liam getreu

I love Battlefield! What an amazing game! I’ve just come back from a few hours playing LAN games near Caulfield Station, and had a very enjoyable experience. Sure, I’m not that good at it, but who cares?

It’s quite fun to destroy (I mean, capture) Berlin in Battlefield 1942 (the WW2 game), and capture (I mean, destroy) Basrah in Desert Combat. Man, I wanna join the army!

In other news, I’m going off to buy a DVD burner tomorrow — the Pioneer DVR-108 from Centre Com. Very, very pumped.

Remember my preachings about Firefox? Well, there was a huge campaign run on SpreadFirefox to get a two-page ad in the New York Times to get the world to know about Firefox. Or, as one of the head volunteers put it:

Today we entered the homes of over a million doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers and others far removed from the techie-world that once constrained Firefox. Today we entered the big leagues.

Here’s the low-down about the ad: lots and lots of people donated money to fund the advertisement, and in return got their name on the left of the ad (you can see it in hi-res PDF). Pretty clever PR…

Oh, and if you haven’t alrady, get Firefox!

http://www.mish.us/xmas/Christmas.jpg — A modern encounter with Santa.

A little joke to lighten the mood:

One day G-d called all the leaders of the world into Heaven. He told them they had made a mess of the world, and that it was time to start the whole experiment over.

“Go to your peoples,” he thundered, “and tell them in six months I shall cover the earth with another flood.”

Contrite, the American president advised his countrymen to repent, and prepare to meet their Maker.

The Russian president told his subjects to eat, drink and be merry, for soon the world would end.

The Israeli prime minister told the Knesset, “We have six months to learn to live underwater.”

I really am getting lazy when it comes to blogging! It’s been almost six whole days! Well, I guess I have the excuse that nothing that interesting has happened. Still, I keep feeling that I should write something big.

So I figure that I’ll write about Shnat! If you haven’t been keeping track, Shnat is a program run by Habonim Dror — commonly shortened to just ‘Habo’ — the Zionist-Jewish-Socialist Youth Movement that I go to (yeah, I know, I don’t like the Socialism either, but when I have my way it’ll be changed to Social Action; mua ha ha!), which is basically a year in Israel.

The first four months of the program are divided into either Machon — which is an informal, yet really hardcore, university-style learning program, where you learn about Judaic history, Israeli politics, Hebrew, all of that really interesting stuff — or Chalutz — where you learn about the history of Habo, and Hebrew, and work on Kibbutz. As you can see, Machon is clearly the superior program. I only feel sorry for the New Zealand participants. There are five of them and they’re all doing Chalutz. That means that they’ll only get to mix with inferior people on an inferior program. Shame.

After that, the Machon and Chalutz groups continue to be divided (much to the discontent to the Shnat group) and continue to go on Kibbutz for seven weeks, then onto Kaveret for another seven weeks.

Kaveret is literally Hebrew for “bee hive”. People think that it’s an apt name, I’m not one of those people. Basically you live as an Israeli in a development town and either: volunteer for Magen David Adom (MDA) which is the Israeli ambulance service; teach English to Jewish-Israeli primary school kids; or teach English to Arab-Israeli primary school kids. I really want to do MDA, as do most people, but unfortunately one has to be 18 in order to do it, and I’m only 16 now, but I’ll be 17 by then. That’s unfair. So who knows what I’ll end up doing…

Peace out!