I am Shlomi Fish, a professional Israeli software developer, and author of articles, essays, presentations, and funny stories, aphorisms and bits. I have a Bachelor of Sciences (B.Sc.) from the Technion in Electrical Engineering, but it would be a stretch to call me an Electrical Engineer, at least with my current level of expertise in the field. I’m actually more of a programmer and a specialised mathematician.

At the moment, I’m a computer geek (= person who is enthusiastic about computers), and a former nerd (= a person without a social life), because I recently started to increasingly socialise more. I’m interested in many other fields, including linguistics, history, writing, children and non-children literature, and T.V. and movies.

I should note that I am only one person, and in fact am unaware of any other “Shlomi Fish”’es of significance (at least not according to Internet searches).

I am very much a guy, despite what my first name’s suffix (the “i” of “Shlomi”) may imply to English speakers. I am also heterosexual, and while hating being a macho in real-life, and having some other somewhat feminine qualities, do not think I’m a woman born in a man’s body. (Or a lesbian born in a man’s body, for that matter.)

Many Israeli masculine names end with an “i”: Avi, Ari, Meni, Beni, Ori, Uri, Udi, Eli, etc. An “i” suffix means “of me” or “mine” in Hebrew, or “having the property-of” (like “-ful” in English). There are also many Israeli Hebrew feminine names that end with “i”. One reason I’m using “Shlomi” instead of “Shlomy” is because “Shlomy” might be pronounced to rhyme with the word “my”.

Well, “Shlomi” or “שלומי” in Hebrew (see its wikipedia entry) means “my Shalom” in Hebrew, or perhaps “Shalom-ful” (= having the property of Shalom) or “the Shalom of Jehovah”. “Shalom” is an ancient Hebrew word, that is derived from proto-Semitic origins meaning something like “well-being”, “welfare”, “peace”, “harmony”, etc. It is an ambiguous noun as the nouns of some ancient Semitic languages were. See also what I wrote about it on my blog (and some of the comments I received).

The reason why it is “Shlomi” or “Shelomi” instead of “Shalomi” is due to a certain pronunciation transformation in Hebrew, where certain vowels are shortened into a Schwa when they are distanced too much from the Stress of the word. Quite a few non-Hebrew speakers have issues with pronouncing Hebrew words that start with several Schwas in succession (as this scene from a screenplay I wrote indicates).

Now, most Israelis pronounce this name with the stress on the “lo”. I, however prefer it to be pronounced with the stress on the “mi”, albeit I also answer to people who pronounce it the other way around. My version is the correct Biblical pronunciation. You can hear me pronounce it in Hebrew (Ogg, mp3) and in English (Ogg, mp3).

Please spell the name as starting with “Sh”, similar to the common spelling in English — not with “Sch” (the German spelling).

My last name - Fish - naturally means the aquatic creatures in English or (with a different spelling) in German. It was the last name of my late grandfather who was a Polish-born Jew, and I’m still carrying it.

“Fish” is an uncommon name in Israel, but there are also some variations such as “Fisher”, “Fishman”, “Fischer”, “Fishlov”, “Fishelson”, etc.

Note that the last name “Fish” is not meaningful in Hebrew and in fact in Ancient Hebrew the only possible pronunciation would be “Pish” (which means “pee” or “urine” in Modern Israeli Hebrew slang) because it uses the same letter - פ for both the "P" and the "F" sounds, and it would be "P" in the beginning of the word.

Well, I was born in Israel in 5 May 1977, and lived in Tel Aviv for a year. Then, when I was 1 year old, my parents moved to Dallas, Texas, USA for my father’s post-Doctorate and later on we moved to Rockville, Maryland, USA and stayed there until I was about 5. Then, we moved back to Tel Aviv and I lived in Ramat Aviv Gimmel ever since.

