As of a few days ago, I have come to a realization that I must face a certain life-changing decision.

Either I take a left turn, and be what people expect me to be, but not be free to do whatever I wish, or I take a right turn, and “head for daylight”, in which I can do everything i’d like to do and not follow any expectations.

If I take a left turn, I will continue what i’ve done up ’till now, being who i’m expected to be [in the present and in the future].

If I take a right turn, i’ll be free to do as I wish, but I may disappoint some people in my life and possible have our connection “broken”.

So to speak, if I take a left turn my true want of what i’d like to be will not “shine” due to lack of daylight, but if I take a right turn it will shine but may cause some people i’ve known to stay on the right side, as they may not be able to accept the/”survive” in daylight.

I know some of you will understand my crisis here, and some will not. If you do understand, please talk in “clues” as I did without uncovering any details.

(My avatar is partially in the dark, which expresses my current status: in the dark, but willing to step out of the darkness and head to daylight.)

Wait, what’s “The Scenario”?

The Scenario is an Israeli documentary-fiction television show, based on analysts and experts’ evaluations of what could happen in the coming future, based on predictions and current news. The show, hosted by Yaron London, presents a view of events as-if happening in real time or which have happened in the past during this semi-fictional timeline. Every episode, the show “leaps forward” in time and investigates what could happen in the future in accordance with the current timeline (The non-fictional timeline in which we live), which is presented as what is currently happening or what has happened in the semi-fictional timeline. What is shown is based on real investigations of current and previous events which could indeed happen in Israel. After every incident, a fictional “Breaking News” edition of a news channel appears and reviews the incident.

Documentary-fiction? What’s that?

Documentary-fiction is a genre of television programs which are documentary shows that although based on academic material and real interviews, they present a possible future as predicted using the real material presented. Using video clips of incidents which did happen in real life along with the documentary genre style creates a certain feeling of reality which, like in normal fictional shows, triggers emotions but in a much stronger level.

What are the scenarios presented in the show?

Well, according to sources, and what i’ve just watched, they are:

1. Earthquakes: It’s a sunny-cold day in October 2012, and suddenly a 6.7 in the Richter magnitude scale earthquake attacks Israel. This earthquake is only one out of many to strike Israel in the coming weeks. How do we handle it? How will the public react? And what will happen in the most dangerous place in Israel - the Ammonia tank in the bay of Haifa? (Broadcasted)
2. Temple Mount - A ticking bomb?: A warning written in Arabic and Hebrew is delivered to the nation-wide news network, after the prime-minister’s announcement that the holy city of Jerusalem will be divided, saying Temple Mount will be blown up by Arab people should it be divided between the two (Israel and Arab countries), since Temple Mount will obviously be kept as ours (Israel’s) should we ever divide it. What will happen the next day? (Not yet broadcasted, but shown in the preview is: (click the little 1))¹
3. Nuclear Crisis: A nuclear war erupts between Iran and Israel, will anyone (Israel’s prime-minister or Iran’s “ruler”) push the button? (Not yet broadcasted, one preview bit shown. (click the little 2))²
4. Biological Crisis: A new mysterious disease breaks out in Israel, what is it and how will we handle it? (Not yet broadcasted, no preview(s) shown)
5. The Second Depression of the Economy: The US stops supporting Israel’s economy due to it’s own economic crisis, and the worldwide economic crisis just gets worse. How will Israel handle the economic crisis? (Not yet broadcasted, no preview(s) shown)

My opinion about the show

In my opinion, the show is very good because it presents a view of what could happen, like it has just happened. The combination of real interviews and material, along with the semi-fictional evaluations presents a fine show which can take on any thriller. Because the predicted events are possible, and not fully fictional like monster movies such as Cloverfield or other movies which are based in another country, the experience felt during the show is very powerful, as if you’re watching what actually happened. I praise the show’s producer for the amazing techniques used to make the evaluations of what could come seem so real and alive, even if they are just what could happen. I’m looking forward for watching the show’s next episodes, and plan to record it too. Perhaps HBO will buy this show too like they did with “In Treatment”?

