Since moving to Israel in 2004, I’ve purchased two new mobile phones. The first was a Sony Ericsson T630 that I bought from a shop on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street in early 2005. The second was a first generation iPhone that I bought in America in early 2008.

My reason for buying the first phone locally, instead of getting an unlocked GSM phone in a Costco or on Ebay, was that I needed a phone with an operating system capable of displaying Hebrew, and a keypad with Hebrew letters for typing in Hebrew. For the privilege of getting a phone that would be suitable for someone who lives in Israel, I paid roughly a 50% premium over the American retail price.

My reason for buying the second phone internationally was that technology had advanced sufficiently in the next three years that I was able to overcome the operating system language and keypad language barriers. Question: how did this happen? Answer: the keypad became part of the operating system.

The original iPhone was the first phone I ever encountered that was genuinely as much a pocket computer as it was a phone. Computers get periodic software updates, so it’s natural for the iPhone to get them also. Therefore Apple planned ahead and built a system for computer owners to update their iPhones through their computers (I wish it hadn’t been through iTunes, but hey). And, because Apple gave iPhone users an easy way to update their phones, they also gave iPhone users an easy way to modify the updates, which meant people in places like Russia and Israel, two countries that didn’t have access to iPhones with support for their languages, could add support.

In that way, Apple’s iPhone, with its touchscreen keypad and system for firmware updates, became the first truly international phone.

At the beginning of the iPhone era, jailbreaking and unlocking an iPhone was a bit of a terrifying process. The modification was run on the phone itself, so if something went wrong, the phone could be busted permanently (nowadays, the software is modified by a program on the user’s computer and then, once it’s done and correct, it’s uploaded to the phone as part of a restore). The first time I installed the Hebrew hack – that is, giving my iPhone the ability to display Hebrew characters and enter them via a Hebrew keypad – I learned that it was actually a hack on the Russian hack. There was a confusing process to follow, at the end of which I had to go somewhere on the phone and turn on the option for Russian, after which I could select an international menu and Hebrew letters would appear. Does that sound terrifying to you? It definitely was to me (nowadays, iPhones are finally sold in Israel and Hebrew support is native).

A lot of people won’t buy an iPhone, or won’t buy another one, because they hate the touchscreen keypad and demand physical keys that they can have the feeling of punching. Undeniably, having that tactile-textual experience is awesome, but after seeing the iPhone’s great ability to switch out an infinite number of keyboards, I know that I’ll be using this type of phone for a long time.

By the way, which phone do you think cost more?

If you guessed the iPhone, you were absolutely wrong. In fact, the two phones cost about the same. Buying phones in Israel is for suckers.

iPhone: The First International Phone is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Mac users in Israel, and probably in many other countries, have long experienced befuddlement and frustration to find that the Mac version of Microsoft’s market-dominating Office suite doesn’t support right-to-left languages like Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi. Now it’s clear that even the next version, Office for Mac 2011, won’t support right-to-left languages.

Over the years, many right-to-left compatible Mac alternatives to Office have been identified. Some, like OpenOffice and Google apps, are not at all Mac-specific and consequently don’t strive to deliver the Mac experience, but are intended to replace and even to supersede the attraction of Microsoft Office by offering 95% of the features for 0% of the cost, with the added feature of stability and opensourcity. Apple’s own iWork suite – which includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote for Word, Excel and PowerPoint – has pretty decent Hebrew support. iWork does cost money, but it has the benefit of being made by Apple and intended only for use on Apple computers by the same people who made those computers. Actually, even TextEdit, which is like Apple’s built-in version of Notepad, can handle Hebrew pretty well. I used it for almost all my writing until recently, when I switched to Notational Velocity – which also does Hebrew and which has the awesome added benefit of storing all my notes in a database and syncing like a champ with an iPhone app called Simplenote. For Mac users in Israel who need serious word processing, another popular choice is Mellel (it means something like phrasing in Hebrew) is a full-featured Mac word processor that’s built with right-to-left languages in mind.

My point is that there are really not that many reasons for a Mac user to need Microsoft Word specifically. I understand the game changes when it comes to Excel, but I’m not a spreadsheets monster so I’ll just point out that Numbers is not as easy to use as Excel but it’s still pretty good. There are only a few reasons that people cling fanatically to Microsoft Word: habit, Word’s market dominance and demand for Word’s advanced features.