Currently (November 2019) I am happily unemployed, and trying to build esteem, success, recognition, fame, etc. as a writer/entertainer/amateur philosopher. My ultimate goal for now is to become the next big author — the next J. K. Rowling if you may. Even if I don’t achieve it that goal, it’s going to be a wonderful, exciting, and wonderous, journey, and I’m not going to give up. (“Never Give Up!!”)

• “Challenges I face in my quest to become the next big author”

First of all, thanks for thinking highly of me. Otherwise, note that while I may be a competent software developer, I inhibit some issues that may make me unattractive to employers. See my critique to a post and some replies I received. I won't list my perceived problems here, just note that employers care about several aspects of an employee beside raw competency and knowledge, and often I feel they are right.

That put aside, if you are interested in hiring me, despite whatever limitations I may have, please contact me and we'll see about that.

I’m also known as “shlomif” or on the IRC as “rindolf”.

When writing a letter to me you can start it with “Hi Shlomi!”, “Dear Shlomi,”, “Hello Shlomi,” etc. or with “Hi Mr. Fish”, “Dear Mr. Fish”, etc. Not “Hello Fish” please... I hate when people call me “Fish” to my face, albeit “Mr. Fish” is OK. You can also use my “Rindolf” nickname with or without a “Mr.” honorific.

Some letters begin with “Shlomi,” in a separate paragraph. I personally feel that the person is always trying to preach to me in this case, but I was told it is not considered bad form in English-speaking countries, so it may just be a culture gap.

If you wish to refer to me in third person, you should start with “Shlomi Fish” and continue with “Shlomi”, “Fish”, “Mr. Fish”, etc. Alternatively you can start with “Shlomif”, “shlomif”, or “Rindolf”, which are my common Internet handles which I use everywhere I can.

On the IRC, I generally use the nickname “rindolf”.

First of all, I should note that one’s general classification of a religious inclination (e.g: Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, Deist, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, etc.) is not always indicative of of a their idea system or philosophy. That put aside, I consider myself a self-sufficient, optimistic, idealistic and anti-cynical, pluralistic, anti-Fatalist, agnostic. Now let me explain what all those mean:

• I’m agnostic because I’m not sure whether God — however he/she/they/it are manifested — exists or not. I suspect they do, but don’t take chances and don’t wish to risk dying - now or ever.

• I’m self-sufficient because I believe that “The Gods Help Those That Help Themselves”, that “Reality to be Conquered Must Be Obeyed” and all that Jazz.

• I am optimistic, idealistic and anti-cynical because I believe that people are inherently good, can be trusted and that humanity is going forward instead of backward. I feel like my life is gradually improving and that almost every day is the best day of my life so far , and that 2014 (when these lines were written) is the best year I can remember (and I’m 1977-born).

• I’m pluralistic, because I constantly have derived and will derive inspiration from many sources and also try not to dismiss an insight based on its source - see Ad-hominem, Reductio ad Hitlerum for more information about why this is fallacious.

  Also see this quote by Larry Wall about All Truth is God's Truth.

• I am anti-Fatalistic because I believe that humans’ survival mechanism - reason operates by choice, and not automatically, and that we have free will. This is as opposed to the new age crop of neo-Deterministic materialistic atheists who believe that the laws of physics dictate exactly what a person will think and do.

I am a Jew by birth and almost all of my known ancestors were or are Jewish.

That put aside, my mother was born in Baghdad, Iraq and lived there for some years as a child before her parents and her made aliyah (or immigrated) to Israel. My father, on the other hand, was born in Israel to a mother from Vilnius (a.k.a “The Jerusalem of Lithuania”) who immigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, along with most of her family during the 1930s, and to a father who was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, and who escaped from the Nazis during World War II through the USSR, and Persia/Iran.

As such, I look (see photo) like a kind of a Iraqi/Persian version of my father, who looks East European.

A conversation I took part in the evening at a during a hiking trip, went something like that:

• Girl to Shlomif: "which Jewry do you belong to?"

• Shlomif: "I am half-Polish / half-Iraqi."

