Mar 25 2010

bike shopping and chatting with local in Talpiyot

Yesterday I took a different route home from work, as I wanted to visit three bike shops to get some idea of costs of a cycle to get me to and from work, as I live 6kms (4 miles) away from work, friends and shops.  Seems that around 600NIS (£100) will get me a new simple bike, with used ones fairly scarce amongst cycle businesses, one wanting 450 and another 1000, one did give the option of buying back the bike for half what you pay for it which seems like a sensible idea for volunteers in the country like me.   I am going to leave it for the moment and look at any privately offered ones.   Heck, there is a bike with a flat tyre outside my flat owned by the neighbours that hasn’t looked like it has been ridden in a long time.   The main things I am looking for is cheap to buy and cost of ownership, something simple, as I haven’t really owned a bike since I was a child, and something low cost to fix when it needs mending so has standard type parts etc.   I don’t really have the funds to do this right now but am praying for a source of money of some kind for this.

Anyway on the way home I got thrusted a leaflet outside some shops in Talpiyot by some young lad who looked about 16 or so,  I just gave a quick ‘toda’ and took it from him, he then said something in Hebrew back, when I asked if he could speak English, he just said thanks I took his leaflet as he was counting on this job to make some money, when I looked it was for bedroom furniture, I mention I was volunteering for a charity so I wasnt really his target market, we had a good chat for a few minutes as he was surprised seeing an British person here, lately you probably saw on the news UK/Israel relationships has been strained since the row over a faked passport allegation was in the news this week.  It was good for me as a foreigner to chat to someone genuinely curious why I was here to work for free showing Israel support from Christians.  For those new to my blog, as I have mentioned before I came here not to convert or evangelise but to show love and practical assistance in volunteering here, for me, I have a ‘backroom’ role doing IT support, to provide the main workers with the tools to do their role in providing food, assistance with new immigrants and sponsoring towns being some of the many things Bridges for Peace does.  It was quite a encouragement to see this young lad’s eyes light up at the thought there are foreigners coming to help when the media paints a grim picture of Israel being a much disliked nation amongst a lot of the world.

Mar 24 2010

Coffee shops that call your name

Coffee shops are a big thing here in Israel, you could say they are experts at it, seeing as Starbucks briefly tried to open chains here and they bombed as the native Israeli chains like Aroma were already firmly rooted here.

I am sitting here in a branch of Aroma in the Shuk (open air market in Jerusalem), it seems like the perfect antidote to manic fast paced chaotic style of crowds of people getting of mostly fruit, vegetables, meat and fish here.   This particular branch is more of a handful of chairs and tables out in the street and a few indoors too.   I am on my own, as I finished work and it takes me ages to get home as I live 6kms away and I wanted to go to a bible study group at 7.30 so thought it would be better to hang around town till then.

The way you get a coffee here in Israel is amusingly different from everywhere else.   You go up to the till and place you order, you have to give the steward at the counter your name, you sit down with cake, pastry or sandwich you take there and then, and then wait.   You name gets spoken over the microphone and you go and collect your beverage, from the other counter.

This makes me think, as they only ask you your first name, if you have a popular Hebrew name like Moshe, Isaac, Avram or Jonathan, it could get a bit comical as many people could stand up!

Mar 22 2010

Back in Jerusalem for a second season…

Whilst waiting to catch my flight, I caught sight of the Harrods logo on of the aircraft hangers outside the window at Luton airport.  Interesting, I didn’t know Mr Alfayed or the world famous department store would have any interest in the aviation business.  Luton being a city north west of London has a busy medium volume of flights to various bits of Europe as well as domestic parts of the UK including Scotland and the Channel Islands.