Reliance on Microsoft Word for either of the previous two reasons – out of habit or deference to the large Word-using community – are problematic for me. I don’t have Office installed on my computers. When someone sends me a .doc format file, I can open it in any of a half dozen applications, but most of the time, I ask the person to send it again either as .txt, .rtf or .pdf, depending on what he needs me to do with it. 99% of the time, I get no complaints. In the remaining 1% of the time I get an opportunity to educate someone who needs help.

In the rare event that someone needs something that involves a Word feature not available in other programs, I secretly do have Office, but please don’t tell anyone.

Hebrew in Office for Mac is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

I’ve actually never seen the Siskel and Ebert show. Or rather, I never did see it while it was on television. I don’t know if that’s a weird quirk of my childhood or if it perhaps wasn’t shown on Montgomery Cable when I was growing up, but I feel a little bit left out that I didn’t get to watch these two guys trashing some of the terrible movies of my youth. Fortunately, Mental Floss has put together a bunch of clips so I was able to get a great feel for how it works when Siskel and Ebert hate a movie. It’s a riot. You should watch every one of them.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised not to see Dolemite on that list, but it was so outrageously bad that it definitely became good (example of its weird badness-cum-goodness: boom mic visible in the upper part of the screen in a few scenes).

Traditionally, Mars Needs Women is considered one of the worst movies ever made. I’ve never managed to see it (for some reason it’s not available on any of the popular p2p filesharing networks), but I’ve gathered that the Martians in it are dudes wearing wetsuits with football helmets and that they’ve come to earth because, well, “Mars needs women.” I don’t know why, but it reminds me of an article I once read about North Korea freakishly and creepily kidnapping South Korean and Japanese women (and actresses, and movie directors) to fulfill their weird fantastic ideas.

Another movie known to be almost unbelievably bad is Ishtar. I have managed to download that one, and I watched about 15 minutes of it, but I could not force myself to go on. The fact that this movie was only available to me with Swedish subtitles says something really confusing and disturbing about Sweden.

What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen?

Worst Movies Ever is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

I’m not sure whether it’s because I always considered my name, Nathan, to be a little out of the ordinary for my generation (baby boom echo), but is it weird that baby names and how they’re chosen have long interested me? I came across this US government database of popular baby names by state recently, and when I checked the popularity of Nathan in Washington DC, 1981, imagine how surprised I was to find that it was the 50th most popular name for boys!! Now you might be thinking that Nathan only got to seem so popular because 85% of all boys born in the District in 1981 were named Antwahn, but that’s totally untrue: the top five most popular names for boys that year were Michael, Christopher, James, David and Matthew, which is reflected by my experience growing up nearby in Maryland. Antwahn does not even appear in the top 100 at all, though Antoine is 66, Antonio is 47 and plain old Anthony is 16.

This got me thinking: if Nathan was even more popular than Antoine in 1981 in Washington DC, how does it compare to names of my family members from the states and years in which they were born? I decided to compare my 50th place name against my brother and those cousins who were born after me (I can’t remember the exact years of cousins who were born before me, and they aren’t sharing this information in their facebook profiles). Also, on this side of the family, all seven cousins are boys, which makes the comparison more fair (families tend to be more traditional when naming their sons).

Here are the ranges that I would have expected to find:

1. 1st-10th – Michael – 1987, Pennsylvania
2. 1st-10th – Jeffrey – 1987, Pennsylvania
3. 21st-30th – Matthew – 1981, Pennsylvania
4. 21st-30th – Marc – 1985, Pennsylvania
5. 31st-40th – Andrew – 1984, Pennsylvania
6. 41st-50th – Alexander – 1984, Maryland
7. perhaps 91st-100th – Nathan – 1981, Washington DC

Here’s what I found:

1. 1st – Michael – 1987, Pennsylvania
2. 2nd – Matthew – 1981, Pennsylvania
3. 13th – Andrew – 1984, Pennsylvania
4. 34th – Jeffrey – 1987, Pennsylvania
5. 50th – Nathan – 1981, Washington DC
6. 54th – Alexander – 1984, Maryland
7. 94th – Marc – 1985, Pennsylvania

The most shocking thing about this is that Nathan was more popular than Alexander in our respective years and states of birth. Who would have guessed?!? I definitely always thought that his name was more conventional than mine. Marc was also a surprise, ranking far lower than I expected, but I also noted that Mark was 28th. Jews typically spell it with a C, so if Marc and Mark were combined they would have been in the mid 20s.