• Girl to her male friend with me overhearing it: "You know what is the only thing that is worse than a Polish Jew? A half-Polish / half-Iraqi!"

I found it amusing, and kind-of have taken it to my advantage.

Judaism is much more than just a religion, and it is also an ethnicity (or "peopleship" as I used to call it), a culture, a heritage, and possibly many other things. There are many secular Jews, who do not completely adhere to the Jewish religion, and are instead deist, agnostic or even atheist. This is the case for me, but note that I am still aware of Jewish holidays, and join the family feast or reflect upon them in a way. (I also commemorate April Fools' Day, International Talk Like a Pirate Day and some other secular holidays.)

Despite all that, my studies of the Jewish religious scripture, has a large influence on my personal philosophy "Rindolfism" and my works of fiction, but there are many other influences. As much as I like parts of the Hebrew Bible, I do not hold it as gospel, or as "The Word of God", and I think Sturgeon's law (= "90% of everything is crap") applies to it as well.

No, I did not. I’m exempt from service, due to the various depressions I got into during High School. Please don’t accuse me of being a “Mishtamet” (“משתמט”), who is a person who purposely avoided a military service, while being fully capable of it. That’s not the case for me, as back in the time, I wanted to join the army.

That put aside, I oppose the draft in Israel or wherever.

While the amount of emails that I receive is not overwhelming (yet), I still find that people are sending me a lot of annoying emails. Here are a few ground rules for when not to send me emails:

• If the email to which you are replying was sent by me to a mailing list, please reply to the list. I loath such emails sent in private to mailing list posts. They tend to be preachy, annoying, and worthless.

  One person, who sent me a lot of emails like that, and whom I talked to about it on IM and told him how I felt, claimed that he sent such emails when what he had to say was not well-thought enough. Well, my reply now is that if you want to send me a non-well-thought email - don’t. Please respect me enough to make sure it is a mature idea or else don’t send it at all.

  Feel free to criticise me in public, as long as you do it with decency, respect, and while avoiding common logical fallacies.

  If you do want to send me a private E-mail to a mailing list post, please explicitly say that the E-mail is sent in private, and detail the reason for it. Else, I am likely to throw away your E-mail.

• Please don’t send me a “Can you teach me how to become a hacker?” emails. See my How Can I Start Contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) essay instead. If you’re living in Tel Aviv and vicinity and are willing to pay for me giving you private lessons, then this is an option.

• Please don’t send me emails, trying to interest me in contributing to an open-source project for free, a pro-bono commission, or anything else that doesn’t involve payment. I follow my own interests and don’t work for free.

  If you have an online or offline publication, and can pay me for the trouble of writing an article, then feel free to inform me about it. Other possible commissions such as book reviews are also appropriate.

• Please don’t send me emails with technical questions about open source projects or other general knowledge-and-experience questions that other people may be able to answer. I maintain a document explaining how to get help on the Internet and you should refer to it for general enlightenment.

  An exception to this rule, may be questions about projects that I personally created or maintain.

I don’t drink alcoholic beverages, don’t consume caffeinated beverages, and have never smoked (e.g.: cigarettes), and have never “done” any of the currently illegal narcotics (e.g.: Marijuana, Cocaine, Heroin). I find that this way I’m less tired, more energetic, and less moody. I don’t need such negative bio-physical aphrodisiacs to be happy, and neither do you.

Most of the people I talk with on the IRC who consume caffeine have become dependent on it and cannot function without their morning/mid-morning/midday/etc. coffee. On the other hand, I’m energetic from the time I wake up until I go to sleep. As for alcohol, it has negative short-term and long-term effects. And I also don’t want to become drunk because it will cause me to lose control of myself, and do silly things and say silly stuff.

I have never smoked or taken drugs, and never intend to do so. People with a drug dependency reduce their happiness and self-esteem like this, and damage their health.

All that put aside, I still believe all these substances should be legal, and should not be regulated in any way.

