7 October 2005 (4 Tishrey 5766)
To be invited to the house of someone I know is not only a pleasure in itself both on special occasions and on ordinary days but also a good opportunity to look into his internal world through two closed windows that are opened during the visit. I can never say that I understand what he really is until I look at him through these windows.
The first window is his private library, including lack thereof. We are influenced by the books we read no less than by the people we meet. Of course, we generally do not keep all the books we have purchased, and we also read books that belong to public or someone else's private libraries. But the specific books he has decided to keep in his private library often tells me about his personality more eloquently than casual and even serious conversations with him. Not only what books he keeps but also how he does so and what place, both physical and symbolic, they occupy in his house tell a lot about him. Sometimes I am disappointed at the library and sometimes I am amazed at it, but the fact remains that it shows me his internal world that is otherwise closed to me.
The second window is his family, or to be more specific, his parents and children, but not necessarily his spouse. Although there are innate predispositions we cannot change by our conscious efforts or by others, it seems to me that we are molded more by nurture than by nature. Formal education at school may have an intellectual and often spiritual influence upon us, but what really decides our basic philosophy of life is what our parents think and do; they do not always have to explain it explicitly in speech so that their message may get through. So when I visit someone and meet his parents, who happen to live with him or visit him, I see who has formed (often how) the very basis of his thought and behavior. On the other hand, when I meet his children, I can see what messages he has tried to convey to them. If I can see both his parents and children, I can locate him more clearly in a chain of tradition, understand him more and often feel closer to him.
14 October 2005 (11 Tishrey 5766)
It seems to me that one is influenced by one's own name, not in the Kabbalistic sense but, e.g., psychologically. I respect my parents and am grateful to them for what they have given me, but I am rather sorry for the name they gave me, Tsuguya. Many people not only in Israel but even in Japan found and find it difficult to spell and/or pronounce my given name correctly.
Although this name is rare in Japan and in my whole life I have met only one person with the same name (but with a different spelling in kanji), it conforms to the phonotactics of Japanese, so the main problem there has been with its spelling, i.e., how to explain it to others in situations that do not allow me to write it before their eyes.
Here in Israel the main problem is more with its pronunciation, though there are unfortunately quite a few people who cannot even copy a name with six Hebrew characters from one sheet of paper to another correctly. People here tend more frequently to ask the name of someone they meet for the first time. When I tell them my given name, most of them ask me to say it again (and again), and many of them forget it after a few minutes. Some of them can retain the phonological shape in their short-term memory, mostly but with a wrong accent. Only a very small percentage (definitely less than 5%) and number (perhaps no more than five) of all those people I am regularly in touch with in various degrees of intimacy pronounce my name correctly. Even when someone mispronounces or keeps on mispronouncing it, I do not correct him or her, except in a very special case, since the very fact that they remember how to pronounce it, though not with the correct antepenultimate accent, is already something rather rare.
I feel that all this has influenced me in such a way that I have come to find it a source of headache to have to introduce myself to strangers with no one who knows me, so I have become reluctant to go to places where I have to do so. What I can say now on the basis of my given name is that parents should not give their child a name that is too uncommon graphically and phonetically. The biggest irony is that one cannot decide for oneself something that accompanies one's whole life and can even have a great influence upon one's personality.
21 October 2005 (18 Tishrey 5766)
Ever since I was first initiated into the convenience of content syndication by an ex-student of mine (thanks, AB!) several years ago, the expression "surfing the net" has become obsolete in my cyber-lexicon, at least theoretically, just as continuing to use Microsoft Word and saving your precious documents in one of its proprietary formats is registered under "how not to future proof electronic information" or "cyber-suicide" there.
I have been trying in vain to share the benefit of this technology with those who are in touch with me not only actively by syndicating my own site, first with RSS 1.0 and since a few weeks ago with Atom 1.0, which I think is the best syndication format as of now, but also passively by urging them to start using a feed aggregator. According to some online article I read several weeks ago, the percentage of netizens who are already using a feed aggregator, i.e., subscribing to feeds to keep themselves updated about their favorite sites instead of checking them either manually or through one of the automatic (stupid in my opinion, as webmasters can always put robots.txt) web-crawling services, is less than 10%. Unfortunately, this number seems to reflect more or less the situation among my colleagues, friends and acquaintances as well as returning visitors to this site, the majority of whom still use "dinosaurs" called Internet Explorer and Outlook Express as their respective default browser and mailer.
For those of us for whom "surfing the net" has already become obsolete there are four types of feed aggregators to check RSS/Atom feeds, including the feed of this site: 1) browser-based, 2) mailer-based, 3) standalone, 4) web-based. I have never liked the fourth possibility like Bloglines, just as I have avoided web interface as the default method of using email. The third alternative such as RSSOwl seems inconvenient as you have to open a separate program in addition to your browser. So most of the time I have been using feed aggregators based on some browser or mailer (excluding, God forbid, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express).
I started subscribing to feeds a little after I switched from the above two "dinosaurs" to Firefox and Thunderbird respectively a few years ago. Intuitively, I felt that a mailer would be a better place to receive feeds, but mainly for ignorance I stuck to Firefox as my default feed aggregator, first with its rather primitive live bookmarks, then with an extension called Sage, as well as some other extensions.
This may sound stupid, but what finally made me decide to switch to Thunderbird for this purpose about a month ago is the fact that none of the Firefox extensions (and standalone programs) allow me to customize how to display date and time in the way I want as is specified in my computer system, i.e., according to ISO 8601, which is an international standard for date and time representations. So I use now the so-called RSS Blogs & News in Thunderbird, which in my opinion should be renamed something like "RSS & Atom Feeds" or simply "Feeds" to better reflect the nature and reality of content syndication. Although there is definitely room for much improvement, it is by far the best feed aggregator I have ever used in overall terms. So the intuition I had when I was first exposed to content syndication was right. As of now, I subscribe to more than 30 feeds.
28 October 2005 (25 Tishrey 5766)
The four-month summer vacation is coming to its end; next Sunday I am starting my second academic year as a member of the faculty at Bar-Ilan University. As I have been missing my teaching and verbal interaction with my students since around the beginning of the third month of the vacation, I am glad that I can go back to school. On the other hand, however, I am sorry that I have to return to a busier life without finishing a few important things I had planned to do during the vacation and would not be easy to do while teaching.
Apparently, I misevaluated and mismanaged the amount of free time I had at my disposal as this was the first time I had such a long vacation as a teacher. The first month July passed by as I prepared my oral presentation at the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies and two talks I was supposed to give during my one-month visit in Japan in August. The second month was a vacation par excellence except for these two talks. It was only after I came back to Israel at the beginning of September and started working on the tasks I had imposed upon myself that I realized that two months would not be enough to complete them. This is one of the two main reasons why I have decided to make annual visits to Japan not during the summer vacation but perhaps during the intersemestral break in February (the other being the unbearable humidity in the summer in Japan).
The lesson I have learned about the time management of the summer vacation can also apply to our life in general. Most of us, including myself, tend to waste our time in our youth and sometimes later in our life, thinking erroneously that we still have a lot of time for ourselves. But life is not like a vacation whose end we know for sure in advance, so it is even easier to fall into the temptation of postponing what we can do today to tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have been an expert in doing so, partly because of my perfectionism. Ironically, the more free time we think we have, the more we seem to waste it just like money. So the best way to do as many things as possible efficiently would be to keep ourselves busy, but in such an extent that enough free time is left for things we have or want to do.