This plaque is outside some University building in Jaffa Street, albeit with the street looking like a mess for the long overdue electric light rail project with road dug up.
Its a good pictorial view of Jerusalem and Israel being closely wedged between Europe, Africa and Asia.
This sign shows its origins. Seen it featured on a few post cards.
The rubbish bins in a Jerusalem street are bomb proof. From normal perspective, they look like normal bins with a stronger steel base. When I was walking by, there was a truck come to empty them with a special crane attachment, you notice the chamber inside is about 2.5 metres long which is hidden underground. Next to the man in the florescent jacket you can see a bin the same already sitting in the ground, with the long chamber below the street.
Seems pretty good. Wonder if we could get such a thing around military bases in higher risk parts of the UK.
Today is a special day! I have been volunteering for Bridges for Peace for one year! (ok have been out of the country a couple of times on a break)
I got a chance to escape the office and head of in a car with some other staff to the small town of Beit Shemesh. Here is a map.
Here we got to see some kids at a summer camp at a school. Here a lot of these kids come from poor background and Bridges for Peace provides them with lunches and books when they are at school, so its nice to see the people we are directly helping especially for people like me who are admin staff and are not dealing face to face with needy Israeli families.
After some fiddling to get the projector working, this child did a presentation on the big bang and how the planets are formed, I think he is one of the most clever kids there and also seems pretty confident to do this talk himself. Its good that unlike my home country in the UK political correctness forces educational places to only talk about evolution rather than creation.
Got to join in with drawing and painting
We were trying to draw this view out of the school building, but I just stuck to the green hills and small number of buildings 🙂
This community has a lot of African Jews from Ethiopia as children Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (Middle Eastern/Asian) backgrounds, you see a big mixture of skin colours here.
Once we had finished we got to chance to grab some take out coffee from a mall down the road and head back to the office.
Last sunday morning I went on a prayer walk on the walls of the old city.
Bart and Joan Repko have been doing this walk 6 days a week (except Shabbat) for some years now, alternating between each half of the edges of the wall, as you can start from either side of the Jaffa gate and finish just behind the Al Asqa Mosque. You can get a ticket for 16 Shekels and its valid for two days so you can do the other half the next day, just need to start just inside the Jaffa gate.
The aim is to pray over this city and for the frequently volatile atmosphere here. Often when we are here we can hear the sound of the minarets (Islamic prayer towers) boom out loud voices from different parts of the city.
These steps are quite hard work especially with the fierce midday heat here and it is quite easy to slip as they have hundreds of years of wear…
My friend Marcel is often on this tour. Check his blog here.
Stunning views into and out of the old city are guaranteed….
Its quite amazing doing this walk as you get to see over into yards, gardens and roofs of all kinds of places. People in both Arab and Jewish cultures use their roofs as yards, and usually characterised with satellite dishes, old sofas, solar panels (used to run hot water tanks) and various junk.
Gardens are quite popular, whether its a handful of hanging baskets or something quite a bit ambitious, here this person has their own vineyard, think it belongs to an Arab Christian. I often see orange and lemon trees too.
The group’s name ‘Never be silent’ is taken from Isaiah 62 : 1 “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch.”
See more about the Never be silent old city prayer tour walks here: www.neverbesilent.org/en/
Skip downwards if you don’t want to read geek stuff 🙂
I found out the beta of Firefox 4 came out today so I thought I would try it.
Where as Google’s Chrome is getting more and more popular, Firefox is stil popular choice for domestic web browsing, and contrary to stuffy IT managers I have seen that force everyone to stick to IE6 because of compatibility concerns, despite being dangerously flawed could be negligent to their customer’s data, it can be configured for performance, security and compatibility for any business. Awkward web based apps that rely on Internet Explorer can be run using the IE Tab extension which makes setting up scripts for just those troublesome sites a breeze. Generally users take to it and the user interface is close enough to IE for the adapt without too much trouble. Sometimes I have to explain to users how tabs work but they are normally pretty happy. The other reason for me why Firefox is king is how the Windows, Linux and Mac versions are similar enough to provide consistency in use and many of the extension work on all three environments, add to that this application is available in numerous languages, and you have a really stellar example how open source software can give you the freedom to make applications work the way you want.
I have to say, the Mozilla do tend to market Firefox like a bunch of hippies in a VW van selling organic soup or something, great but the stuffy IT managers of big businesses are not going to be convinced by it. They really need an extra separate marketing campaign to get ordinary businesses using it for general browsing, and highlight the dangers of Internet Explorer’s dangerously flawed ActiveX system where uninvited nasties are free to get on a PC even if the user doesn’t have administrator rights nor are on web sites over a dubious nature. Where as techs like me are always having to reimage PCs messed up by viruses and malware from an outdated browser.
So far I have only had about 2 hours worth of time to test drive Firefox 4, because it is a Beta, a mostly complete prototype not ready for primetime, you will find none of your extensions will work. If you are a developer or just plain impatient, heres some tricks for you to get up and running.
