My parents-in-law came to visit us in Ireland to check that we are fine and manage on ourselves. They saw our apartment (aka "The shoe box"), the town we reside in (Maynooth) and we took them to a trip to various places in Ireland.

We had one day with a tour around Maynooth and seeing bits of Dublin, the next day we went to the Wicklow mountains, driving around and walking in Glendalough, three days were spent in Killarney for the Killarney national park, the ring of Kerry and parts of the Dingle peninsula. We then came back and on the day the left we went to see Newgrange with its ancient buildings.

All in all it was nice, we got some food from home. Humous, pickled cucumbers and broken olives featured prominently on the menu, as well as a home-made chocolate cake. The taste of home is so nice!

They left two days ago and now we are back to normal. The Humous is gone, the cake is eaten and we only have a few pickles left.

We'll be going to a trip to Donegal in a few days, the weather is too nice to stay in the office!

I've got a few requests to add peoples to the planet, all besides one were accepted, the last one doesn't have RSS feed for his blog. Can't do much about that.

In my haste to execute the idea I forgot to add contact information when peoples want to be added to the planet. This is fixed now.

Anyhow, if you want to be added to Planet (former) Advogato, mail me at baruch@ev-en.org. Please provide me the blog address, RSS feed and nick(s) on Advogato. I think it's only worth to add English language blogs there.

In the interest of tracking those who abandoned their Advogato diary to supposedly greener pastures, I've created Planet (former) Advogato. The domain ain't pretty, but it works.

I obviously missed plenty of peoples that have a new blog, but as usual in Open-Source, it's an early release. Let me know if you know of others that I should add.

I have a car in Israel, well, my wife bought it before our marriage, but now it belongs to both of us. Ever since I worked I had a leased car, but for the last (almost a) year in Ireland, I didn't have that luxury, and was bound to use the public transportation. Now I have a car.

It's a small Fiat Punto 98, and since the Irish do not recognize my Israeli drivers license I needed to do a theory test. I'll get to do the practical driving test in about 52(!) weeks, almost a year, and just before I leave Ireland back to Israel. The waiting time for a practical driving test is ridiculously high here.

In order to get an insurance I was required to pass an Assessment test. This is in effect a practical driving test done by a private organisation. I did that yesterday, and passed. Today I rang up the insurance company and got a quote, accepted it and paid by credit card, and the insurance is valid from now. So today I could legally use my car, so instead of walking the 10 minutes from home to university, I took the car for a ride.

In about two weeks my wife's parents are coming for a visit and we'll take them on a tour to west Ireland (County Kerry), and then we'll really test drive the car.

Yesterday I had my disk filling up. If you saw old blog posts in my RSS feed and Planet FOSS-IL didn't update, that's the reason.

Another side effect of that condition was that SpamAssassin got stuck. The effect of that was that further mails were not processed by it, they were sent right to my mailbox. And I had a reminder of what it means to have life without SpamAssassin. I got in a period of about 12 hours just over 300 spam messages.

Thanks to SpamAssassin folks, I don't need to suffer this on a day to day basis.

Now, if they only got this hangup bug fixed, all would be well.

Oh, and the Subversion peoples need to see what needs to be done with all those damn log files, they filled my HD. Still need to research what caused a single project to fill 12GB of disk space.