Baby names is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

George Steinbrenner is dead. I guess it’s weird that I never thought he was the kind of guy who could die. He was just timeless, effortlessly throwing vast amounts of money at some Caribbean immigrant athletes so they’d wear pinstripes; and immortalized in Seinfeld episodes that are starting to feel weirdly out of date.

I came to be a Yankees fan in the mid 1980s when I was pretty young. Growing up in a DC suburb, I never felt that Baltimore could be my team, and Yankees were just an alternative to liking the Orioles. But the Yankees legend grew on me as I came to realize what kind of a team I’d chosen to follow. The Yankees were the team of the great baseball heroes of earlier eras – Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, and always Babe Ruth. In some important way, the history of the Yankees is the history of baseball.

Steinbrenner took a team of legendary history and brought glory to it, bringing esteem and pride to New York. I’m sure my idea of wanting so badly to live in New York was fueled in part by its being the kind of awesome city that seemed to bring home World Series rings year after year (when I was in high school in the late 1990s).

There are good owners and bad owners in sports, but almost all are mediocre. Steinbrenner fucked up a lot, but eventually he figured things out and it was never difficult to be a Yankees fan after the strike ended in 1995. By that point I was pretty sick of baseball, but I was always proud to be a Yankees fan and a New Yorker.

George Steinbrenner is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

Do you have a Mac? If so, go now to download AppleJack and install it on your computer. Then forget about it. When something goes terribly wrong with your computer at some date in the distant future – and you can’t access the GUI, don’t have a startup disk, etc., you should then remember that you gave yourself a way to access the computer with this handy Applejack thing, back in July 2010.

It’s nice if you print out the Read Me document, but that’s not necessary.

I would have told you to do this half a year ago, but the Snow Leopard version of Applejack just became available.

AppleJack for Snow Leopard is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

I did the International Baccalaureate program for high school and graduated with an IB diploma. The New York Times has an an article about IB and that is awesome, since I’ve spent the past 11 years surrounded by people who have no idea what the IB program is and who don’t give a damn about it. To describe it, I’d usually say that, in comparison with a full load of AP classes, IB is focused on writing. In fact, it did a pretty good job of preparing me for college, the first year of which I barely remember because it was easy enough that I managed to sleep through most of it.

Going through IB is probably something like the teenaged version of going through law school: you learn to take an issue, figure out what the question is, answer the question, answer any questions about the question, add a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t exactly matter (but demonstrates that you understand what you were supposed to have been studying), then include some nod to whatever overarching ideas or themes this whole study is supposed to be about, and finish gracefully. In writing. By hand. For eight hours or something ridiculous like that.

IB taught my peers and me to think sharply and broadly at the same time, to be hypercritical without getting lost in the criticism and, unfortunately, to cheat pathologically (no one from my class has been involved in any cheating after graduation). At the time (1995-1999), I remember joking about how IB is constantly and consistently described using the words “rigor” and “rigorous.” Those words were a little odd and uncomfortable due to the vaguest sexual connotation and of course due to the motif of death (rigor mortis), with IB students being so tired all the time that they are like walking dead. It’s fitting and just that the Times has chosen to describe IB in the same way:

Many parents, schools and students see the program as a rigorous and more internationally focused curriculum, and a way to impress college admissions officers.
…
Many schools, and many parents, see the I.B. partly as a way to show college admissions offices that students have chosen a rigorous program, with tests graded by I.B. examiners around the world.
…
Because it is so rigorous, the I.B. is not for everyone.

What is it about this word, “rigorous,” that excites IB people and people writing about the IB? I see that the word “challenging” is used only once and “difficult” is not used at all. I think the problem is that Tamar Lewin’s English teacher let her get away with telling instead of showing. She should have gone to the IB.