Flying with Easyjet was ok.  The flight itself wasnt particulary cheap as it was only slightly cheaper than my flight with BMI last year, and the next cheapest would of been with Turkish airlines and had to spend a good few hours changing planes in Istanbul.  Bearing in mind as a budget airline you dont get food, drinks, TV/movies, choice of seat etc, this is no big deal when flying to Paris or Amsterdam as its only 1 hour and 15 minutes for these sorts of routes, however here being 4 hours, it gets annoying paying for #4 for a very small cake and some coffee.  I brought some food to take on the plane however when I was about to say goodbye to my parents, the announcement on the tannoy system was you were strictly allowed on bag to carry on, so I gave part of my lunch to my parents, and just carried my laptop with me and two large books loose.

When getting on the plane I noticed overhead luggage space was very tight, it seems most of the other passengers took no notice of the announcement, mostly a necessity with people needing things for very young children and religious Jews who always carry boxes to put their hats in, as well as many people with laptops meant shoving your belongings wherever they could fit often some distance away from your seat.

Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport has this nice Roman Mosaic hung on the wall of the new airport that was built in 2004.   Some people have said TLV is one of the best airports in the world, with its modern bright interior with familiar white Jerusalem stone everywhere, big water fountain at the interest, free (unlike Heathrow) wireless internet and big choice of shops I am inclined to agree here.

The next step was getting on a Sherut bus (12 seater Mercedes van) directly to my new flat.  This was quite simple and I do like this cheap and easy direct to your door method, with the exception of driving very fast in between some road humps around the discrict of Talpyiot which made me feel a bit sick.

Anyway its nice to be back, in a much nicer apartment and in a different part of town.

More soon…..

Mar 15 2010

Dividing wall in Jerusalem

This wall here is the one put in a few years ago between west and east Jerusalem, it runs all the way around the outside of the Palestinian territories.   To many it looks like an icon of oppression, and people make comparisons between the wall in Berlin that used to divide Germany until 1989, or think its similar to the Apartheid movement in South Africa.


Look at the graffiti and you can see people wanting to show help to the people that live beyond this wall.   But, if you live in Israel in the early 2000s or even before then when bombings of cars, coffee shops and shopping malls happened once or twice a month, where people live in fear of terrorism then something needed to be done.  Giving a neighbouring authority that has a large scale terrorist infrastructure ability to come and cause death and destruction should not be allowed in.   Like a good farmer that needs to protect his chickens from a murderous neighbour like a fox, this is what the wall is for, although its a shame this affects the Palestinians who only want to live their daily lives without affecting anyone.

Some other roadblocks put in place for the safety of everyone have been relaxed in order to give Palestinians more freedom, but then things like this happen. (link)

Many people wont like me saying this but as the wall has meant terrorist attacks in Jerusalem do not seem happen hardly ever now, the wall is a good thing, and has saved the lives of many Jews, Arabs and visiting foreigners.

Please don’t comment on this article, all will be deleted.

Mar 3 2010

Jerusalem part 2 starts March…

part 2 of my travels in volunteering for Bridges for Peace, a Christian charity that helps poor Jewish people in Israel, is almost here.

I am flying to Tel Aviv from Luton on 16th of March.  At the moment I have this ‘what the heck have I just done’ type feeling as flight was quite a bit more (£270) than I thought it would be with Easyjet, being not much less than a regular non-budget airline I flew with last year, and that I have less than two weeks to plan everything else and go..

If you click here you can see some figures of what I need in financial support for this year.   This is a voluntary role, I get an allowance (not a salary, I am still a volunteer) in some of my costs like rent and bills, but need probably about an extra £300 a month to live, I have to buy one more flight, as I am coming home in May to go to a friend’s wedding in Spain then see my sister and her new baby than head back.

My writings here only account for about 20% of the places I have been to into middle east, I intend to write plenty more.  Of course if there are certain sights and places you would like to read more on, feel free to ask.

I would of course appreciate prayer as well, I have a great many challenges coming up soon..

Mar 3 2010

getting a little extra cash back from online shopping – my thoughts

For the last few weeks I have been doing online shopping with Top Cashback.

