Category me

Sep 17 2009

my back

Few days ago I played frisbee with about 10 of us in the park.   Has to be said I don’t really do sport.  If I engage in anything that might involve tackling or taking control physically of some item like a ball from someone else I tend to ending hurting someone.   Instead I took a leap to grab the spinning plastic disc about 6 feet away from me and try to do a goalkeeper type leap and later that afternoon I found that my back was sore.

This kind of worried me, but after some praying and sitting in hard upright chairs for a couple of days, the pain has gone.   Similar things healing has been happening with some other people I work with.  The Lord is good.

Sep 13 2009

electronic bible

I am thinking of getting an old Windows PDA for use purely for bible study, looking for ideas amongst fellow IT pros on some ideas.

Often I rely on using biblegateway.com for searching for keywords on some scripture and a small device in which I can carry around in addition to a bible in a carry case would be good.

Now old HP/Compaq ipaqs and Dell Axims can be got for as little as £25 on ebay,

This is what I need,

Basic, cheap, reasonable battery life, clear screen, SD card slot, not scratch prone, some app to show bible (maybe multiple translations) easy to make notes on things, possibly a way to sync things from google calender via Activesync, usable on screen keyboard. 64Mb or even 32Mb would be probably be fine. Maybe a bolt on real keyboard.

What I dont need: iPhone/iPod Touch, these are great but wants some basic as its more or less going to be used for one purpose only, so I dont want to get distracted by messing about with some other things when I want to use it just for bible study. I dont need a phone (I have a basic one that suits me fine) I dont need wireless or bluetooth or MP3 or camera.

I want to stick with Windows just to stick with something mainstream.

Suggestions are welcome from anyone.

Aug 29 2009

33

Today I hit 33, Jesus died at this age at the peak of his ministry somewhere probably no more than a mile than a live at the moment.   Thats quite a sobering thought.

Lately I get to go round someone’s house, either with one of the Bridges for Peace volunteers, or to some friends who work for one of several other Christian organisations in the city, and have food on friday night (Shabbat) which I did yesterday, its always great fun and everyone tends to much in making something.

Today I have some people coming round my house tonight so I am trying to make a bunch of things, have assembled together a Lasagne in a long aluminium tray, I have never cooked anything this big nor for and organise for 10-12ish people who are coming tonight, I need to make some chilli as well as Lasagne with its meat and diary combination isnt kosher, hopefull this should be ok, no one has told me if they are vegatarian or has any special requirements, I am just a little nervous this is all going to work out ok tonight.

Later tonight a few of us are heading to a comedy club in town, as have been recommended this is a must do experience when doing Jerusalem, not been to one of these before, so should be interesting.

Aug 24 2009

prayer around Knesset

In view of the news about Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu appearing to side with the US about stopping building work in some of some of the disputed land, and I forgot to do my one hour prayer slot at work on tuesday, I decided to go prayer walking around the government buildings. I live not far from there but today I thought about taking a different route and went via a main road past one of the museums, after a mile or so I saw some very attractive gardens with neatly trimmed hedges next to the stone perimeter walls of the Knesset and there is a smell of lavender from the bushes, a glimpse of the days of Solomon in some ways. There was a road turning off here directly to the Knesset buildings themselves and approaching some booths with a barrier across the road, seeing a park on the left hand side I was not familiar with I ventured into there. Although its dark and not easy to see, I suddenly saw a family in a tent there, or to be more exact two or three tents with a large canvas over all of them, and a man and his two sons sitting outside. There were various cardboard signs in Hebrew and some in broken English they had been thrown out of their house by the government. I asked the man if he knew English, he called for his son who got his friend from another tent close by who looked about 15. This boy was telling me they had been living here for 2 months as their house was seized without saying any reason why. They didn’t say much why this was, I think they were living before in Jerusalem and not in any of the parts of the West Bank or in East Jerusalem. I asked if maybe I could get someone to interview them as this might made a good story for our magazine, the man said he would be ok with this. I went away sad for them, a little confused of why this community of people were living in a park. I told them Christians would be praying for them.

I went and finished my praying for Mr Netanyahu and the government and headed off back home.

Around the government building and in the hedges I have seen some spools of cassette tape wrapped around trees, I have seen this a fair bit back in Portsmouth, but there’s quite a bit of it around this city, I have been told its some kind of occultic practice, I don’t know who does it, but I always make a point of praying over it and breaking it.

Aug 23 2009

learning experiences

Learning experiences

If anything, my 6 months in Israel is a big learning experience. In many different ways, I am learning the culture here, that people don’t queue for the shops and if the guy in the car in front of you hasnt notice the lights have gone green its quite acceptable to lean on the horn, but also having to expand my technical skillsets with learning how the computer network runs and troubleshooting a dead server at work, and supporting users on Macs something I havent done before. My own laptop keeps overheating, so have several times replaced the fan and put some new thermal paste on the ships but its still not working quite right.

