After over two years of a war that has been horrible on both sides of the border (but especially on the Gaza side), a cease-fire agreement has been signed. All of the remaining living hostages have safely returned to Israel and some of them are already home (some of them are still in hospitals recuperating from their physical ordeal. Recuperating from the mental ordeal is going to take month and years and decades, regardless of where they are). 19 dead hostages are still held by Hamas and other organizations, and I hope they will return them soon as well. I hope the rest of the cease-fire and the following plan for making this a new and better Middle East will come into fruition. Our country deserves the recovery; the Gazan people and Palestinians in general deserve the recovery, and another attempt, now backed by many countries in the world including (especially) the United States, to have their own nation. I hope, in any case, that the cease-fire will hold, that it will mature into peace, and that will in its turn mature into prosperity for all of us.
Children and school
Both my children have finished one level of school in June and started the next one in September. My daughter finished six years of grade school in which, I think, she did not have a single normal year - COVID, then war, then another war - and now hopefully there will be some stability. My son has chosen his majors for high school, which he started this year - Physics and Software Engineering. The latter of course makes me very proud.
Books
I am still working through the David Bowie Book Club, a challenge for myself and a Medium publication for whomever else is interested. Officially, I have read 91 out of the 100 books in the list so far, and you will not see it on the publication but I will share a secret with you here - I am quite ahead of the monthly reading, working through my April 2026 book already. The project publication, at least, is planned to be completed by summer of 2026.
Mostly due to the lean focus diet I've decided to pursue (see below), I've reduced my concurrent book reading to only three books - one about Systems Theory, one digital and one physical. The physical ones will probably be all related to the David Bowie Book Club for now (see above). Other than the next David Bowie Book Club that I've randomized to read, I am currently reading "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows, and "Creativity, inc." by Ed Catmull.
Focus
I find that ideas I read about fit when they're needed, and so reading about the same idea multiple times is beneficial from that perspective. Recently I've come again by a story about Warren Buffet recommending his pilot to figure out what his priorities are, by determining what are the top 25, circling the top 5 of those and then focusing on them and avoiding at all costs the other 20. At the first time I've read it, I thought it was a clever idea, but I did not have anything to use it for. This time, I was overwhelmed by dozens of overlapping projects and I thought it was definitely the idea to invest in and therefore cut down my priorities to just 6 personal ones, and 6 for work. The personal ones include more time and focus on the family, more focus on exercise and health, building a personal LLM Inference server for the family, recording my next album at last, and learning about Systems Theory, which I've discovered recently is fascinating. Avoiding all of the other 20 priorities I've identified will be a project by itself - I may update here from time to time how that goes.