Originally saw this company mentioned quite a bit on MoneySavingExpert.com, so it is a legit operation and its quite popular now, it offers you cash back from buying anything online.  Most of the time its things I buy from retailers I use regularly.  It cost absolutely nothing to join and doesn’t need any commitment of any kind.

The way this works is you have to go onto the the Top Cashback web site first then do a search for a type of product (ie: car insurance, DVDs etc) you want buy or a retailer (Boots, HMV, confused.com, etc)   and then go and buy what you want, your browser relays what you have bought back to the web site who give you something back, easy.

Open this picture bigger and you can see what I have been using it recently.

So is it worth it?  Well, its not a get rich quick scheme, but I have got back nearly £3 which isnt too bad, as I have only signed up since about the beginning of this year.  This might not seem much, but BIG amounts of money can be made on things like insurance or a mobile contract (£50, £100 or more)   so this is definitely worth considering.   I havent bought much seeing as I am not employed, I have bought a few computer bits of ebay in order to fix some old computers up to make them saleable.  In doing so, I probably only get 30 pence for £5 I have spent.   Ebay’s cashback is something like 40% of their fees they charge the seller, that the buyer can get back.  You can see I bought a bus ticket to get from Luton airport to Stansted airport as I will be getting off one flight onto another to go to Spain in May, this ticket cost me £11.70, so 70p back isnt bad, usually (when I am normal employment) I get a bus from Portsmouth to London about 3 or 4 times a year to go shopping, see friends or go to a museum which is about £13 return, so a bit of money back there pays for a bottle of coke or something.  Play.com (I think they must be second to Amazon now, for biggest online retailer in the UK)  give you 1-8%, they tend to be the cheapest place to get DVDs anyhow without this, here I just bought one CD for £7.99.   I used Vodafone to get a pay as you go SIM card which was free and doesnt get you any incentive as I wanted to switch from Orange due to their poor service lately, but O2 and Orange offer a small (50p or so) amount of cash back for free issue prepay SIM cards and a very good amount for a new phone contract.   In some cases two seperate offers can work together for even more savings.   If you are a first time user of Tesco’s online food shopping service they can give you £10 of £50 (if I remember correctly) but more money off on top of that if you use the discount codes that are widely on the internet and click to join from topcashback.

To make the cashback work successfully you need to check your computer can ‘track’, this means using the test tracking feature on the web site to ensure that your PC will tell the retailer that topcashback have sent you there, so they can acknowledge that you should have some payment.   Sometimes when buying this might not work, so there is a manual way of chasing up any money that doesn’t show on the list of things bought recently.

The way they can afford to give the public back their money is if you think of a real physical shop which has middlemen who earn a commission in between a product comes from a wholesaler to your shopping basket, so does the online retail industry.   Therefore companies, Google being the biggest of all earn a small portion of something you pay for if you go and search for buying something via Google’s site or one of their ads.   So imagine if one of those companies actually shares some of the commission with you, the customer and you get to keep it, well that is quite nice really.   They just want to pay a bit to someone who can point them in the direction of new business, it also happens that car insurance and mobile phone stores pay their salesman good fees if they make a sale, and at the same time you have some of that cash for yourself if you know where to look.

Tips to gain cashback successfully:-

  • – Always click onto Topcashback web site then search for the retailer’s site from there, otherwise it won’t work.
  • – Don’t change things on your browser settings (like clearing cookies or settings) whilst shopping online, this might remove the evidence you have bought from that particular shop.
  • – If the cashback tracking records doesn’t show up anything, check their web site for help on how to chase it up.

So, in all I would recommend that may be 6 months worth of casual small spending on popular online retailers could get you enough money to get a discounted DVD, or with more generous deals maybe quite a bit more.   Either way I wont bother earning points with Airmiles any more I reckon. 🙂

Online Cashback

Of course, they offer me a small commission of £1 if someone gets a recommendation from me and goes to collect £5 worth of money back from places you have spent at.   If you (UK residents only) could be so kind to click the above banner and join even if you are just casually curious, this would be most helpful to provide a tiny bit extra to my travels to Israel in a few weeks.