New features on FF4 (I am doing this without cheating and looking on the web, just from obvious things I can see from the browser installing on my machine)
Aesthetics – the user interface has changed so the tabs are at the top, similar style to Chrome. Gone are the odd shaped green circular back/forward buttons, and more neater buttons take their place. Actually the newer animated clock things for waiting for a page to redraw look naff, please bring the 3.6 ones!!
Extensions/Add ons system appears to be completely revamped.
Inspect and Heads up display – seems to be diagnostic tools for developers to see the HTML code that makes up a web browser.
So far that is all I can see, but I expect there’s a lot of fine tuning for performance and stability below the skin.
Of course, as I am support and network administrator guy, I look at things from a different angle that my fellow IT peers who are web developers, so there is plenty of other features I am missing out here.
Running Firefox in commercial environment really is pretty simple and hassle free, security is good and users are warned if security certificates seem inconsistent. As always I would refrain from rolling out the major updates, so not to break any extensions you may have, but when the browser updates itself from say, 3.6.4 to 3.6.6 as it did for my users, this is always done discretely in the background and doesn’t interfere with users work. Compare that how horribly clumsy and awkward another application like Adobe Acrobat screams at you to do updates when you just want to view a darn PDF in a hurry. I don’t know if Firefox can be forced out in a business environment using Active Directory type tools, this would be worth thinking about if anyone in Mozilla is reading this.
Some critics say Firefox is bloated and eats lots of memory, all I can say is that I have installed it on lots of different machines and rarely get into this problem. Excessive memory consumption is likely to be down to lots of extensions loaded or stuck bits Java or flash residing in memory. I would recommend you get the excellent free Ccleaner registry clean up tool and run it every now and then. If your PC is never rebooted and runs 24/7 like a lot of other apps you will run out of memory every now and then. Heck I was using an ancient 1999 model Toshiba Satellite 4090 laptop until 2007 running Firefox 2 on only 192Mb of RAM and with more than 3 tabs it would choke every now and then and wasn’t fast, but generally Firefox copes with elderly PCs quite well if the machine is properly configured.
Anyway my other talk here was I learnt from a while back how to trick Firefox into making your extensions work if they refused to load as they intended for an older version of Firefox, perhaps the main moan point for me, as third party developers are a bit slow in keeping up with the new versions for this browser.
These are my favourite extensions
IE Tab 2 – renders sites in Internet Explorer, great for poorly maintained web sites written for specific browsers
British English Dictionary – spell checker (works the same as MS Word) that underlines unrecognised words whilst you are writing text on a blog/twitter/facebook/forum or some kind.
Foxytunes – remote control to use iTunes/Windows Media Player/Youtube/VLC player at the bottom of your browser – Note I was surprised to have found out tonight Foxytunes is written by Israeli developers and now owned by Yahoo.
Resurrect pages – Finds cached copies of deleted web pages on a server. Seen a blog with something interesting but controversial that got taken down? Normally you can use this to find it again.
Warning, using Beta test software should not be done in a live commercial environment as the software is not fully tested. Add on the fact I have interfered with the extensions to ‘force’ them to work, that is, remove a compatibility safety feature that will make the browser refuse to load on preventing a possible crash. I am using standard old Windows XP SP3, but this should be the same for Windows or Linux users with equivalent tools. Do this at your own risk.
1. Download the required extension you want, but you need to right click and choose ‘save as’ as we want to save it as a normal file with the extension XPI to change something. Notice here this app is labelled as only compatible with upto version 3.6 of Firefox. (the most newest stable version today July 2010)
2. Once this is done, you then need to drag and drop the XPI file onto Winzip. I am not a fan of Winzip as its bloated and awkward, but the equivalent apps don’t work so well for this type of job, Winzip isn’t free of course but the trial version is good enough for what we want to do.
3. Drag out one of the files off Winzip which is embedded in the XPI file, one should be called ‘install.rdf’ save this somewhere safe.
4. Next, drag and drop this file into a text editor like Notepad.
5. This looks like a lot of meaningless script only understandable by a programmer, but where it says ‘max version’ and 3.6.* change this to 4.0.* and then save the file.
6. Put this file back in the Zip file. This hack XPI extension can now be dragged over onto your Firefox browser main window, and restart the browser when prompted to.
If something goes wrong? Firefox not starting? If Firefox then crashes, you will have to start it in safe mode [start > all programs > Mozilla Firefox > Firefox (safe mode)] will get you out of trouble, then disable the last extension you installed. So far, all of the above four extensions were hacked by me this way and all work fine.
If you are having some problems with a favourite Firefox extension and need some support, I will gladly offer some help and maybe adjust your extension for you, contact me on my normal contact form. A small donation would appreciated as I am a volunteer IT tech just blogging on IT and places I see at a charity in Israel.
On the away trip with the staff of the charity I volunteer for, we first stopped off at Caesarea.
I have blogged on this place before but only very briefly, really only touching on the theatre which hosts live music and TV shows today, this time I got to see this place in a bit more detail.
