Category: Rant

I rant about stuff sometimes. Don’t you?

Slight break from history lesson

So I’m taking a break from my history recap for a few quick updates.

To start off, I’m in Manhattan, new York City, new York, USA. Wow.

I flew out here on Tuesday, and it was a long day of flying. I was awake for almost 24 hours
At my stopover in London’s Heathrow, I picked up a laptop charger/adapter that allowed me to connect my laptop to the airplane I was flying in – and that kept me going for a good few hours.

Once we landed, I breezed through passport control and customs, and my uncle picked me up and drove me into Manhattan, where we did some basic food shopping and then got me into the apartment.

The next morning, Wednesday, after a fitful night of sleep, I had my first Continue reading Slight break from history lesson

Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned…

… it has been over a month since my last post.

It’s been a busy time period, lots of things have been happening, and I’m still catching my breath. So now I’m finally writing this post to put it all out there.

So some of you may know, and others may not, that I am looking for a new job.

This is mainly due to the fact that the company I work for has brought in someone to replace me, an “IT Manager”, someone is supposedly to have a much wider range of experience than myself, in order to take the reins.

Personally, I’m not impressed by the choice.

Anyways, I’ve broadened my search parameters to pretty much anywhere in the world, specifically Manhattan or elsewhere in new York City (where this post is being written right now).
Unfortunately, the job market in and around Jerusalem is pretty weak, so any decent job would be in the Gush Dan area, and require a massive commute and/or moving closer to Gush Dan. I’m not happy about moving to another city that is not Jerusalem, as I’ve loved and lived this city for quite a long time now, and am VERY reluctant to leave.

Rationale: If I have to get up and move, I might as well make it a big move that improves some other aspects – better financial situation, better work environment, and less day-to-day crap that is the people in the public eye in this country.

Some history:
I came to Israel in 1988, in the middle of the First Intifada. Not the best environs for raising kids, but my parents believed then (and probably still do) that Israel is the place for Jews on Earth, as handed down by the Lord to Abraham, etc etc.
We lived in an Absorption Center close to Jerusalem for seven months, and I commuted to school in Jerusalem, and then back to after-school tutoring, and finally made it home “under the cover of darkness”.
We then moved to Har Nof, an ultra-orthodox neighborhood with the “suburbs” of Jerusalem, and along came the Gulf War. Just a personal timeline – my Bar Mitzva was a few days before the start of the war, my eldest sister’s wedding was pretty much the day after it ended. Thanks, George Bush, Sr. I will forever associate two important dates in my life with a war.

Continue reading Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned…

Come on, blow us up! I dare you.

So yet again Israel’s doing something a little weird.

Saturday night, we were over at some friends and caught wind of something playing in the background on their computer. One of the other guests freaked outin happiness and started to sing along.

On further investigation, this is a song written by Israeli band “Teapacks“(a friend of mine actually shows up in one of their music videos). The song sounds a lot like their other songs, and is in three languages – English, French and Hebrew.

So I’m not really impressed by the song itself – but I have to consider the fact that Israel’s choice of song has caused a lot of ruckus in international news, as well as first being rejected from the Eurovision contest, and then allowed after appeal.

It’s pretty interesting – Israel’s history of the Eurovision. Joined the contest in 1973 – and got 4th place.

Then, only five years later, a first place win! And then another! The first, a somewhat gibberish song, the second “Haleluyah” – you may have heard it.
Then silence for almost 20 years – with few high-placing songs – and then we bring on a transsexual singing some weird song about a Diva or such.

And Israel wins.

Important to mention – Diva took a total of 172 points – higher than both other Israel wins. Last year, however, the Finnish heavy metal band Lordi with “Hard Rock Hallelujah” took a record-breaking 292 points (just for a scale!) in Finland’s first-ever Eurovision win.

Israel, the land of wholesome historical values and entire neighborhoods cordoned off for the Sabbath – Israel wins with a Diva. Good for us.

And then – silence yet again, with some pretty lame entries over the past few years, and then we come to this year. Brilliance.

So go ahead, enjoy the show – May 10th for those interested. It’s gone to hell and it ain’t coming back too soon.

In any case, if you really want to push a button, I suggest you do it in the safety of your own home, by clicking right here.

Watch the clip here.

Thanks for reading.

So we can make you do this, too!

So at work, a couple of months ago, our webmistress left for maternity leave a little prematurely, and two months later (!), we need some updates and whatnot to our website.

They company has a lot of people that can deal with: HTML, source control, and reading English instructions and following them.

But somehow, it becomes my job, “at least until we find a webmaster”.

They have yet to interview one webmaster, and from past experience, it’ll take forever before they actualy know what they want, then another lifetime until the interview a lot of people, and then, after an ice-age long wait, they’ll hire someone.

If I wanted to be a web developer, I wouldn’t have gotten so attached to hardware, software and networks. Ugh.

Advertising, yet again.

