What caused my Windows Vista to be very slow?

Yesterday I found out. It was Zone alarm's firewall.

If you installed it and your system suffers from the following symptoms, I recommend that you uninstall it.

1. Slow start up - doubles the start up time
2. Very slow shutdown - about 5 times slower than the usual Vista shutdown (which is slower than XP, but that is another story)
3. Slow performance - after running for more than a few minutes, the system would operate at 70% cpu usage or higher, everything was performing very bad. An example would be yourtube - clips would only play seamlessly after a fresh system reset. Trying to watch something in youtube after more than 2 hours without reset was impossible.
4. System responsiveness - or maybe lack of it


It was difficult to track it down to Zone alarm's firewall, because when checking the task manager, it was always a process other than Zone alarm's: Firefox, Java, IE…

If in doubt, uninstall it and .

Living in a small town

Only in small towns or villages, you can come to work and find a parked Segway in the bicycle parking lot.






The picture was taken with my mobile phone, hence the poor quality.

Bayern - every reason is good enough to party

Here in Bayern (Bavaria), every reason is good enough to party:
- Celebrate xx number of years an organization exists
- Let people get to know your organization once a year
- Religious holidays
- A fair is coming to town
- Get people to see your farm
- Bock beer season opening. This is called the 5th season in Bayern.
- Get people to see the old parts of a town/village
- Play poker
- Hear classical music

The list goes on and on


what can you expect in these festivals?
Great local music.
Traditional clothes
Beer, usually they only have it in Maß - one liter of great beer. If you order 0.5 liter, they would just fill half of it.

Here are a few pictures I took that show only the upcoming festivals for the next 2 weeks.

what is Kurzarbeit?

מה זה ?
המצב פה קשה. יש משבר גדול כמו בכל העולם. ההתמודדות של המדינה איתו קצת שונה מבישראל: אם מפעל נתקל בקשיים, המדינה רוצה לעודד אותו לשמור את העובדים ולא לפטר. הדבר נעשה באופן הבא: החברה מגישה בקשה למשרד העבודה לעבור למתכונת עבודה מקוצרת. זה יכול להיות החל מ 10% פחות לעבוד, או אולי יום או יומיים בשבוע, עד סגירה מוחלטת של המפעל לשבוע, שבועיים או יותר.
בזמן הזה העובדים מקבלים 60% מהנטו שלהם ממשרד העבודה(משרד העבודה מעביר למעסיק את הכסף והוא מעביר לעובד).
היתרונות כפי שאני רואה אותם:
- אנשים לא מפוטרים - זה הכי חשוב.
- חברות יכולות להמנע מפיטורים של עובדים, ולחסוך בגיוס חדשים ולא מיומנים כשהמשבר חולף.
- המדינה מרוויחה גם כי הסטטיסטיקה מראה פחות מובטלים, וגם חוסכת תשלום דמי אבטלה - פה מקבלים שנה אבטלה.
- אנשים נשארים במעגל העבודה - חשוב במיוחד לאנשים מבוגרים.

זו רק דוגמה אחת איך החיים כאן משרים ביטחון. לאזרח הקטן יש המון דברים כאלה קטנים או גדולים שהופכים את החיים להרבה יותר רגועים.


עוד דוגמה

living in Bayern

Living in Bavaria is different than living in Israel and even in other parts of Germany.

I am not going to say that 5 months here is a long enough study, but here are a couple interesting things:

1. Beer is taxed as food, and not as alcoholic drinks. Oh, and its very good and very cheap.
2. In the summer, every week there is some kind of festival even in small villages.

Combine 1+2 and you get lots of opportunities to have fun in Bayern (Bavaria).

Party belts

Party belts are very common in Germany.
They are sold for 4-8 Euros and have small pockets with bottles with different drinks in them.

Here is a guy with two belts, taking the underground train in Nuremberg on June the 20th at around 10 o'clock in the morning. He was traveling with 3 friends.


...and an Adv. for another one

Rhapsody's idea of Dialog boxes

This is another symptom of Rhapsody's bad IDE design. Their dialog boxes are packed with information, which often causes users to just click on OK without reading what they say.