Ivan Krivyakov's Blog

In recent days I was doing some serious hotel booking in Israel, and I must say I am appalled by the state of the hotel industry there. I am quite intimately familiar with the cost of living and real estate prices in that country, and in comparison the hotel prices are not just high, their are through the roof.

First of all, if you planned to spend less than $100 a night, forget about it, in any part of the country. You might get some apartments for $70 or so, but their owners are usually very reluctant to rent for only a couple of days. And I am talking November, which is considered “off season”.

Second of all, the hotels are concentrated in a few key areas, mostly around beaches. There are absolutely no (detectable) hotels in small towns like Rishon Le-Zion, Yokneam, or Givatayim. Nearest hotel to the Ben Gurion airport that charges below $150 is located in downtown Tel-Aviv and does not have parking.

The concept of cheap motels in suburbia does not exist. To give you some comparison: in New Jersey if all you need is a place to sleep and you don’t insist on being within walking from New York Times Square, you can get a room which is not a total dump at $60-70 a night, or even lower if you catch a good deal. A basic 1 bedroom apartment in a safe neighborhood in the Greater New York area would cost $1200-$1500, which makes it $40-50 a night on average. So, the price of low end (but still decent) hotels is only slightly above the price of a good (not luxury) apartment. Of course, a hotel room is much smaller than an apartment of equivalent value, but this is not the point.

In Israel a decent low-end hotel which is not a total dump and has a parking would cost at least $150 in urban areas and around $120 in the middle of nowhere. It does not matter whether you call them, e-mail them, use Hebrew language sites, or English ones. The price would be the same through all sources.

At the same time, a decent apartment costs no more than $1000 a month, and much less in the middle of nowhere, unless we are talking about beach-front property rented to tourists. But even then anything that is not a huge villa would go below $2000 a month. This makes $33-$66 a day, which is 3-5 times lower than a price of a basic livable hotel. This disparity is even higher in suburban and rural areas.

Something must be seriously wrong there. I think, two factors play key role here. The American hotel market, especially in suburban/rural areas, is designed for Americans – tourists and businessmen. We don’t have crowds of very rich Japanese, German, or Martian visitors coming to Fairfield, NJ. Israeli market is clearly oriented towards foreign tourists who allegedly have more money than the locals, and prefer to hang out in Jerusalem, or on a beach in a big city, and pretty much nowhere else. This is why there are no cheap hotels in more remote areas – nobody would use them. This unfortunately makes Israel look like a third world country, not very far away from the Bahamas or Dominican Republic.

The second factor is limited competition. Given the cost of living and real estate, hotel prices could be much lower. I am not sure what is the reason for low competition. On may blame the level of corruption and taxes. It may be difficult to open an hotel without “connections”, and if you do, you risk it being immediately shut down for a random violation of some 200 year old Turkish law you never heard of.

The thing is, when the British came they continued to use the laws of the Ottoman Empire with some modifications, and when Israel was established, it inherited the Mandate laws, albeit most of them were later superseded by new legislation.

Whatever the reason, Israel easily outprices places like Moscow, St. Petersburg and most American cities, and hotel prices there approach those in Manhattan.

Temporary measures of today tend to become the legacy of tomorrow.

I was downloading C# 4.0 feature list, and Microsoft presented me with a several page license document. Somehow, when I see words “nonwithstanding the above” in a text, I don’t expect anything good to come from it.

I am discovering for myself the world of RSS, ATOM, and blog feed aggregators. I tried to find out what’s the difference between RSS and ATOM (here is a good starting point), and it looks like one of the differences is in the date format.

The older date format is RFC-822. It was adopted in 1982 and it has only two digits for the year part. Indeed, in 1982 the 21st century seemed like a very distant future. I do remember that feeling

The newer date format is RFC-3399, that was adopted as late as 2002. It specifies for digits for the year and reinforces the mandatory specification of the time zone, although many existing applications don’t do it. This is how the RFC authors justify their decision:

Since interpretation of an unqualified local time zone will fail in approximately 23/24 of the globe, the interoperability problems of unqualified local time are deemed unacceptable for the Internet.

In other words, gentlemen, wherever you live, keep in mind that you are not the center of the Universe. Approximately 23/24 of the globe has different local time! If you forget this, your interoperability will suffer. Be humble and specify your time zone.

We had an interesting encounter when flying US Airways from San-Diego to Philadelphia a couple of days ago. This was a red-eye overnight flight. A young woman with a little baby in a car seat boarded the plane and sat in a row in front of me. She had difficulty securing the car seat in the position, and the flight attendants refused to help her or even advise her on the matter. In the end it turned out she had the car seat backwards – well, they should have known that, shouldn’t they?

But something much more interesting happened later. [read more...]

During the wonderful 4^th of July weekend, I discussed with a friend the widening gap between the world of commercial software development and the world of “advanced technology”. I am talking specifically about Microsoft products here, but I suspect this situation is more widespread.

Software technology is moving way too fast. It looks like in Microsoft products become obsolete the moment the final release gets out of the door, or even slightly before that. If today you complain to Microsoft about a bug in Visual Studio 2008, they will look at you as if you are saying your 20,000 years old stone axe is not sharp enough. “Look”, they will tell you, “we appreciate you buying the axe in Bill Gatestone store 20,000 years ago. But stone axes are no longer supported. We have power saws now. Yes, our power saw product is in beta, it does not have an installer and it occasionally explodes, but when it comes out in a couple of years, it is supposed to be much, much better than the stone axe”.
[read more...]

The Middle East conflict is a complicated phenomenon and the number of points of view on it probably exceeds the number of people involved. But if I had to describe it one picture, it would be this:

I was recently doing and small research project and got kinda tired of mechanically spitting out all those boring chants like

using (var cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT foo, bar FROM abc", conn)
{
...
}

I felt like my ride on the ORM train is long overdue. I’ve been planning to try NHibernate too long, and now I have finally found free time to do that.
[read more...]

We went to the “Liza in the Palace” concert today, which is a four-week series of Minelli concerts on Broadway. What can I say… I’ve got mixed impressions from this concert. From one hand, undoubtedly, she still got it. The opening was brilliant. The songs were great. She really knows how to do a show. She has a vibrant temperament, and you get instantly swiped out by her infinite charm, energy, and sense of humor. Her voice is still amazing, after all these years. Oh, and the accompanying musicians are simply wonderful.
[read more...]

Just got back from a 3-week trip to Russia, and then work-work-work… Not much time for blogging. But I will be back, I promise