So this weekend, I drove out to the folks, and had a nice time with them, and my sister’s family. It was very nice, we had some great food – Friday night, tacos and refried beans, oh, the memories from Texas, and on Saturday lunch – a whole spread of everything that’s good, thanks to my momma.

Cervesa, tacos and some wine was there. The wine was a nice Carmel young blend, but the bottle left me a little confused.

Continue reading Advertising, yet again.

Weekends? Damn, man, they is fo’ wimps, yo!

So this weekend I hosted Dan for dinner, simple pasta, as Tha Siz was away, studying for some major exams.

Then this morning, I left on a wild Harley rider chase, that didn’t end with any results. On the up side, I ended up going to places I didn’t think I’d see anytime soon, and I also tried to barrel my way into kmelion & zachkessin‘s yishuv, but it was locked up tighter than I felt like breaching.

So I made it home, and found out that the Internet Service Provider (henceforth: ISP-from-Hell) has once again failed to provide full-time service, and my office is effectively off the grid as of about 3pm today. No email, no VPN, nada, nothing, zilch. You get the idea.
So the CEO catches me on chat on a different issue (which I resolved) and I inform him,
and I give my boss a ring and let him know as well.

See, the way it works is like this:

A service provider (let’s call them “GC“) that already has a stake (and equipment) in our building, leases service from a much larger (and VERY reliable) service provider (purely for clarity’s sake, let’s call them “NV“).

So GC leases a line with a specific capacity – let’s say 3MB (the actual capcities and rates are less relevant, you’ll soon see why). GC then sells line capacity to Customer A, Customer B and Customer C.

The only problem is – Customer C (me) has a contract for a 2MB line, while A & B have a 1MB line each. Now, it doesn’t take a math genius to calculate that something is wrong with this – but in comes trotting the concept of “line sharing”. Effectively, I get prioritized traffic for my 2MB of data, quashing the others on the same line.

But that’s not the main problem today – it seems that a main router is no longer capable of routing, and the specifics are a little blurry as of yet. The line has been down for over five hours now, and answers are still not forthcoming.

It turns out that NV has actually purchased GC, and that moving from one to the other might be feasible and even a good idea to replace GC with NV.

This open up an entire new array of options, including adding a router and using something called BGP to allow for fail-over communication line capabilities.

I foresee a change in our ISP future. Let’s hope it’s for the better.

Really? You must be kidding!

So I thought I’d swing through my spam folder on my GMail account. I don’t know why, as for some reason my spam filter picks up over 1000 spam a week, but I thought it might be fun.

As I glance through the wonderful offerings of the world’s best marketing slogans – “What IS 0EM Software And Why D0 You Care?”, “And pillars the Lord my hurt them the husbandmen, and when the night,” – I came across one that caught my eye.

spam1.PNG

Now, I’m saying that there aren’t some people that actually fall for this marketing slogan, but come on! “She’ll be running away?” Isn’t that counter productive?

Your thoughts?

A little reflection

So this morning, on my way to work, I get an urgent phone call that something is wrong with the network – people can’t get to the file server, or get out to the Net, nada.

So naturally, I do what any average person would do. Whip out my BlueTooth ear piece and connect it so I can have my hands free. Then I grab my laptop – someone else was driving – and connect to the Net via BlueTooth connection to the phone I’m talking on.

Once the net is up, I connect to my office VPN and check the status of the servers.

Servers seem ok, communicating nicely with each other and the world.

My guy on the other end of the phone is not a sysadmin, but is savvy enough to check some of the more advanced diagnosis problems, and it seems that the internal network computers are just not talking to the servers.

So I decide I’ll restart the server that hands out network access numbers (for the techies: DHCP server) and see if that does anything good for the universe.

No dice.

By now, I’ve pretty much arrived at the office and begin the point-to-point diagnosis of where it seems the failure is. I see that the servers, on their own switch, seem to be happily chattering away, but anything connected to that switch is not happy.

Power cycle the switch.

Nope. Not yet. So I power cycle the other switches that are connected to that switch, effectively disconnecting anyone connected to anything anywhere.

Still no effect.

Finally, I decide tht I’m going to swap a cable – a simple, 12″ cable – that connects one switch to the other.

Voila!

So everything works, power cycle the switches again, and all is well. What a great start to an even greater day.

This leads me to the following revelation: I am a hero.

Not a super-hero, just a hero. Batman was a hero thanks to his gadgets and capability to use them. I have some of that under my (non-utility) belt.

So there.

YouTube is pretty fast these days….

So at the end of my last post I sent along an embeddded object of Michael Richards on stage at the Laugh Factory. YouTube removed it since yesterday due to the request of CBS, some sort of strange reason, etc.

Then I keep looking for somewhere else that this might be available and come up with this. They claim to have “obtained exclusive video” of this.
However, when you go to their site and try to watch it, you get:

tmz_baderror

Now, if I claimed to have exclusivity on somehting, I’d have a system in place that could provide a little more feedback than that.