious at us (and the one who used to work for the secret service threatened us that with his record of service to the country, we should take our shoes off, which sound much more biblically impressive in Hebrew and takes into account all his crimes against humanity, which did not, in fact, inspire removal of any item of clothing…) and we found a new apartment and moved into it within a week.
And it didn’t take long before the landlord paid us approximately all the damages this rush move caused. He was not happy about it, to say the least.
The comment my aunt made about this? if you’re gonna deal with jerks, you’re gonna get jerked around.
I guess it wasn’t TOO expensive a way of learning this. (However, having the baby born 10 days into my residence in that place, which was also my son’s first day in the new school, did eventually become emotionally costly.)
Comment by shunra — August 23, 2003 @ 7:39 AM |