Category me

Aug 4 2010

The modern Shepherd

Found these pictures from last year.

This was a nice way of a glimpse of something around in biblical times that hasn’t changed much today.

I got a glimpse of a shepherd and his flock of goats just off a main road towards the Arab part of the city.  A good way of visualising life like by Yeshua (Jesus) himself.  Especially with the backdrop of hills in every direction, rocky desert like ground with olive trees and white stone buildings.

Here after getting some pictures, the Shepherd asked if I had some money as a token in getting pictures of his flock, I pulled out about 3 shekels, but he said in a mixture of basic English and hand gestures he was wanting 10 shekels to get some cigarettes.   This was a young Arab man of about 20.

I think today’s shepherds mostly tend to be Arab Bedouins in open spaces often seen on the side of highways living in tents.

Aug 2 2010

Saturday afternoon cycling and robots

When I was a child, I had this dream where I was in a playground and all the other children had run off out of the school, I wasn’t sure what they worried about, I turn around and there is an evil robot coming towards me.  It was a weird nightmare I had a few times…

Today I decided to take a ride around my neighbourhood of East Talpiyot in other direction away from Jerusalem city centre.  I head to a convenience store and get a bottle of Fanta and ride back along the main road, towards the food bank which I work there typically one day a week. Anyway I am riding my bike across a junction where there are some traffic lights and I see a policeman stopping a coach and talking to the driver, he doesn’t see me and I ride past him, in the corner of my eye there is a policewoman and a police Ford Focus stopped diagonally at the traffic…    Then someone yells at me STOP three times….  At the same time I hit the brakes when I see what is ahead of me… If you can’t see anything, look closer at the taller white railings.  There is a garbage bin with usual piles of old clothes spilling out like I see on most street corners and about 15 metres ahead is a bomb disposal robot with caterpillar tracks and a single arm is analysing the piles of clothes…. I turn around and head to the opposite side of the road, the police don’t seem to be cross that I didn’t notice this road block. I get some pictures.   The robot is partially concealed by the barriers in the road. Apart from my childhood nightmare turning into a reality, this experience didn’t worry me too much, there are all kinds of circumstances where items abandoned in odd places start a security concern and procedures have to done to see if there is a genuine threat.   Its just I often see piles of rubbish falling out in bins like this. I talk briefly to two men sitting on a bench, its seems quite funny.   I take a detour to another street to go south towards out of Talpiyot. Another 5kms or so down the road, and this is a nice view of a very new housing estate, my maps tell me this is called Homat Shmuel. A little bit further and now I am completely out Jerusalem and I can see the border with the West Bank.

Border controls.  I take a U turn and head back on the main road.

This sign seems interesting.  This is pointing the another biblical place, seemingly named after a king who was famous for killing babies.  This adventure is for another day as I have no water left and ought to get back.

Just before going home, I did see these ruins which look Roman looking, from standing in Derech Hevron Street.

Aug 1 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 3: Masada secrets

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Back to up again on Masada, there’s quite a few buildings that are interesting, for one thing there are an interesting plumbing system that brings water through some clever channels that run around the side of the mountain.

Marcel made friends with a bird that fed from his hand.  These little black birds look like starlings but have orange tips on their wings and have a fondness for biscuits.

Along the top of Masada there are many buildings for the community that lived up here, complete with synagogue and dwellings.

Whats this strange cave room down here?

Not sure what it was, but something moved in the corner of my eye, that made Magnus nervous:

It was this cute quite large mouse.  Not sure exactly what sort of rodent it is.

You can see for a long long way from here.  Of course next door neighbour country Kingdom of Jordan shares the Dead Sea and some of the thriving industry from cosmetics that come from this unique mineral rich lake.

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Jul 31 2010

Gaza’s prosperous regions

Saw this interesting article the other day.   Seems just like Portsmouth or Jerusalem that have people in poor and rich areas, not all of Gaza is hit by poverty, even if the media shows it this way.  Interesting that shopping malls and big swimming pools have recently opened when there is supposed to be a shortage of building materials.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html

This is not to show that I don’t care about people in Gaza, its just more that their problems are less caused by Israel and more by rule from Hamas and Hezbollah who keep them in bondage, and kept the worldwide media in the dark by painting a different picture of what is happening, where other troubled places like Sudan get much less coverage in the news.

Jul 30 2010

strange back/chest ache and visit to the doctors

Thanks for people who prayed for me as of late.   The illness I has this week was a strange one.