IB Program is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

In Israel, most fruits are available only in season. I understand that this is due to how small our country is and how expensive it would be to import fruits all year long, but damn, it’s extremely annoying. I don’t have freezer space to store all the strawberries I want to eat from about March, when they’re poised to disappear, to about November, when they start reappearing, so there’s no way I could conceivably also manage to freeze all the necessary mangoes, cantaloupe, peaches, kiwis, etc.

I just stopped by the produce dude to buy a lot of peaches so I could eat them ravenously and then freeze as many as possible. But all I found were the bizarro nasty white wannabe-peaches (note: in Israel there are two fruits marketed as “peach,” the normal delicious peach and the bizarro nasty white wannabe-peaches). He told me that peaches were done for the year. That’s right, 2010 Israeli peach season ended really early because there was not a lot of rain last winter or some such nonsense. And I completely missed it. Damn. Now I won’t get to eat peaches until 2011.

I stocked up on mangoes instead.

I missed peach season! is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

My parents' Volvo

This is my parents’ white Volvo 850, which they’ve just sold. It’s one of only five or six cars that I’ve ever driven in my life, including some cars I drove only one or two times while I was learning how to drive and getting my licenses, and it’s one of only two cars that I’ve driven since September 1997!

Even though I’ve lived far away for most of the past 11 years, I’ve always enjoyed hearing what was happening with the Volvo, from the “check engine” light coming on all the time for no reason to every conceivable part needing to be repaired or replaced by Snider (no first name or title necessary for all the Montgomery County Volvo owners and many from the wider DC area). And then replaced again. And then again. Most recently the air conditioning wouldn’t switch on, which is intolerable for summer commutes, and my parents realized that they’d gotten as much out of this car as they ever would.

Goodbye to the Volvo. I don’t know if I’m ready to greet the Mini Cooper so graciously.

Goodbye Volvo is a post from Lines Writing Lines.

If you’re in the habit of following these things, you’ve by no doubt now read Dan Yoder’s 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. I’ve seen it posted in six or seven places in just the past few hours. Unfortunately, it makes less and less sense every time I skim it. For the following reasons and for many others, I am not planning to delete my Facebook account:

Keeping in touch with Facebook

10. I moved from America to Israel in 2004, leaving behind my entire family and almost every friend I’d ever known. Though I didn’t get a Facebook account until 2005, I’ve been using it daily for the past five years to stay in touch with friends and relatives. Facebook makes it extremely inexpensive and highly efficient to get out important news about myself and to find out important news about other people with whom I never was very close. At the same time, it has never replaced traditional means of communication like telephone calls; nor should it.

Business networking with Facebook

9. LinkedIn is there and it does a fine job, but work is only one part of my life and there’s no chance for a prospective employer or client to get to know me by my LinkedIn page. I add my coworkers as Facebook friends and I’ll do the same for my clients. If they don’t accept me, I don’t mind at all, but I think they’ll want to get a better understanding of who I am and what I like, to the extent that information on Facebook supplements my real personality.

Photo sharing on Facebook

8. I understand that Facebook is now the world’s biggest photo-sharing site. There are others, like Flickr and Picasa, that have lots of features and are more professional, and more serious solutions like installing Gallery on your own domain. But for ease of tagging, getting photos to lots and lots of people – but not to random strangers – and sheer simplicity, sharing photos with Facebook makes perfect sense.

Connecting with new friends on Facebook

7. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been out and met someone or a few people, but only gotten first names. In the old days, meeting someone and speaking for a few minutes meant that I’d either have to ask for a telephone number to continue the conversation, with might seem a little too forward (and I don’t enjoy talking on the telephone very much) or attempting to follow up through a friend-of-a-friend, which could be cumbersome (I’ve never been comfortable meeting someone and then asking for an email address). It’s now extremely handy to use Facebook to connect with a new contact, even given just a first name and a mutual friend. This might be to continue a discussion about some interesting issue, to finish tagging a photo, to pass along information about a job or an apartment or just to stay in touch in the future. It’s clean, it’s easy and it works.