Note that as of November 2019, I am still taking prescribed psychiatric drugs which I hate and think are harmful but am forced to take.

Regarding food, I eat an omnivorous diet that includes meat (chicken, beef, pork/bacon/ham/etc. and the occasional mutton) - sorry vegans/vegetarians but I feel like I need to eat meat. I used to avoid consuming sugary foods and beverages, but I now consume them again and am much happier.

As a matter of fact, I do. I used to get into Clinical depressions, anxieties and Hypomanias and even a few Manias. The presence of the latter may indicate I have Bipolar Disorder (or “Mania-Depressia”).

I’m no longer getting into depressions or anxieties, which is good because when I’m in them, I feel that I am a bad person, think the whole world is bad and cannot concentrate on doing anything. I’m still getting some hypomanias, in which I feel quite elevated, while in fact knowing that I feel bad, and where I can still function, and still know that I’m a good person. Most of the time, I am OK.

Note that the opinions I express and what I say are not a consequence of my mental status, but rather of the many philosophical influences, I’ve been exposed to, which I feel made my thinking process straighter and more logical. Some people take many common “truisms” for granted, but I can often demonstrate they are wrong.

Here are a few jokes about it:

Shlomi Fish once defined himself as a “Programmer, Writer, Amateur Mathematician, Wannabe Philosopher, and someone who studied in the Technion in the vain hope of becoming an Electrical Engineer”. He does not consider himself a sane person, but is quite certain that only makes him more interesting.

And:

  <tyler->  rindolf: you are seriously the craziest fucker I know
  <tyler->  and I know some crazy ass people
  <mofino>  haha
 <rindolf>  tyler-: I am crazy. And proud of it.
  <tyler->  rindolf: you should be
  <mofino>  haha
  <mofino>  Ahh man
 <rindolf>  tyler-: being crazy is hard work. I worked all my life to be
            crazy.
  <mofino>  Normal people aren’t fun.
 <rindolf>  tyler-: “Craziness is not an action. It’s a process.”
  <mofino>  heh
  <tyler->  rindolf: I see
 <rindolf>  You need to tend to your insanity.
 <rindolf>  tyler-: do you want to be crazy?
  <tyler->  rindolf: that’s why I feed my leprechaun at least once a
            day.
 <rindolf>  tyler-: I can teach you everything I know.

(and “Ask not what your insanity can do for you - ask what you can do for your insanity.”)

My opinions are subject to change - they have changed in the past, and it’s likely they will change again. Furthermore, reality is dynamic, and Ethics, philosophy and opinions change with time, as technology, culture and education progresses.

It’s a quote from the Disney Animated film The Emperor’s New Groove, which is otherwise highly recommended. Here is the clip on YouTube.

Note: for a while I converted to using «https://www.shlomifish.org/ ; It takes Summer Glau exactly a minute to write a rebuttal like in xkcd: “Venting”, and she would sign it as Chuck Norris. ( https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Summer-Glau/ )», which is part of my activism to promote the Summerschool at the NSA screenplay and Ms. Glau.

First of all, in this day and age, it’s unlikely that the spammers will not find my email address. That’s because they also install a lot of malware on vulnerable computers to harvest email addresses from. Since I can’t refrain from sending email to Windows users, and would rather not, I can never prevent spam entirely.

I deal with spam by filtering it on the client side. I’m using SpamAssassin to filter my email and so far it’s doing a very good job. Some spam still arrives at my inbox, but otherwise very little. There are several other open-source spam filters (and some non-open-source solutions), which you may wish to look at. GMail and other webmail services also do a good job in filtering spam (regardless of their other faults).

All of that put aside, I think that having a convenient “mailto:” link is recommended because people don’t need to go through inconvenient hoops to send you an email. I love receiving (good) email about my site, and I’d rather not throw away the baby along with the water, just because spammers may have an easier time harvesting my already public email address.

For more information, see my post to the “Joel on Software” forum about “Email at the bottom of every page”.