I had pain in my back not on my spine but on the muscles below my right shoulder blade.   This seem to also hurt on my right hand side and then onto my right chest.  In addition this I had some spots and a rash as well, this wasn’t too noticeable as I have acne on and off for a while.

I had various ideas.   Was it sleeping in a funny position, problems with my bed not giving me the right posture?  Allergy to a new brand of deodorant?  Bugs in my room? (I often get mosquitoes in my flat and a friend got bitten by a poisonous spider last week)

Last weekend I went to Christchurch congregation to their morning service, (just inside Jaffa Gate, in Jerusalem’s old city walls) the service was ok but the audio system was less than satisfactory so I didn’t really get a lot of the word that was spoken, but in addition to that, there are old style pews which really didn’t help my back at all.

I left it until the middle of this week and eventually visited a doctor at a clinic in Diskin Street which is in a Ultra Orthodox area and got a quickie appointment the same day at 5.45pm.   When the doc saw my back and chest it only took about 5 seconds of diagnosis for him to tell me that I have Shingles.

Seems this illness stems from Chicken pox, and like most kids, I spent a lot of August 1988 with this contagious rash which meant I couldn’t go on a church camp and generally meant I had a mostly miserable summer not being able to go out anywhere.  But as my South African GP told me, traces of this hide in your spine so a specific ‘stripe’ of your body gets this, I don’t have that many spots but it is very painful with my muscules hurting quite a bit.  This has made part of my chest ‘twinge’ a bit which is worrying although not near my heart or my left hand side which is good.

Something I take for granted, is prescription medicine we have in the UK.  Now I don’t know what this is like to regular Israeli families, but as a foreigner I have to pay for treatment of course and use my health insurance to claim for this later.  To get any drugs following a consultation with a GP at home I think costs a fixed amount of £6-7 or so.   Here my medication I got which I have to take five times a day, cost me 389 Shekels as well 400 Shekels for 15 minutes with the doctor.  In total this has been about £133, so really pray these pills do the trick and I can get better soon….

Jul 30 2010

Apostle Paul on twitter

Was thinking the other day, about Twitter the hugely popular way of making a commentary of life events, things in the media and often how celebrities get followed and current news events get shown.  I was perhaps a bit mean with my earlier writings thinking it was a bit naff, but lately I was thinking about someone who told me that maybe the Apostle Paul in the bible was the world’s first blogger, so imagine in Paul was on Twitter too, it would be interesting to see as one of the first followers of Jesus who brought Christianity to the gentiles, travelled around various corners of the Mediterranean and got put in prison a few times, how his tweets would of looked like….

SaulOfTarsius I’m outside the Sanhedrin with my fellow Pharisees.  Today we are stoning some guy called Stephen.  #MyBenjaminTribe #MyRomanHomies

SaulOfTarsius Feel the urge that I need to do some writing for some reason.
sent via Papyrus

SaulOfTarsius Sorry not been online for a while, crazy week.  Only just got my eyesight back

SaulOfTarsius Had serious meeting with the boss.  Put me straight about some things.  #Salvation #FoundMoshiach

SaulOfTarsius Thanks everyone in coming to my baptism, it was a nice day

SaulOfTarsius PS YHWH told me to change my name from Saul to Paul.

SaulOfTarsius @Ananias, thanks for relaying what I needed to hear.

SaulOfTarsius Follow my new active account at @ApostlePaul

ApostlePaul Now in Damacsus.  Had some help to get there whilst my sight returned #Damasq #Asyria

ApostlePaul Praying with my new friends @SimonPeter and @James #Apostles

ApostlePaul Writing a book, I am going to call it Acts. Got a feeling, it will be one of many.

ApostlePaul Oyvavoy… Has it been ten years I have been speaking the good news in Damascus now?
via carrier pigeon

ApostlePaul @Barnabus thanks for the invite to Shabbat, look forward to helping your congregation in Tarsius.  #Tarsius #Nicetobehome

ApostlePaul Went and rebuked Elymas the sorcerer whilst staying Cyprus.  Also got a Roman soldier following Christ.  #Paphos #Κύπρος #Cyprus

ApostlePaul Leaving Cyprus to go on a mission trip to Asia Minor tomorrow, looking forward to it. #AsiaMinor

ApostlePaul Was a pleasure to stay with you #Lydia G-d bless.