1. A Jewish religious man saying “Israel should destroy Temple Mount and build the third Holy Temple“, the army is seen to be guarding the house while many Arab people attempt to be breaking the defense slowly and are seen throwing stones at soldiers and the temple itself, an Arab-Israeli man says a Muslim man will never “hurt” Temple Mount, and several people say that should Temple Mount ever be bombed, or even partially “hurt”, it will set off a World War.
2. A man is saying “Our biggest fear is Iran’s biggest weapon: the nuclear facility.” (interviewer’s response) “Why?” “Because once it explodes or will be used, *BOOM, all of this will disappear. *Points at Jerusalem*”

So, while viewing YouTube I came to find a trailer of the finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender. As some of you may know, Avatar: The Last Airbender (Avatar: The Legend of Aang in some countries) is an animated anime-like show about Aang, the newest avatar, and his friends trying to save the world from the “fire nation”. Quoting from Wikipedia: (You can read the series’ premise by clicking on the tiny “1″ just after this text^»1 )

Avatar: The Last Airbender (also known as Avatar: The Legend of Aang in several countries) is a multi award-winning American animated television series that airs on the Nickelodeontelevision network and on Nicktoons Network. The show is set in an Asian-influenced world^[1] ofmartial arts and elemental manipulation; the series follows the adventures of Aang and his friends, who try to save the world from war with the Fire Nation.^[2] The show’s protagonist Aang is trapped in an iceberg when he is found by two members of the Southern Water Tribe, Kataraand Sokka.^[3] After being freed from the iceberg, Katara and Sokka join Aang on a long journey across the globe; their ultimate goal is to help Aang acquire the skills to defeat the Fire Lord, and end the war.^[4] In the series’ terminology, each episode is referred to as a “chapter”, and each season as a “book.”.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is popular with both audiences and critics,^[6] garnering 4.4 million viewers on its best-rated showing and receiving high ratings in the Nicktoons lineup, even outside its 6–11-year-old demographic.^[4][7] The series’ success prompted Nickelodeon to order second^[8] and third^[9] seasons.

So, as I was saying, I came upon the official trailer for episodes 12 through 21 of season 3, “Fire”. I had already watched episodes 12 through 15 on a website providing leaked episodes, so only 16 through 21 matter to me. The trailer is highly filled with action, interesting “clue” scenes (Like the one showing someone, known as “Azula”, throwing her hair brush on the mirror. It’s a “clue” because her mother is seen in the reflection, and she is known to either be dead or far gone), and surprising scenes. (One example is in about the middle of the episode, when a girl, known as “Katara”, stops the rain in place. She’s a waterbender, so she can control the flow of water, but up till now we (the fans) had no idea she can do something as big as that.) The finale will consist of 4 linked episodes, meaning it will be a 2-hour long movie. But, as much as i’d like to see it already, I don’t want the series to end. I hope they make one more “fun” season, just for the heck of it. Three seasons aren’t enough. When the DVD comes out and all three get to the nearest Blockbuster, i’ll rent ‘em season-by-season to rip them all to my PC. I want to have all 61 episodes on-hand after the series ends. (Then I could stream them from my PC to my PlayStation 3 and with its upscaling engine, I could watch it in full HD 1080p! )

So, without further waiting, here’s the trailer! I think you’ll find it to be more of a trailer like for real action movies, as I did.

P.S.: Did you notice the funny ending? It’s a joke made by the creators.

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender takes place in a fantasy world, home to humans, fantastic animals, and supernatural spirits. Human civilization is divided into four nations: the Water Tribes, theEarth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Each nation has its own natural element, on which it bases its society. The Water Tribes base their society on water, the Earth Kingdom on earth, the Air Nomads on air, and the Fire Nation on fire. Within each nation exists an order called “Benders”, who have the ability to manipulate the element of their nation. The show’s creators assigned each Bending art its own style of martial arts; each Bending art inherited the advantages and weaknesses of the martial arts it was assigned. The Bending types areWaterbending, Earthbending, Firebending, and Airbending.^[20]

   Each generation yields one person who is capable of Bending all four elements. This being is referred to as the Avatar, the spirit of the planet manifested in human form. When an Avatar dies, they are reincarnated into the next nation in the Avatar Cycle. The Avatar Cycle parallels the seasons: winter for The Water Tribes, spring for the Earth Kingdom, summer for the Fire Nation, and autumn for the Air Nomads.^[21] Legend holds the Avatar must master each bending art in order, starting with their native element. This can sometimes be compromised when the situation requires it, as Aang demonstrates in the show. For the Avatar, learning to bend the element opposite their native element can be extremely difficult. This is because opposing Bending arts are based on opposing fighting styles and disciplines. Firebending andWaterbending are opposites, as are Earthbending and Airbending.^[22]