This is EvilPHish from the comics’ strip UserFriendly.org by Iliad. I was a big fan of UserFriendly.org when EvilPHish was featured there, and it was so me, so I decided to make it my emblem. After downloading the big version of the comic, and tampering with it a little with GIMP (= the GNU Image Manipulation Program), I was able to produce a transparent PNG file that I could use.

After a while, I realised that most people recognised this emblem and associated it with me (in part because my last name is “Fish”) and decided to standardise on it as a user-pic or “avatar” everywhere, and so I did. Note that the image is still copyrighted by Mr. Iliad, but I hope its use by me is acceptable.

As a child and a teenager, I’ve been a bit frustrated by my last name being Fish, and was often teased for it. But I feel OK about it now, and it’s good that people can associate my last name with something they are familiar with, and with a memorable emblem such as EvilPHish.

You can also find various versions of the EvilPHish image for download and reuse.

Update: There is now a vector graphics SVG version courtesy of the amazing Marc Jeanmougin (Mc) and Inkscape. It is placed under CC0 but may be a derivative work of the original by Iliad.

A few people told me that I shouldn't mention the fact that I have been exempt from military service or that I used to get into clinical depressions and still get into hypomanias, because other people may think less of me. My response is that these are real and honest details about myself, that I would rather not keep to myself given the context, and the fact that I had to mention them many times.

While some employers may look down on me for mentioning that, I’d rather work for employers who appreciate honesty, sincerity, and openness, and eventually realise that keeping non personal details to yourself is a sure recipe to lose your mind.

For more information, see:

1. “‘Publish or Perish’ → ‘Life or Death’” - blog post.

2. “Honesty” section - from “Putting all the Cards on the Table (2013)”

I believe that honesty is the best policy, and trying to be who you are not, or keep important details about you not in the open will end up working against you, and cause you a lot of aggravations.

Well, I am Israeli-born, but my parents moved to the United States when I was one year old until I was five years old (first to Dallas, Texas, and then to Rockville, Maryland, where I spoke English with the fellow children. However, after I returned to Israel at the age of five, the children there ridiculed me for my English, and, as a result, I did not want to speak it, and so forgot most about it, and just spoke Hebrew (which is my mother language).

After that, I had to regain English much more painfully as I learned it at school, and from other sources such as computerised Adventure games, books, films, Television shows, and the Internet. Shortly after high school, I felt that my English has dramatically improved. Nonetheless, looking back at my English text from a few years back, I cringe at how bad it was, and am still being told that some of my writing is non-idiomatic by some native speakers.

Some of the effective ways I found to better learn English are:

1. Write. Write a lot. Start a blog. Write about interesting stories from your past. Ask your readers to point to the issues in your text (also your code). Maybe start specialised blogs for writing about a topic that interests you.

2. Read. Read a lot. Especially fine literature, though not too archaic. I really like reading original and quality Children and Young Adult's Literature in English (e.g: The Hobbit, The Treasure Island, E. Nesbit, Roald Dahl, Mary Poppins, Sherlock Holmes, etc. - can't think of more right now.) There are many public domain and freely distributable fiction online in Project Gutenberg,

3. Pay attention to what you write and how you phrase yourself. Don't write too hastily.

4. Chat with English speakers on IRC - I like Freenode for that and they have an ##English channel, but other channels accept somewhat off-topicish discussion, especially some #not-channels or channels like #perlcafe , or #perl-cats (sorry, I'm an old school Perler bastard), which are intended solely for off-topic discussion.

5. Watch/listen to some films to see how people use the English language in speech. There are many clips on YouTube and similar sites and you can learn a lot from them. There are some larger scale videos available online, offline and on torrents naturally.

6. Most importantly - remember that improving your language is hard work, but it's also fun, because hard work is often fun and rewarding and makes you happy. The opposite of fun and pleasure in general is not necessarily work. If people did not enjoy hard work for pleasure, then large scale operating systems that are completely free-and-open-source-software such as GNU/Linux or the *BSDs could not happen.