ApostlePaul Myself and @Barnabus are off to Jerusalem meet new Christians #Judea #ישראל

ApostlePaul Spending 18 months working in Corinth with @Silas and @Timothy #Κόρινθος #Greece plan to see Ephesus some point soon.
via Greek post office AD52

ApostlePaul In Jerusalem in prison.  At least I escaped from being killed in the temple.   #depressed #WhatAboutRightsOfRomanCitizens #CaesareaJail

ApostlePaul said to the soldier today ‘is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?’ I’ll put that in Acts 22.

ApostlePaul Out of Jail.  Roman bureaucracy takes a long time, its only taken 18 months.. But Governor Felix has let me out today.

ApostlePaul Off to Malta.  The Lord told me this ship really isn’t safe and I dont like the look of those clouds, or how choppy the sea is. 😦

ApostlePaul Ship got wrecked.  Oh well, Maltese people offer unusual kindness though. #Malta

Please note, biblical extracts are very approximate and locations are probably not in chronological order.

Jul 25 2010

July 2010 and IT work in Jerusalem

At work I have been setting up a back up system for all three of our offices as the current system wasn’t working well or flexible for our needs, so I have deployed Cobian (which I really like as its free, open source and easy to configure with support for compression and encryption and reporting) and its crucially important as an IT administrator to be well rehearsed for a worse case scenario.   I am also thinking my job has some different slants, in terms of do IT people prepare for possible war.   One example is if our staff have to go into a bomb shelter (most houses, businesses and public places have one)   how we get announcements of what is happening.   I don’t think mobile phones work in heavy concrete shelters, and neither do laptops or smart phones using wireless internet either.   I have been told the government uses radio announcements for this kind of scenario, but then again I am not sure if they have these repeated in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian languages, all widely used here.   I thought one theory would be to put a wireless router (in a locked enclosure, so no unauthorised person can plug in a network cable or tamper with it)  in the shelter in one office, but then again that particular office has a shelter shared between 3 other businesses, so it doesn’t belong to us nor is it possible to drill holes or wire cables through a wall.

This week, there are announcements that significant numbers of Israelis have had details hacked by Turkish hackers see this news story.   Seems to be more common people deface web sites or illegally get personal information as a political statement.   I think I need to think about making sure all our servers and critical systems are fully patched.  Last year I saw a public presentation by the IDF who had an IBM Thinkpad laptop still with XP SP1 (I can tell as Service Pack 2 and later no longer shows the words ‘home’ or ‘professional’ upon booting up.) Microsoft stopped supporting XP without service pack 3 sometime ago now and the update isn’t that difficult, and apart from needing new wireless drivers for sometime laptops there is little possibility for this update to cause a problem, testing would need to be done with specialised apps but I have not seen any real issues.   I merged Service Pack 3 with our CD of our volume licence version of XP (do a google search for ‘slipstreaming’ if you want to learn to do this) so this is done transparently when I do rebuilds of PCs at work, saving me a lot of time.   I don’t think complacent in IT security is any worse here in Israel, as many of my previous employers were years behind on installing service packs, using an outdated web browser or had cut corners on inadequate antivirus apps that were not upto scratch.

If you have done IT administration or know articles for places where people may face danger, do feel free to comment.   I am not interested in anything political, just ideals for sensible practical plans for technology to keep people safe and work in times of uncertainty.

I have tidied up my blog and should get my original domain name back soon, I have removed some people from the links on the side, hope no one is offended, but I got rid of some dead links and blogs that had not been updated in a while.

Jul 23 2010

Pray for my back

A couple of days ago, I had a sore back, not on my spine, but below my shoulder and armpit, and also on my side.  Theres a slight rash as well which I am not sure if is coincidental.  I can now feel it on my chest also on the side.

Its like the muscles that are around my chest are sore.  I am not sure why, I thought it might be that I slept in a funny position.   I am a little bit worried I might need to see a doctor, as I really don’t what it is.

Please pray for me to get healing.   Thanks.

Jul 23 2010

Priestly tombs

Took another visit to some of the tombs in between the outer walls of the old city and the Mount of Olives

This is Zechariah’s tomb

Here is the tomb of Absalom, King David’s rebellious son who got his hair stuck in a tree and was killed.  Both of these you can’t enter the gap underneath.   Apparently a lot of the stone work was unfinished and the back of the tomb the stones and not hewn as neatly as the front.

There are some more interesting caves and places to explore..

…but it appeared to be all closed and locked up when I was there.  Some ancient writing can be seen though if you have sharp eyes to look high up.

Jul 19 2010

Bombproof bins

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.