A number of necessary things have so far not been done, thanks to my timing. Wouldn't you know it, I've arrived in the midst of the week of Sukhot, which is apparently not altogether unlike that week between Christmas and New Year's back in the States when everyone is either on vacation or working in a restaurant feeding people on vacation.
I am, incidentally, going to shamelessly exploit this condition to explain the recent gap in posts. I'm building up a hefty backlog of photos in my camera, which I am unable to upload for two reasons: whoever runs the network in my dorm is on vacation, and thus I can't connect the laptop to the net; and my sysadmin is on vacation, so nobody has the ability to make the extremely minor configuration change that would let me plug a flash drive into my workstation. If there's a cybercafe nearby, I can't tell, because I haven't learnt the Hebrew alphabet yet. So that'll have to wait ... something tells me hacking the Institute network my first week here wouldn't be the grandest idea.
Aside from the Institute staff being "on collective vacation" as I was told, it's little things like the fact that the grocery store I've managed to locate has been closing earlier than they let me out of the lab (hint: an early-morning teleconference in California keeps us in rather late) and that I thus have some yogurt and an apple to get through Shabbat. And the wonderful baker next to my dorm who's been selling me breakfast pastries didn't open today, either. Long weekend.
My officemate swears that there actually is some commerce in this country. Guess I'll see it next week.
So, if you can't type on the cybercafe computers and you can't connect your laptop...how did you write this post?
We definitely are in need of some pictures.
We had our first cosmology exam today...you would think that such an event would be a breeze, but we were all freaked about it, and justly so, it was a relatively hard, although straightforward, test...I called it the Cosmo Quiz From Hell. But I *think* I did ok on it...we'll see...
-paul-
Well, I can post from any computer with a web browser, for which the workstation in my office suffices. But I can't get pictures onto it, because it hasn't been configured to allow me to attach flash drives to it.
In the meanwhile, I have three words that should evoke an approximate mental image of where I work: Homer Simpson's office.