Magic trick, woo hoo!

So I found a nice little trick that someone put together and saw a good performance of it.

It’s a quickie one, a three card monte, and it took me about three minutes to figure it out. I also jotted down how the cards move, and I must say that it’s performed with a certain degree of elegance.

Enjoy.

EDIT: The “three card monte” that I referred to before is actually not a magic trick, but typically refers to a con, trying to get you to find the queen, etc.
I tend to use the term loosely when referring to any magic trick with three cards.

Thanks to Paul again for his attention to detail.

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.

Old pictures, come back to haunt me.

So a couple of years ago, some friends had an SCA event for Purim, that took place in Liberty Bell Park in Jerusalem.

We were all dressed in (almost) full period gear – and if you want a gander of me, check it here. The shame, the shame.

Anyways, hope you have a good laugh, and send this as a warning to others: If you partake in activities that change your appearance, you too may look amusing to someone else!

Improv, what fun!

So Thursday night was great.

Thanks to:

Shira, Annie, Ari, Asi, Danny, Dorf and Joe!

The show was great – the place was packed. Over 100 people were there, and it seemed to me that they all had a pretty good time.

So, if you were there, I hope you had a good one, and if you weren’t you really missed out. Don’t believe me? Ask someone who was there, they’ll tell ya!

In the same news, I got my name in the “In Jerusalem” section of the Jerusalem Post Friday’s paper for the event, here:

M_Fiedler_in_IJ.jpg

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?

Hello? Is anyone out there?

So I now have this blog site thing, right? and I used to have it hosted over there, right? But now, it’s got it’s own lovely space here.

So people reading over there don’t really know what’s going on – some have figured it out and congrats to you.

When commenting for the first time on the new site, a moderation email gets sent to me for approval. Once approved, the comment is visible. Any sequential comments will appear immediately.

Just thought I’d explain that.

If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action. ~Douglas Adams

So I decided on Sunday morning that I would try this whole “quit smoking and live longer thingie”.

It’s not like I smoke all that much anymore – an average of 3 a day. That’s not too bad, is it?

In any case, I added a nice little counter at the bottom of my page to reflect the time passed. Check it out.

Wish me luck!