Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

You may also refer to me as muli (at) member (dot) fsf (dot) org, and muliby (at) gmail (dot) com (thanks, shari!).

– Orna bought me tons of stuff from thinkgeek, seeing as my birthday is coming up. Loot include /dev/mug, “got root” bucket hat, the quintessential stuffed tux and a tux golf shirt. Have I mentioned I have the best SO?
– My order from the free software foundation arrived this morning. Two tshirts with the GPL on them (I am now a walking license!), and a GNU travel mug.
– I bought new running shoes yesterday. Exactly the same (New Balance 991) as the old running shoes, which have served me faithfully in the last few years.
– I also bought a new backpack, an Eagle Creek Work Space 30L pack, with a special nest for one’s faithful companion, the laptop. Now I can lug my laptop on hikes! (I can hear you Orna, yes, I know I will actually have to actually go on hikes!)
– I bought new shoe pads (no idea what these are called in English..) for my flat feet. This is something that my health insurance should have covered, but the sales person convinced me to get new and improved ones, to the tune of 1400 NIS(!) (310$). The selling points were the fact that I should feel absolutely no foot pain with these, and a money-back guarantee if I am not happy with them. I should get them in two weeks, and we’ll see.
– I bought new earrings. I’ve been wearing the same pair of earrings for a few years, but one of them got lost last week. The old ones cost me around 10 NIS (some unknown metal) – the new ones 400 NIS (18 karat “white gold”). I have expensive tastes.

The good news: As predicted yesterday, I am at the lowest ever weight since starting. This means I have already achieved my goal for this week. Not sure if I should revise the goal, or just enjoy the achievement and take the rest of the week easy. Probably the former, taking things easy is a slippery slope…

The bad news: I didn’t make it to the pool this morning. I woke up after five hours of sleep, considered very briefly going to the pool, and went back to sleep. I am ashamed of myself for this flagrant SEAL-unworthy behavior. I did do abs and push-ups in the morning before heading to work, so it wasn’t a complete waste, but still… I should have gone to the pool. There is no excuse.

I have just listened (if one uses this term freely enough) to an hour long sales pitch by a Gartner person. As the presentation was winding down, it struck me that an analyst (or at least this particular analyst…) is a modern day fortune teller. Both leave you happy for having spent the money to hear what you already thought in the first place.