Feb 22 2010

horse riding in the West Bank

Shortly before Christmas I went with three friends to a farm on the west bank to do a bit of horse riding.  This was a fun journey going in a old VW Beetle out of Jerusalem through the border, getting smiles from Palestinian kids who haven’t seen a little car like this in a long time.

Its a long time since I have rode a horse, in fact I am not even sure if I have since about 1998 when I worked in a kids camp in Florida…   Anyway it seems quite obvious in yanking the reins and yelling woah to stop, but when this particular horse just likes to gallop up this hill and the only thing keeping me still onboard was my feet in the stirrups – it gets quite scary, and hard to grapple the reins and steady myself…

Without realising it, I managed to lose my watch after pulling back on the reigns so hard, it snapped the metal strap, I didn’t notice I lost anything until our instructor pointed out why I had a few scratches on my arm…   My friends who came with me were much more savvy at riding than me though.  Come to think of it, I didn’t see anyone with a riding hat 🙂

This camp is close to an Arab village but the young men working at the farm says there is never any trouble here, as police and army regularly patrol this area, but there are good relationships with the neighbours it seems.  The farm primary business, is making cheese and yoghurt from goat’s cheese, didn’t get to see the goats in their shed, but did get to see the finished products for sale.   They have to buy pineapple and other fruit from somewhere else to make this.

Time to relax after scary and crazy horses, and try some goats cheese with some of the people on the farm, think some young adults out of work get a chance to do some training in helping here.  This was a fun day out on my last (first week of January 2010) day out here.

Feb 15 2010

Journey to the Red Sea – part six; into winter desert in Wadi Rum

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8

I had to wake up early for this group tour I booked with the manager of the hotel in Wadi Moussa (the town Petra is in)   This meant getting up very early, the calls from the neighbouring mosque took care of that, but not so loud or abruptly this time.

I came down at just after 6am and remembered I could get some breakfast for leaving, apparently breakfast in Jordan is quite simple affair, pita bread with jam or some foil triangles of cheese.  Had a couple of these and was half way through some coffee then heard a beep from outside, my bus tour was here dead on time at 6.30.

This is where a very stressful morning came.   I realised to my horror I had spent most of the money in Jordan on the long taxi ride, admission to the park and food.  Here the tour guides would obviously expecting payment before we leave town and there were no ATM machines once we left Wadi Moussa.   We stopped in a road with two banks opposite.   Here they let me out and I drew out some money, the ATMs have the instructions in Arabic and a selection of main European languages as well.   This machine asked some strange questions asking me if my bank account was a savings, checking or some other account, I pressed one of these before correctly two day ago, but I didn’t really know which of these is appropriate to my account, anyway it spat out my card, and second attempt was the same.   The different bank over the road had a machine that gave me the same result and refused a withdraw.   I had to tell the young Arab man on the bus I would have to cancel my trip as there was no way of paying and I couldn’t use plastic to pay for the tour (about 35 Dinars I think, quite good value for a whole day’s exploring, staying overnight and getting food)  so there he told me I could pay with my shekels and after giving me a figure I didn’t have time to think but knew it was a pretty lousy exchange rate, I decided to stay put in the bus and go with the trip.

A bit further on we were told we would get to a checkpoint where would need to pay for access into the park.   Before getting there I had a phone call, not on my phone as I didn’t have roaming enabled to use my phone on JO networks, but the driver’s Nokia phone which reeked of cigarettes which a voice of someone I have never met told me (but strangely not the other travellers) that I had to tell the border guards I had come from suchandsuch hotel, I replied and told him I was from a different hotel, but the voice repeated that I had to tell them this exactly, as it implied I had to be a bit dishonest to the security guards at the Wadi Rum border, this made me feel really uncomfortable.

