I’m in a very strange place right now where the most interesting things going on in my life are things I’m not at liberty to discuss publicly at the moment. On the whole, life is pretty much the same as it usually has been, but there’s still some catching up to do.
Enter the bulletted list:

• This may sound surprising coming from me, but we’re sorely lacking in good accessible poskim. To paraphrase R. Tendler, calling something a safek, throwing up your hands and being mahmir isn’t pesak, but the avoidance of pesak. Thankfully I have some numbers in my cell phone, but it’s still a problem and it’s going to get worse.
• Speaking of cell phones, mine is literally falling apart and it’s depressingly difficult to replace. Since the current expectation these days is to replace your phone every two years, manufacturers are making cheaper phones. I can understand my model doesn’t exist anymore, but the new ones are flimsy and actually have less functionality than the one I have which I purchased for the same price two years ago.
• Should you ever need to get a non-Mac laptop, get a Thinkpad. Best quality and service out there hands down. Personally I think I’ll be making the switch when my current one dies, but hopefully that won’t be for another few years.
• It’s elections like these which make me proud to be a registered independent.
• I recently signed up for Spertus College’s Feinberg E-Collection and I highly recommend it. It works very nicely and gives you significantly cheaper access to several wonderful resources, accessible from almost any computer. I happen to own the latest Bar Ilan CD, and I still find it worthwhile. Check it out.
• If you’re in the Philly area, try to spend a day at Wissahickon Creek. It’s really close by and gorgeous on a nice fall day.
• From the Ironic Errors Department, if you go to Israeli Government’s offical website for aliyah, the links on the page produce a “Runtime Error.” On the Facts about Israel page, the “History” link returns a “Security Error.” (At the time of this posting at least).
• And for some blog notes, as a followup to our earlier post on the matter, the Bitachon people have since added attribution.
• Also, you might have noticed that I’ve included a “Printer Friendly” link at the bottom of each post. Should be self-explanatory.
• Finally, and this one is important, due to the exponential increase in blog spam I’ve had to make an important change in the site. Until now I’ve been filtering spam messages by manually approving valid comments, but the inundation of spam has made this solution far too tedious and time consuming on my part to continue. I have experimented with creating my own CAPTCHA, but completing it will take way more time than I have right now. (There is a plugin for MT3 but the load it puts on the server makes this option implausible). In the meantime, to post a comment on this site, you now have to register with Movable Type’s authentication service TypeKey. Registration is really simple and safe from what I can tell. We’ll see how this works for the time being, or at least until I find a better solution (or someone codes a CAPTCHA for me).

Hopefully we’ll have some more thoughtful posts coming soon.