Using Facebook ads

6. Recently, while looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, I used Facebook ads to get the word out and drive people to read my message that I was willing to pay a NIS 3500 finder’s fee for information leading to me renting an apartment. A very large percentage of the site’s traffic was generated by these Facebook ads, leading to several actionable tips. My somewhat creative use of Facebook ads was profiled in an article in TheMarker, the business section of Haaretz, but in fact I believe that I was using Facebook’s advertising platform in exactly the way it was designed and for exactly its purpose. Gone are the days when ad campaigns cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just to plan and start. I set $10 daily limits for my ads and didn’t have any knowledge of the system beyond what’s available in Facebook’s own FAQs. It’s so easy to use Facebook ads, I could almost train my dog to use them.

Facebook’s privacy settings

5. Complaints about how Facebook sets up its privacy settings are a dime a dozen, but I challenge anyone to come up with another comparable web service that gives its users more powerful, granular control over their information than Facebook does. You can choose exactly who gets to see every little thing you do on Facebook or set global settings and just stick with them. True, they change their privacy options all the time and true, it gets pretty confusing, but it’s getting confusing because it’s getting more detailed and more complex, which is a good thing. And the bottom line is that no information is available about you that you don’t put on Facebook in the first place: if you want to have a profile with just your first name, last initial and favorite television shows, you can do that. This isn’t to say that privacy isn’t a big concern. It is, but it’s also crazy to complain that Facebook is spreading your information every which way if you don’t use Facebook’s own options to control who sees your information.

Remembering people’s details with Facebook

4. Whenever someone I know travels, I always ask for a postcard to add to my collection. “But what’s your address?” they always ask. And I always say: “It’s on my Facebook page.” When I meet someone who asks for my phone number, I could recite the ten digits or write them down, but it’s a hell of a lot easier just to give my Facebook username – which, conveniently, is the same as my first name. When someone wants to know my birthday to wish me a happy birthday – it’s there, and it even reminds my friends and family on Facebook when my birthday is approaching. I have a Birthdays calendar in iCal too, so I can see when important birthdays are coming… but there are hundreds more birthdays in my Facebook account.

Everyone is on Facebook

3. As often happens, Farhad Manjoo said it best: “There is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook… it is now so widely trafficked that it’s fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant [and mobile phones]… Facebook is now at that same point – whether or not you intend it, you’re saying something by staying away.” What does it say to me when I meet someone who doesn’t have Facebook? Something like: I don’t want to stay in touch with you. Or perhaps: Please leave me alone. Or even: Community is not important to me. These are perfectly valid sentiments, but if you do want to stay in touch, if you don’t want to be left alone, if community does matter to you, then you’ll find a way to use the tool that’s expected of you.

Facebook gets better all the time

2. I’m actually ambivalent about Facebook’s progress and I include this one even though, while I think it’s true that Facebook does get better all the time, it also gets worse. I miss the days when Facebook was mainly about networks (and then groups) and I think becoming a “fan” of a “page” is lame, which is why I’ve never done it. I think most Facebook applications like the Farmville thing and the Mafia Wars thing are complete crap, which is why I’ve never used them (and why I’ve blocked them from spamming me). At the same time, Facebook’s integration with the wider web is very cool and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities – who knows, maybe one day Facebook will be the next Google, the first stop for people who want to find something on the internet. And where else on the internet do people join a site with their real names (first and last) and real pictures, one account per person? Facebook could be the long sought source for online micropayments, one-click identity verification without credit cards, etc, etc.

It’s a pain in the ass to quit Facebook

1. This is in response to Dan Yoder’s point three: “Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.” It seems circular to me that it’s hard to close your Facebook account would be an argument for why you should close your Facebook account, but I understand that many people see it that way. Just ask yourself: is it really worth it? Facebook is entertaining, useful, efficient, free, generally a good idea to use and possibly will be even more essential in the future. If you don’t like making your information public, limit the amount of information you share. You don’t even have to give a real last name to use Facebook; you don’t have to use your normal email address; you don’t have to join your company’s network or accept your boss’s friend request. Is it really worth canceling your account for the vaguest and lamest reasons? Nope. Do yourself and everyone around you a favor and keep the damn account open.

10 Reasons NOT to Delete Your Facebook Account is a post from Lines Writing Lines.