Bill 892 stops you seeing this post - please try another website

Israel has made many huge advances in the field of hi-tech. We invented here many of the things the world takes for granted now, especially in the realm of the internet ( VoIP Telephony, ICQ, etc) so it comes as a great disappointment to me to see that the Internet Censorship Law has been brought up again.

In today's Haaretz, and Jerusalem Post, there is the news of the bill proposed by Amnon Cohen and backed by the Shas Party, talking about bill working its way through the Knesset to force ISPs to block all users from accessing adult orientated sites.

How can we allow it to happen ?

The original bill was aimed at stopping children accessing these sites,but adults would have a password or biometric verification method, but it seems that this is not the case in the report now.

The world news is full of stories of other countries which ban and block sites such as You Tube. It would be a sad day for personal freedom, the internet and israel as a pioneer in the field, if this bill passes.

For more reading on this, see:a great blog post on the globalvoicesonline site when the bill was proposed in May 2007 and another site which documents the history of the Bill 892

Buying a House

I am not entirely sure how the chain of events came about, but we started to think about a place to live. It's very different from in the UK, where our options are limited really to the main centres of Jewish life. Here, we have the whole country to consider.

We have decided, through a process of elimination, to try for the Gush Etzion area, specifically Efrat, partly as we are hoping Ruth will have a job in the area.

Ruth went to see it about a week and a half ago; I went to see it on Friday
Tonight we spoke to a lawyer about it, we are talking to banks tomorrow.
All of this seems to be going very fast!

I know there is much to do in order to get a house here (my sister went through the same thing last year-ish.

Anyway - I know that the style of post is not the usual ones, but every once in a while it happens.

Snow ?

As mentioned before, there is 1 thing at this time of year which makes all Israelis excited -- Snow.
They are forecasting snow again tomorrow night. This will mean another couple of days of chaos and fun for all.
Will it snow ? Well,I for one won't get the day off, but will try to take part in some of the fun, if only I can find my gloves

Browser Compatability

I have often been annoyed how some websites don't work properly in Firefox. One solution is to use the IE Tab plugin. This has a few flaws, but is generally excellent at emulating an IE window within Firefox. I am therefore very sad to have noticed that the Blog template I am using looks really bad within Internet Explorer( at least on my laptop).

I therefore apologise to all of you using Internet Explorer, who, as far as I can make out, see my blog as:


Those of you using Firefox (and even Safari) see the blog in this nicer template of


So, until I find a template which is better suited to all browsers, or am proven wrong, please use Firefox to maximise your viewing pleasure.