I still havent figured out a way to learn Hebrew yet, as don’t have money to do proper lessons. Its hard shopping when I need a 5 shekel coin to release a trolley and I have to ask someone for change, or looking at items on the shelves which a lot don’t have English labels so I have absolutely no clue what they are.   Would welcome any suggestions on this.   Probably something I could put on my iPodI could listen as it takes me 35 minutes to get to work.

Aug 8 2009

cats in the holyland

Cats in the holyland

For some reason, there seems to be lots of stray cats here, saw plenty of them on previous trips here, in the city walls of old Jerusalem, around one of the Roman amphitheatres on the Mediterranean and in a museum near Masada.

Stray cats can serve purposes, to get rid of rats and mice, but often they don’t bother as there are ready stocked dustbins or generous human neighbours around, There’s at least 15 cats in a hundred metre radius of my house, most of them sit in a garden two houses away which seems to have loads of rubbish (and really stinks, as do our drains and rubbish bins with the heat we have) and appears empty. Some of the kittens appear ridiculously cute, the little tiny black one that’s often asleep by my front door appears to have a nasty eye infection. Most of them look a mixture of ginger, tiger stripes and black. I don’t think anyone bothers to get their animals neutered or spayed.

Try and pet one of the adult moggies and you will get a nasty scowl and a paw swiped at you. I dont know if this country has a rabies or other nasty diseases but I think large numbers of feral animals can be a problem and really numbers probably need to controlled a bit, just as national parks in the UK, have to cull excess numbers of horses and deer.

Now, as domestic cats are widely thought to originate from Egypt, I wonder if Moses brought some over to here at some point….

will get back to some more articles soon….

Jul 17 2009

second day here in Jerusalem

Plane journey was not to bad, left on time, although my screen on the seat in front of me stopped working, pressing any of the buttons would not respond, the screen was just black, after a couple of presses of the alert steward button, someone came after a few minutes, he then pressed some of the buttons making me feel somewhat stupid. Got chatting to the guy next to me who was returning back to his home in Haifa as he had been on the way back from Los Angeles which required 3 different plane changes, so he was obviously very tired. Also spoke to a British girl who was only 18 but was bravely coming on her own to see some family here, so we chatted whilst waiting to go through security and waited as she went to buy a new mobile phone from kiosk in the airport, then we got a Sherut (taxi van) which gets you from TLV airport to anywhere in Jerusalem for NIS50 (£10ish) this is great as you can get to the door of where you want to go, but the taxi only leaves when it has enough people, and it took a few hours going all around different bits of Jerusalem dropping other people off.

My phone has decide to not work doing roaming here which is odd as its worked before. In my flat I share with an American called Josh, and once I arrived I had a Cellcom SIM card, some food, and few books and literature about the charity waiting for me.

Today I got up about 9.30, and don’t have to work till next week, so got a free day to take a wander and look around town. There was a demonstration on a road nearby for the release of the young 18 year old soldier who was captured by Hamas a few years ago, he is meant to be still alive somewhere in Gaza, so continued to pray for him that he will be released soon. Jerusalem has changed a bit since my last visit here in 2006, there’s a huge bridge held together by some steel wires, looks like a big expensive and ambitious design, its not finished as there were workman there as there is no actual road surface on it. In the middle of town there is a lot of work going on as well and its obvious a new light railway that is going to through the city is underway.

Its not easy negotiating round the city as the street signs are small and directional signs are a bit vague. As I was hoping to get to the Shuk (main market in the middle of Jerusalem) it became apparent as it was 1pm the chances are it will be shut already or soon because everything closes for Shabbat. I got a few items in this medium sized supermarket, but things like falafel or bagels were not to be found, and this shop like a few others for some strange reason do not sell drinks in bottles smaller than 1 litre. It was slightly worrying my carrier bag I had these items nearly broke half way walking through the park, think I must of walked a good six miles today in exploring the city, but not got see the juicy bits like the old city, the Shuk and the tomb of Jesus.

My room has wireless and Cellcom sim seems to work all ok, I also have a land phone as the international rates we have seems extremely cheap too. My housemate is making me dinner so will call this journal a night I think.

Jul 17 2009

Flying London Heathrow to Tel Aviv Ben Gurion

Woohoo! Time for some airport lounge style blogging, even though all the wireless networks here are subscription only, I am just typing this into Open Office and uploading later.

My flight is going at 11.15 to Tel Aviv, getting up at 5 wasn’t so bad as for some reason I keep getting up early anyhow, but some how feeling hugely dehydrated and some tea and orange juice didn’t really help things, it go worse on the coach up here, but found praying and getting a bit more sleep seem to help things hugely.

Oct 1 2007

software as tools #1 – a critical look of Microsoft Outlook

Software are types of tools in a lot of ways

Trouble is some of these tools are often blunt, a bit broken, inaccurate or awkward to use.

Some software is akin to a Swiss army knife, can be quite a cool too pack too lots of things in one package but they all don’t do the individual dedicated job that well. It might have a can opener but you wouldn’t want to open a tin of beans with one, and using the philips screwdriver to change a electrical plug is likely to be more difficult.

Microsoft Outlook is the most popular mail client in business today. Just because something is popular or industry standard it doesnt mean its all that great or even satisfactory.