   The Avatar possesses a unique power called the Avatar State. It empowers the Avatar with the knowledge and abilities of all past Avatars, and is used as a defense mechanism.^[23] When an Avatar enters the Avatar state, their eyes and tattoos begin to glow. If an Avatar is killed in the Avatar State, the reincarnation cycle will be broken, and the Avatar cycle will end.^[23]

   Through the ages, countless incarnations of Avatar have served to keep the four nations in harmony, and maintain world order.^[20] The Avatar serves as the bridge between the physical world and the Spirit World, allowing him or her to solve problems that normal benders cannot.^[24]

Haha, Torley¹ -style! :D 

1. Torley Linden

After I read an article on Engadget I got curious about Safari 4, and began searching the web for a “leaked” developer preview release for Windows. I thought “Why would Apple make a release for Windows? It’s designed to ship with Snow Leopard first.”, but I still did a Google search. 5 seconds later, I was downloading the build. It took me 93 minutes to download by torrent, but it was worth it. Why? Here’s why.

1. Javascript: Insanely fast. – Javascript in Safari 4 Developer Preview for Windows is very, VERY fast. For example, if you know what’s Plurk, it’s a heavily-”AJAXified” web application which takes some time here and there to load stuff. In Safari 3, loading the “x new responses” and “x new Plurks” took me about 0.5 seconds. Now, in Safari 4, it takes me approximately 0.23 seconds. Fast, eh? In addition, Plurking (same as Tweeting just in Plurk), replying and opening conversations is much faster now, in addition to the amount of time it takes to load Plurk. Loading Plurk is approximately 2 seconds in Safari 3. In Safari 4, it’s about 1.3-1.4 seconds, and rolling the timeline is faster than ever. Another example is the now-sluggish Gmail. As we all know, the “new” Gmail “2″ is very slow when loading messages, labels/folders, settings, etc.. However, with Safari 4, it’s now almost as fast as a native application. The only thing not faster in it is the initial “Loading (hidden)@gmail.com…” screen, but that’s ok.
2. Speed: Speedier than ever. – Safari 3 is super-fast when rendering pages. But, Safari 4 is even faster. Rendering pages, images, and loading javascript is much faster now, which makes browsing even more fun, quick and easy.
3. Web applications: Browser not required. – A cool new feature is the ability to “save websites as web applications”. What does this mean? You choose an option to save, and save it as a standalone .exe file, unlike Prism which is using one .exe file to handle all. No shortcuts necessary, no need for Safari in the background, and it has several options like having a minimized menu bar and optionally showing some of the toolbar. (When you need to refresh, as SSBs¹ don’t have a seen refresh feature and F5 doesn’t always work.)
4. Less memory used: More for the rest. – In Safari 3, I had witnessed the RAM² usage was at about 117MB during normal browsing. That’s a lot. Now, it’s shrunk down to 97MB, and that’s a reasonable amount for a browser with beautiful font smoothing, a great-looking small user interface and high-end speeds. So, you gain about 20MB for other applications.

1. Site-Specific Browsers
2. Random Access Memory

New features:

• Service status now appears above all articles in the “MediaWiki:Sitenotice” part of the page.
• Hovering over the service status or content rating now shows more info in a tooltip.
• Site-wide permissions can now be changed with “Extension:Protectsite”. (Administrators ONLY.)

• “Content Rating” and “Service Status” cannot be hidden now without injecting cookies. (AKA the “[dismiss]” button is now gone.)

As I struggled to keep the wiki clean of those, I couldn’t ban them all, as they were using different IP ranges. So, I kept on fighting, until another administrator noticed what happened, contacted the Wikia team and had them enable an extension to protect the entire site. He activated it and set it to allow edits, page creations and account creations only by registered users and system operators, and moves and uploads only by system operators. The block was for 6 hours.

Afterwards, I reactivated the block, this time only taking out anonymous users’ permissions for 24 hours. After that, the issue seems to have cooled down.

If you’re wondering how were the edits, and how annoying it was to handle, go here and look at the times, IPs, target pages and click “(diff)” to see a differentiating page between the good revision and bad revision.

P.S.: The (-??,???) numbers state how many characters (Unicode) were erased. The lower it gets, the “redder” it becomes.

Along with this update, more will come! My only clue: keep your eyes locked on the search field!

Child avatars are welcome at the celebration. However, we do respectfully decline the submissions we received to create exhibits for the event. Goreans, role-players, and members of the multitude of international communities are all welcome, and I hope you come. The SL Birthday on Linden land is PG.  

