Tag Archives: Israel

Aug 7 2010

Power cut in Talpiyot

On wednesday when working at our food bank warehouse in Talpiyot we had a power cut.

Quite sudden, I was working on setting up a server on my work bench which suddenly went off.  It wasn’t running anything important.  A repeated beeping came on from the various UPS (battery back up) units around the building.   One of them I rebuilt myself as the batteries were old and no longer functioning, each of the cells has a life span of 3 years or so.   I am glad I did now.

With multiple circuits around the building, with the sockets labeled for computer use, it seems everything went to plan, apart from the lights going off in my workshop (one of the only rooms with no natural light)  and the video intercom system on the front door.  I had to manually power down the servers and tell everyone to quickly save their work and shut down their PCs.  Meanwhile our giant walk in freezer had its own battery system, so no food that was to be supplied to the poor got spoiled.

After the utility company was called, we were told there could be a wait of 2 hours.  I think the power outage ran for about 45 minutes, this meant the electric water heater built into a water bottle dispenser was still hot enough to get two cups of tea each.   Once the power came back on, I manually powered on four PCs in my workshop and the two servers and all seems to be fine.    Oddly enough, some switches and routers were still blinking away protected with a shoebox sized UPS but we had no internet connection, although I could ping our router.  It seems during the hotter months, more people have their air conditioning on and the electricity supplier may not be able to cope.   It seems all companies I have seen in Israel all have UPSes on PCs and critical equipment, often see them underneath a cash register in a shop.   If this sounds like a big concern, now that I have been here a year, this is the first time I have seen a power cut at one of our offices.

I want to look at means of monitoring our bigger UPS units remotely, we have some APC and some lesser brand units, so I can see sources of problems from my main desk.

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

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 2: The lowest camp site on earth…

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

In my characteristically quirky random way of doing things, I didn’t mention what we did before going to Masada.

Marcel, Magnus and myself stocked up with food and supplies at a Talpiyot supermarket for camping expedition in Marcel’s work’s Fiat Doblo van.

The camp site we stayed at was pretty good in terms of location.   The toilets were nasty to say the least, the camp site itself was free but the toilets required some coins put into a turnstile gate, but this was not working, probably as no one was taking care of any cleaning or maintenance.

When choosing a place to put our tent, some of the other people were a bit noisy, there were several cars playing Arab music rather loud, we had to get to sleep early as we planned to get up at 3am (!) to walk up Masada to see the sun rise over the Dead Sea.

So we pitched the tent closeish to the beach.  This just required a scrape around of any big stones to get the ground as flat as possible for sleeping on.

The tent is borrowed of Marcel’s Swiss work colleague, it took us three attempts to put it up as its quite unusual in design and took several goes at trying to work out if the sticks go on the inside or outside…

Another problem we hit was the ground was too hard to get the pegs in.  After bashing them with a big rock and bending them in the process, a better idea was just to tie the guy ropes to some bottles of water.  It was quite windy, so keeping the tent upright was best achieved with at least two of us in the tent at once. 🙂

Something hit me when it got dark…  This is the lowest place on earth, this is the lowest camp site on earth, AND, our tent is lower than everyone else’s.   Therefore we spent the night in the lowest tent in THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!  YEAH!!!!

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more 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 20 2010

Jerusalem’s Clover Map

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.

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.

Jul 15 2010

Beit Shemesh summer camp

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.

Beit Shemesh

Jul 12 2010

Riding to work – commuting Jerusalem style Part 1

first bit –  second section –  Third and final

I thought I would mention a bit about my commute to work.

My house is in East Talpiyot, is 6km (4 miles) from work, I got a bike not long after my return from the UK in March.

I have had to commute distances before in previous jobs, when I started working for the Southampton NHS trust (for non-UK people, a hospital authority) to start with, the drive of about 26 miles was hell, due to heavy traffic and the maddeningly complex lane system around Southampton.  After getting a Tomtom unit and planning a different route and fair bit of practice, this journey got easier, after a couple weeks I really started to enjoy this job, and my boss gave me some assignments to do in other parts of the city (there were about 100 different buildings to be visited between a team of about 8 of us)   I think this was God telling me to be more persistent with things.   Plus after a couple of months of this role all the roadworks was complete, giving me more time to get in.

Here though, I am on two wheels which might seem dangerous given the more er, ‘energetic’ Israeli style of driving here, but in general riding around isn’t too much problem as I use the pavement and just keep an eye out for pedestrians. Right: Out of my flat

This junction here doesn’t look much, but I actually have a archaeological site 100 yards from my house. The Talpiyot tomb. I have looked around and I can’t actually see this place, I have a feeling its probably hidden one of those electricity type shed things to the left.   There are steep steps down from this junction, so it could be under the road.
Up a hill, then down.   Then up.   A sneaky short cut up this hill to the right.

Good morning UN!   The United Nations building used to the headquarters of the British Mandate of Palestine (pre 1948)  Apparently looking at this location on a map, shows this place during biblical times was called the ‘Den of evil council’ (!)
I then cut to the right where this white car is:

The promenade!!  You get some amazing views from this place!!   Today it was a bit misty though, I am not sure how you get fog in a dry desert country but visibility in mornings is often like this.

Ride along this path.

Another sneaky shortcut, to the right takes a few minutes off…

first bit –  second section –  Third and final