I really was not enjoying this trip so far, not planning in advance in having enough cash in Dinars, tour guides who were asking me to tell lies, more oddities were yet to come.   At the border, which was a fairly relaxed affair, seeing as I was going to a national park not between two political authorities, the guards asked me where myself and the other people on the trip where we were from, I just said I was from that hotel, seeing as I could not remember the name of either my real hotel and the one they tour people wanted me to say.  They told me I needed to pay 2 dinars, this was not mentioned about extra fees with the tour, but it was not much money so I didn’t care too much.

The trip was tour around Wadi Rum a famous desert national park towards the south of the country, not to far away from the border with Israel.  This meant my journey back to the border would be much easier and cheaper, as not requiring only and costly taxi ride.

We got off the minibus (which was a Toyota, I didn’t know they do vehicles of this type)  at a small village with a couple of dozen houses that looked a bit scruffy looking, and got to office where Zedan the tall Arab man who is the boss of the tour company.   We just got a chance to have some Arab tea and have a chat.   The other people on the trip were two Japanese men, two Swedish men, a couple who were Mexican and Spanish, a Korean girl, a Brazilian chap and a few others.  Another good chance to share stories of what we were doing in the middle east.

Seeing as there is lots of stories on the news about Jap motor giant Toyota’s reliability being tainted due to various different issues with sticking accelerator pedals or software bugs causing brakes not to work if hitting a speed ramp, it seems Jordan is where aging Toyotas go to retire.

This is the quality automobile that was used for our trip.   There appears to be no keys, I don’t think the owner locks it, probably doesn’t matter as the boss of the group leaves outside his office which is in a small village in the south with only about 20-30 houses in between two mountains.  The young chap who is our tour driver has to touch two pieces of cable under the steering column.   The car has some of the plastic rim of the steering wheel come away and fixed with insulation tape, various other bits like all three mirrors and one of the brake lights are missing, one of the wiper arms is completely absent, the other has a sharp metal prong which has already scored a curved scratch over the windscreen, I also noticed part way through the desert that the fuel gauge showed empty, I asked him that I hoped that it doesn’t work, and he assured me it didn’t! 🙂  The bodywork looks quite decent until I open the back door and can see rust holes along the rear wheel arch with a 2mm gap where I can see the tyres.  There is also strangely no licence plates on this or the other vehicle another older Toyota of possible late 1970s origin, we did go past a police car and they didn’t bat an eyelid.  I would say judging by the black square on the doors it looks like this Toyota Landcruiser could of once owned by the UN, a recent test drive of Top Gear of the latest 2009 model mentions the UN are Toyota’s biggest client for this model car, but the man said it used to belong to the Jordanian government.

Not long after we stopped at a small shop in the middle of nowhere on a desert highway to get stuff for lunch, which after carefully counting about 3 dinars (I worked out I needed the other remaining 20 for my taxi home) got me some salty biscuits and some extra water.

Pics from us in the other truck which was swapped over a bit later.

Next, roughing it in a Bedouin camp in a desert in December….

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8

Feb 15 2010

software review: Truecrypt – free and effective file encryption

Are you a laptop user and work away from home or office?
Do you carry around confidential files on a USB stick, external hard drive or on CDs/DVDs?
Have you thought about what would happen if a computer or media was lost or stolen?
Are you a company director or IT manager and thought about what would happen if your staff with the above scenarios?

You should have encryption software!!

I have been using a free piece of software called Truecrypt for my own use in storing lists of passwords and other sensitive files, not only is it free it offers are very high level encryption and can be used interchangeably between Windows, Macs and Linux computers.

I firstly used this app as when I was working for Southampton NHS trust, a user was given a CD with patient data from an organisation who were authorised to deal with a patient’s records, possibly for the purposes of a patient whose medical history was needed to be accessed another clinical authority while they were travelling in another country for treatment.  Although the trust didn’t officially use or support this app, my manager was ok for me to supply this employee that needed the files.  So I quickly installed Truecrypt on her laptop and using the password she was given by email got the files for her, this of course meaning if the CD was intercepted by a third party it would be useless.