The museum park is mostly outdoors and is a beautiful place to visit. It is probably the most important piece of Roman history in the Middle East.
This sign shows how the harbour looked like:
Here you can see only a portion of the harbour is still here, the rest disappeared into the sea, although not so much through war, actually it happened by earthquake.
Today there is some flags out as a sign of countries in battle – this time the world cup football.
By the way the name ‘Palestine’ was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian long before any Arab people populated this land. Caearea was built by Herod, but there are signs here showing it was inhabited by Greeks, Crusaders and Muslims.
Outside a cafe at this place I ordered a hot dog with some french fries and sat outside. The elderly man who ran the cafe had a strong New York accent brought out some pizza to one of my friends at the table and I noticed a small green tattoo on the man’s arm, not a particularly interesting design but when I went up to get some mustard I saw it again, it was about six numbers. This was the unmistakable sign the Nazis used on Jewish prisoners in the holocaust camps, where as most people were rapidly slaughtered in the gas chambers not long after they had arrived by train, the ones with the tattoos tended to be those that were younger that were deemed suitable for working in the camp in unspeakable conditions. Still today there are people who try to revise history and say it never happened. I would imagine the man is probably Polish and moved to the US in late 1940s and came to Israel not so long ago. On one of the other tables he got chatting to one of the other staff, I didn’t hear what was said apart from he said he was from New York. Its a sobering thought that history has come full circle, as the Nazis closely modeled themselves on the Romans to some degree and now as this small fragment of the Middle East is now owned by Jews again and some of them have reminders of tragedies gone by.
There are two films that can be watched in separate screens that show how Caesarea was restored by archeologists as you can see today. Some other people on our trip went to scuba diving as there are parts of the ruins that can only be seen underwater.
People fishing, although I think this sign probably says you aren’t supposed to.
It perhaps doesn’t ‘go’, but I really like this wooden Caribbean style bar :o)
Current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lived here in the town and so did Russian-Israeli Billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak who used to own football clubs in Jerusalem and Portsmouth UK, its incredible this location has changed hands through so many people.
This is an absolutely must see for any visitor to the holy land.
I will cover the Kibbutz where I stayed next…
You have probably heard of lemons being used to run simple digital watches back in 1980s, fun but probably no real life use for citrus fruits as means to run gadgets.
But today in seems vegetables have uses instead, this time for lighting (LED technologies have massively get better in last couple of years)
Perfect for developing nations where batteries are scarce and expensive, not to mention poisonous at the end of the lifespan, and yes its those darned clever Israelis again that came up with the idea of using the humble spud.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/20/yissum-develops-potato-powered-batteries-for-the-developing-worl/
The article doesn’t say when your potatoes need to be changed, or if when they grow shoots if that affects their performance though. Imagine this conversation one day: “Hello, yeah, er I can I call you back in a couple of hours, phone battery is dying and I need to get a kilo of King Edwards from the market, speak at 9pm mate, bye”
On Sunday morning went to my usual church then went out for lunch, usual quite relaxing day. The talk in the morning was part of a series on distractions which is something that causes more problems with things for me than I can think of.
In the evening I went to the Isambard Kingdom Brunel pub (a Wetherspoons pub named after the famous industrial engineer who lived in my city of Portsmouth, UK) and met up with Mark Rodel reverend of another church in Portsmouth who has a blog and in addition to running his own church likes to meet up with anyone in this pub most Sunday evenings for a chance to relax and have a beer and chat to another small crowd. Something different from regular church or cell group, (which is a mid-week church meeting someone’s house in a informal closer knit group for regular church people) but this is different as provides a chance for people with casual questions about Christianity and church in a familiar public environment.
For me I think many Christians don’t always visualise the fact church can seem very scary place for many people that have never been before to church, have fallen away, or are just plain shy, and this is a good place to get to know people and get questions answered on many things on church life. Jesus spent a lot of time in public places speaking, so its only natural that fellow believers could sometimes get together in a place most people are familiar with and invite people to come and chat about whatever they wish. Mark uses a few unusual visual cues to illustrate things from the bible and this week he got us to make some paper boats to float on a washing up bowl of water he borrowed from the bar.
Anyway there was just about 7 of us from different churches around the city, it was nice getting to know different people from quite a few backgrounds. Will try come along semi regularly while I am still here in the UK.
Went to an exciting outdoor show last weekend in the Old City.
Inside the David Citadel has a huge collection of illusions done with projectors. Check out this video.
Think of the castle with audio recordings of some people from hundreds of years ago speaking and shadows of the people of the time moving around. Once a group of 15 of us had walked around the edges of building we sat down for the main part of the show, this is an stunning piece of illuminated theatre which shows the walls on three sides of us were covered by moving imagery of Jerusalem’s history. It was thoroughly enjoyable and unique way to show history in a spectacular way. Even with the large group of us as were there early we managed to secure really good seats on a balcony.
Brit In Jerusalem 