Huh? You want kid avatars to come but you don’t want them to participate in creating the event’s builds? How does that make sense more than before? I guess all you want is some fancy castles, houses, and decoration houses without balloons, lollipops, candy, kiddy shows, and all that stuff. But, as the community fights back, some fight wisely with some smart interpretation:

But Linden Lab, it seems, doesn’t want its Residents anymore. It doesn’t want a free, open, creative world. It wants a sanitized, media-friendly world, that universities and big corps won’t think twice about making major investments in. LL’s message for Residents now is: Thanks for making us so popular, but go away now. You’re embarrassing us in front of the cool kids.  

Jacek, you’re one heck of a genius. It’s like that new “Have your face on the new yogurt flavor’s ads!” campaign we had a while ago here in Israel. Tons of people came to audition, one auditioned and made it, yet after the shots they banished her out and payed her nothing. What’s the reason for most of those campaigns? “Hey, we promised you’ll be on the advertisement. We didn’t promise money, fame and glory. Shoo!” Or in other words, free advertising. Don’t you see how we made this world so popular, by just walking into it? Linden had the count of residents on the home page at all times to show the world “how big our customer count is”! Then, when we reached 1 million, the world exploded into the press, and all came in. Now, they don’t handle our abuse reports anymore¹, they neglect the main databases, bring in “new furniture” before they take out the stinky trash (metaphor for bringing in new features before fixing old bugs), and now fail to even do that one yearly thing called a “birthday”. I don’t think SL will be happy when all his friends don’t come. He’ll start shouting at his parents with his tiny little voice “Did you invite them all??? Why didn’t anyone show up??? THIS IS THE WORST BIRTHDAY EVER!!! *cries loudly*”. I can’t wait for that kid to grow up, “get a grip on his life”, and have his parents die. (Or, in other words, I can’t wait for Second Life to get much better and have the bad part of Linden “die”, or in other words, get fired/laid off/be put out of the SL teams)Ok, too many metaphors and extra issues. Back to SL5B.So, basically, Linden want kids to come to the party, bring a present and say hi to the birthday boy but not have a piece of the cake.In conclusion, Linden, if you’re reading this, back down from your decision and allow all to be accepted into “frontstage” and backstage. Second Life is supposed to be about living your life the way you want to live it, without discrimination or abuse by others. So what, they think if they ban others from doing it they can instead? It’s like saying “Don’t swim in the pool!” and then running in a frenzy to it, jumping and diving with a belly flop so strong it splashes water at the rest of the people.Oh, and do vote for Vint’s JIRA issue concerning this, we’re at over 170 votes now! Woot!  :D .Oh, and one more thing: I’m hosting a party in OpenSim soon to celebrate SL5B. Details will be published soon. :D 

1. I had a report once with a pesky neighbor, which added a platform on his side similar to mine to show it as an expansion. On it, he had his own products for sale. I sent a report to the Lindens, no reply in 1 week. Sent another, no reply once more. Teleported a Linden in charge of our grid, and guess what he said? “Figure it out with him on your own. Don’t involve us.”. Hey, aren’t you supposed to HELP me as a Liaison? Aren’t you “the frontline employees responsible for communicating and enabling the Second Life experience”? Aren’t you supposed to “help to maintain and shape Second Life’s unique online community by assisting Residents with problems both technical and social, orienting new arrivals, and channeling community concerns and feedback to Second Life’s Community Managers and developers”?? Because, the way I see it, you’re doing your job all wrong.

So now, I have the excellent “Nokia E65″ with Symbian 9.1 which fits me pretty nicely. It has a graphics processor with the same power like in the original PlayStation, so, I can (theoretically) run PS1 games on it as well. It has pretty awesome multi-tasking features, and a desktop mode with up to 6 program shortcuts and includes statuses regarding tasks, missed calls, messages, etc.. In addition, it is one of the only 3 phones by Nokia available in Israel which have WiFi. So, I have WiFi on my phone too! YIPEEE!! I also installed the adapted-to-Nokia-N95 game called “Snakes”, which has 42 levels set in PlayStation quality and superb sounds. (3D retro gaming! ) The only thing I don’t like about it, is the fact it takes a while to load programs sometimes, and it takes a while to load the menu every time. But, it’s a sweet phone I got for free. (50 NIS monthly = 30 NIS complete warranty which includes replacement phone + 20 NIS UMTS internet basic package (100MB in Obox Live and 100MB in all other sites) )

The result? Smiley + Nokia E65 = <3. 

1. If its cost is not above 70 NIS per month