Holy cow, this is why I wouldn't put an internet connection where I work.

Amazing site. Just scroll down.

And the Norwegians say that Swedes are dumb.

PR-Wire, Rishon LeZion.

Today at 09:00 Jerusalem Time (GMT +02:00), privately held pashabitz.com agreed to a deal with privately held Sammy Burekas to purchase one "Cheese Burekas". Terms of the purchase were not disclosed but the deal is reportedly worth 6 New Israeli Shekels in cash and cash equivalents. The cheese burekas, which sources estimate to include the "also put an egg inside?" option, will become a fully-owned subsidiary of pashabitz.com.

Says Pasha Bitz, CTO of pashabitz.com "This move enables pashabitz.com to further strengthen it's position among global leaders in the field of cheese burekas consumers, and proves our strong commitment to the morning baked goods market segment".

Industry analysts have been touting a potential IPO in the making for pashabitz.com, that could come as early as Q2 2007.

The recent acquisition joins a row of recent mergers for the Modiin, Israel based company.

 

About pashabitz.com

A known leader in the HTML-based products market, pashabitz.com is privately held and employs 1 workers across the globe.

Investor relations: Pasha Bitz, pavelbitz@gmail.com

 

About Sammy Burekas

A maker and distributor of Burekas (cheese, potato, pizza, Bulgarian), Pizza Malauach and various other baked goods and refreshing beverages, Sammy Burekas operates multiple stores across Israel.

Investor relations: Sammy Burekas (owner and CEO).

Check out this 360 commercial on Google Videos. It got banned by MS lawyers.

If I weren't flying to Buenos Aires in two weeks I'd be playing with this shit all day long.

Get an intro on the LINQ project and VS DSL tools.

I highly recommend reading this book - The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara Tuchman. So cool, I almost prefer taking the bus to work because of it.

The day before yesterday I felt the urge for some Chili Con Carne. So yesterday I went over to all recipes and a couple of hours later I was finally feeding.

Turned out muy delicioso.

This I wouldn't expect. I registered my domain a while ago using Yahoo! Domains. Back then in was 9.95$ a year. A couple of months ago they started offering a domain for 2.95$ a year. So you'd think I'll be able to switch to the 2.95 plan starting with the second year, right? Wrong. They won't let me switch, they'll just automatically charge me 9.95 for every folllowing year. Now if I really want to switch I have to cancel my plan, which will release the domain to the wild (and we all know how many people out there want the pashabitz.com real bad), wait for some undefined amount of time until it becomes available and then register it again as a new customer.

I even emailed their support (which is not easy, let me assure you) and got such a laconic reply I'm not even sure it wasn't all computer-generated.

The correspondence went sort of like this:

Me: "I'm on the 9.95 plan but I see there's a 2.95 plan now. Can I switch starting with next year?"

Yahoo! Support: "No, you can't. We'll charge you 9.95 forever, until the world ends."

M: "But don't you see how moronic this is, you bloody fools? You realize I can switch the hard way right?"

Y: "Hmm. 2.95 is a limited-time new-customer offer, you have to pay 9.95"

M: "Are you even listening to me? Why would you treat an existing customer worse than a new one?"

Y: "The price is 9.95. You have an existing plan. You'll pay 9.95 once a year. Okay?

   Please fill out this quick survey:

   (1) Was Yahoo! Customer Support helpful to you? (a) Very (b) Not (c) Guess so

   ..."

 

You get the point.

This is all very Israeli-type service, but very not USA-type service. That's the surprising part of it, for me.

And anyway, why can't Yahoo! give me that lousy 7 buck discount? They make like a bejillion dollars a month. Their market cap is 50 to the 28th power. They *buy* small countries every day just to "enter new markets". Be damned if I understand.

Zap are really providing a great price-comparing service, I use it all the time.

But of course this is Israel, so I always wondered whether the store reviews are real. I'm sure every online store out there, would log on and post 500 favourable reviews of themselves, if they could. Can they?

Hearing some awful user-experiences from people I know, and having purchased some stuff online myself, I wanted to help fellow customers and also share the love for places of business that are doing a great job. So I decided to post some store reviews on Zap. Turns out they have a Stalinist review regime over there. Guess they figured the Israeli head out too. You must provide a digitally scanned copy of your purchase receipt in order for them to post your review of a store!

I don't own a scanner, and who does anyway? Like I'm going to look for a scanner somewhere, go there, remember I don't have the receipt, go back home, find the receipt, go to the place with the scanner, scan the receipt and email it to Zap just so I can review an online shop. I don't have that much love to share. Not to a website, for sure.

Now they're obviously in a dilemma: they want the user-generated content, and they can loosen the controls so it'll be easy to post a review, but then the info will be very unreliable (that may work in Norway, not here). Or they can make you go through hell so that almost no one will post reviews, but the small amount of data that's available is very trustable. They went for the latter.

 

But I still want to help you out with your online shopping (and you already know I'm very trustworthy) so I'm going to put up some short reviews for google to index:

The Official and Unbiased pashabitz.com Online Stores in Israel Reviews

a) e-net - ordered a Nokia phone, received in two days, no problems at all. "Totally Happy" on the Bitz-scale.

b) Mardanit - ordered a memory chip for a PC, same thing - delivered in two days, no problems. "Totally Happy".

c) Yarden PC - a graphics card for a PC. Fast delivery, no problems. "Totally Happy".

d) Master PC - an LCD screen. Had a few time-wasting phone calls with their orders department. For some reasong they were having problems with my credit card (listen, my credit is respected worldwide, don't be thinking nothing funny). But then after 3 or 4 days the screen got delivered as should. "Just Happy" on the Bitz-scale.

e) Photofilm - bought a compact flash memory card. Arrived in two days. No problem. "Totally Happy".

 

And remember: the spin stops right here.

Ever wanted to manually control what build-events run when you build in Visual Studio?

For example, if you want to register the output in GAC or something, but not always, only when you choose to do so.

At first I was thinking about flipping some boolean environment variable and then testing it in the build event code. But later I decided it's better to define a new build configuration and test for it. To test for the build config - use the ConfigurationName macro, like this:

if $(ConfigurationName) ==DoStuffConfig echo doing stuff

if not $(ConfigurationName) ==DoStuffConfig echo not doing stuff

Now, if you want the special code to run, switch the configuration to "DoStuffConfig" (you have to create it first, of course).If you don't want it to run, switch to some other config.

Only problem is, switching the configuration takes a while on a big solution (30 seconds or so). Is there a better way?