Using Truecrypt means you build a virtual drive of a size of your choice, several kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes, and a drive letter (for instance X: ), chose a password, copy your files to the drive, then the virtual drive can be closed when not needed, the virtual drive exists as a file on any type of media, so you dont necessarily need to give it the .tc extension so a possible unauthorised person probably wouldn’t know it even exist.   If you do give it the right filename extension, then you can just double click on the files, let say, secret.tc and Truecrypt will start up and prompt you to enter a password for it.  If you wish to close your encrypted drive you can just right click on the blue Truecrypt icon on the task bar and dismount this drive (the drive X: will disappear from your My Computer folder)   you can then eject the CD or USB stick if needed, and if you click on Start then ‘Recent documents’, any file names you were working on will vanish from there, no one will know on your PC you have been accessing them.

I personally think deploying this app for a private individual or a business should be quite simple as long as the follow factors are put in place:-
– If a CD or USB stick has encrypted if used on someone else’s (a client let say, that a salesman visits)  they will need to have the Truecrypt client installed, or you can run it straight from the USB stick rather than install it on the host computer.
– If the password is forgotten, the files will be absolutely impossible to access!   A clear policy on passwords should be done, maybe just one for all staff of a department might be a good idea.   Truecrypt actually recommends at least 20 (!) characters in a password for maximum security.
– A clear policy on how big the encrypted drives needs to be.   For instance if everyone creates a 1gb or more drive but actually only uses a small portion of this, and they store it on their network drive, then that could become a big waste of disk space on the server.
– Don’t touch the other features in the app unless you know precisely what they do in case it could render your files impossible to read.
– Like any new change in IT, users should be trained and IT support teams should have some documentation for them to follow so it becomes familiar in everyday use.  Things should be well rehearsed in case, lets say, you are about to a presentation in front of some people and huge embarrassment could happen if you cant get at the file.

Truecrypt also has other features, ie: can encrypt the whole of a laptop’s hard disk sector by sector.  This is a good idea as it is pathetically easy to crack an Windows administrator password on a laptop with the right boot CD (had to do with when my previous employer gave me a laptop of a salesman who just got fired and the administrator password of his laptop was changed to something unknown.)   I have not used this feature of this app yet but I have used rival products from Symantec and PGP – which were not free and cost my former employees a lot for licences)

This program is a really good example how open source apps can come up trumps in doing a task well for zero costs rather than forking our money for individual paid for licences for an equivalent app from another software maker, and unlike Microsoft’s BitLocker which comes with Vista and 7, Truecrypt has the edge in working transparently between any version of Windows, Macintosh and Linux environments.  I don’t pretend any app is perfect but this seems like a excellent solution with 256 bit encryption meaning getting round a password would need a specialist criminal very, very determined for weeks to have any chance of getting at those documents.

Jonathan would be pleased to provide you with further consulting on this application by email or phone in return for donations for his second trip to volunteering in Jerusalem, he would gladly accept any ideas on funding for my flights, insurance and costs, he is experienced in supporting many different applications both typical traditional Microsoft business applications and equivalent free alternatives.

Jonathan likes the benefits of free and open source software, as well as the obvious plus of not having any cost for the application, its good to be free of complex, confusing and restrictive licence agreements and having the source code available in the open has a degree of accountability as flaws and bugs can often be spotted and fixed quickly with a wider team of developers, tools used in business tend to be designed to be more closer to the way people work and to open standards, meaning better integration between other software.  He has a sharp eye for possible security threats in previous places he has contracted at, wether it maybe a non-encrypted wireless network that could let an unauthorised person in a company network, strange search toolbars in a browser which is a sign of a possible spyware application present, or an absent or disabled antivirus client, amongst flaws which are very real dangers for any business.