You can find some other recommended online resources for learning English and improving it in the “Awesome English” curated list of links on GitHub.

Some people on the Internet told me that they believe I have Asperger syndrome or am otherwise on the Autistic spectrum, but my psychotherapist (who has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and whom I met face to face many times), told me I most probably don’t have it, after I asked him whether I do.

I originally ran into Ten-sided dice (d10s) in tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, and I found it remarkable due to the fact that:

1. It corresponds with our decimal system (Base-10) and with the SI / International System of Units / Metric system.

2. It is the only role-playing-game-die that is not a platonic solid and instead is man-made.

As a result, it became a symbol of power of mine. Now what I do with them:

1. After I donated my role-playing gear to a local role-playing club that my friends ran, I was given a plain brown 1d10 die that my friends at the time (~1997ish) allowed me to take. I carried it in my pencil case, and it became my amulet of power and feel it brought me a lot of good luck and bad luck (which are often two sides of the same coin).

   Now, however, I decided to give it to Ms. Summer Glau (who is a Hollywood actress, but much more than that for me), and it is now her property, which I intend to officially pass it along to her and see what she will decide to do with it.

2. I also buy d10s in large quantities (went up to 10 packs of 10 purple translucent d10 dice each from The Dice Shop) and offer to give them away to people I interact with in real life (IRL), such as vendors, clerks and sellers in shops. While not everyone accepts them, many people do.

3. Following the transition from Selina Mandrake to Summerschool at the NSA, I bought a complete set of Tabletop role-playing games' dice, and use this as a symbolic object. This is its photo after being placed on my NUC computer along with the 1d10 die that I have given to Summer Glau.

This quote from the Neo-Tech literature summarises the issues that led to this confusion:

Although the contents of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, are precisely accurate and widely integrated, Ayn Rand committed an error by distorting the word "selfishness" in fashioning a dramatic statement. The word "selfishness" does have valuable, precise denotations of "an irrational, harmful disregard for others". Rand could have strengthened her work by selecting accurate wording such as rational self-growth. Instead, she unnecessarily bent and undermined the precise, valuable meaning of selfishness. …As with selflessness, selfishness is a form of immature, destructive, irrational behavior -- a form of stupid behavior.

While I’m no longer a Neo-Tech/Objectivism purist, I still agree with them that both selfish and selfless (= having an irrational disregard for one’s self) behaviours should be avoided as much as possible, and that one should strive for “Rational Self-Growth” and that often “selfish vs. selfless” is presented as a false dichotomy.

See this tweet which largely relies on an older essay titled “Define ‘Zionism’”. Reading from it:

Seems like "anti-Zionism" is broadly defined (see Anti-Zionism ) just as "Zionism" is poorly defined. I'm Jewish and live in Israel and oppose the by-laws discrimination against non-Jews/Jews/whatever. What does that make me?

While both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages, they are relatively distant from one another and not mutually understandable. I am a Hebrew speaker and reader/writer, but cannot understand the spoken Arabic dialect spoken by some of the local Arab speakers, except for a few words. Note that there are many spoken Arabic dialects as well as Literary Arabic which is common but not normally used in speech. Many Arabic speakers in Israel also know Hebrew, but native Hebrew speakers (Jews/etc.) usually do not have the motivation to learn Arabic or retain their knowledge of it.

Some other notes:

1. I studied Literary Arabic for 6 years in junior high and high school and passed the 5 points matriculation exam in it. However, I lost most of my vocabulary due to lack of use, and also do not readily remember some of the grammar.

2. A few Arab Israelis I spoke with told me it was easier for them to learn to read and write Hebrew than it was to learn Literary Arabic, despite the fact that the local Palestinian Arabic was their mother language. This is due to the diglossia present there.

3. If you know both English and Arabic, I can highly recommend listening to Shaike Ophir’s "The English Teacher" skit.