There has been an argument for and against Microsoft applications and encouraging alternatives for a long time now.

I try and take an unbiased stand on this, some MS apps like Word and Excel do the job very well and don’t really have that many problems.

I have used and supported Outlook at places I have worked for sometime now, and I think its not a good mail client at all.

1/ User interface. Its quite poor, both in 2000 and 2003 iterations. Microsoft makes some aspects of this app “too customisable” to the point where its not consistent in use. Its easy to accidentally hide and move toolbars, something I dealt with a lot with medical staff when I was at Portsmouth Hospitals. “Personalised menus” is a really irritating feature which hides a lot of the menus so only half the choices are shown, in my opinion this makes training people on this application potentially more difficult and from a helpdesk support point of view harder to point people in the direction of a particular feature. This is easy to disable but its not usually turned off by default from any PC of a user I have come across.

2 / Usability. Ok this similar to user interface topic I know, one of the common questions asked to IT helpdesks, is a member of staff is awake sick unexpectedly and other members of the department need to read Mr Smith’s (who is absent) mail. You have to go to File, open, go across and either put in the persons user name (your IT helpdesk should have given you rights from Active Directory if you have been given permission)

The address book icon, why is it so small? Its an item that needs to be used frequently so it should be big and handy.

The size of the email and any attachments. This is not shown be default, it should be. When a user calls his helpdesk when hes run out of mailbox space and wants his box made bigger, usually by adding this they can work out which emails are taking up all the space and then can practice cleaning out unwanted mails, especially the jokes and funny photos are probably several megabytes in size.

Having a member of staff (especially on the PC of a HR manager or marketing assistant) with lots of folders, often becomes a big confusing mess. Having to scroll tediously up and down to drag an email to specific folder can be a real drag, there isn’t an easy way to sort these folders or so lots of them at the same time. So the potential for a staff member to put a confidential email thats meant to go to a private folder and end up putting it in a public one is quite likely.

3/ Worst of all, long time storage of mail and data.

There a flaws in Outlook which affect long term storage of data which I think is an unforgivable shortcoming. If a particular company has a clean sheet to start from as far as there IT infrastructure and does not already Outlook in their organisation, and a proper established viable application becomes available, I would strongly urge them not to use Outlook.

Why is this? When your mail box gets full you are usually advised to make a new folder, which makes a PST file. This a file which contains all your surplus email which has the content and any attachment files all lumped in together.

Outlook will save this file by default in location of your hard disk like C:\Documents and Settings\Jonathan\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\archive.pst. Note, this folder is *only* visible if you have turned on “show hidden folders and files” mode on, as otherwise you wont know where it is. Now its important that files should be saved on a network drive, there ought to be some prompt when setting up a user’s mailbox profile on where these very important files should be saved which ought to be on a network drive, but no, they are saved in a hidden folder where the user is unaware where critical emails are going to end up.

These .PST files corrupt easily. Very easily. Microsoft admits that bugs in Outlook means these files are risk of corruption if the reach over 2gb. In reality these files can corrupt much less than this. This is usually happens suddenly or when the PST files are copied over to a new PC when a user is rolled out a new machine. Often Outlook will ask the user for a password to get into this files, the user will swear blind that they had never (and they are normally correct) put a password on this file. I can use a tool which removes these passwords off the files. I have another tool which can *sometimes* repair corruption in this files if you are lucky. This can be got free from Microsoft site for the genuine one. In the event of the file still broken, a quick google search will reveal a variety of (I haven’t tried any of these) commercial applications at quite high cost which promise to fix these, which could save the skin of a nervous IT help desk engineer who is being demanded by a senior director why his mail folder cannot be read.

Some senior IT professionals I have met in the past think these files break only very rarely, I have seen it happen more often than I am comfortable with. It certainly not a nice experience trying to break it to a user that their files are gone for good, and if they weren’t saved on a network drive, that they cannot be recovered off a tape back up.

Going back to the tool analogy, this flaw of outlook is akin to storing an overflow of water (data) in pipes and buckets (PST files) that have holes in. They leak. Having information in your organisation with a piece of apparatus that means information (could be life critical or legal) gets lost is seriously bad news. I have had to support a user which had files at risk which contained information needed to be given to the police.

Note these are my own findings and opinions from real life support queries I have dealt with, not just stuff taken somewhere off the net. Like most people I tend to moan at Microsoft’s products but I try to do so from my own experience.

Me? I use Mozilla Thunderbird at home. It doesn’t become slow with lots of mail, works great in conjunction with Gmail, so you can have the best of both worlds with proper grownup style POP3 mail and web based mail simultaneously, although I have not used coupled with MS Exchange. Thunderbird hasn’t quite matured yet though as there is no calender/diary yet, I think this can be available as an extension but these are early in stages. I would like to see in any mail client an ability to store my address book list on the web so I can get at one standardised method of looking up email addresses, phone numbers and other details, whilst I am away, I have no need for a PDA or smart phone but would like to get at this information synchronized between my home PC, laptop, work PC and any public computer,