19 January 2007

My computer has gotten possessed by some sort of demon, which in a fit will cause the screen to start flickering, eventually turning the screen completely gray with several white horizontal lines placed in a way that would make a great design for a sweater at Gap, but not on my computer. If I start up the computer in "debugging mode," it seems to help. The demon is probably a Luddite, and as a result I haven't spent hours on You Tube or a new site I just hear about from a friend with full TV shows and movies.

Where to start? Last weekend I went up to Tel Aviv for a few hours to see good friends from college. As soon as I got out of the minibus, I took a deep breath of Central Bus Station air, full of smashed Russian beer bottles and illegal migrant workers, and was so happy to be in Tel Aviv/out of Jerusalem. We sat outside at a café notorious for poor service, and I absorbed the warmth and view of the sea.

Flash forward a week and it's surprisingly warm here in Jerusalem. So much so that I opened the windows in my apartment. While it's great that it's somewhere in the 60's today, we haven't had any rain since the Great Flood two weeks ago. If the dew point is at a certain level (I never understood the dew point), everything is covered with a skin of moisture, and when one inhales the moisture fills one's lungs. An odd feeling, but that's life on a mountain surrounded by desert.

Sunday brings another strike by the Student Union, making students go a bit berserk because exams are soon approaching; not to mention the new overseas students for the spring semester arrive on Sunday for registration. More than 200, to be exact. Hebrew U is going to have an amount of students that it hasn't seen in several years, which is amazing, even if I'm still part-time staff.

The computer is starting to flicker again, especially when I started playing a movie. Damn. I'm hoping it's a software problem that can easily be fixed.