It's me!

This has been on my browser for about a week now, just purely due to the amazingness of it.

http://www.usbchainsaw.com/

Enjoy.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

This morning’s train brought back some memories for me.

I saw a dude wearing a lack t-shirt with Beavis and Butthead in skeleton form, rocking out as usual, and it brought me back to high school, 1995 in Jerusalem, where I met one of my best friends Yos, and he proceeded to educate me in MTV and a lot of animated pop culture.

We spent countless hours at his Dad’s place – whether in front of the TV, on the balcony or causing some sort of havoc in the neighborhood. Good times.

Then my iPod decided it was time to play a dialogue from Free To Be You And Me… – the same dialogue that Talisa and myself performed in 2003, for many children and adults. It was a good time, and it was shared by a bunch of awesome people.

I think it was during that show’s run I got my motorcycle license and bought Stella. Ah, the open road.

Anyways, have a great Monday.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

As a lot of hi-tech companies do, we also communicate via chat. After you’ve been chatting with people for more than a year,  and are friendly with them, you tend to derail the technical conversation into weirdness.

Here’s the tail-end of one such conversation that I had this morning. I have no idea where this came from.

(10:16:12 AM) chris: thanks for the understanding Mr sensativity
(10:16:34 AM) mike: hey, I’m not the guy the gals turn to for a shoulder to cry on.
(10:16:56 AM) mike: I’m the one who made them cry
(10:17:05 AM) mike: by running over their cat in a driveway or sometrhing
(10:18:20 AM) chris: nice, you are one of the nicest guys I know
(10:18:31 AM) mike: except when it comes to cats
(10:18:41 AM) mike: then I turn into the hate-mongerer
(10:19:20 AM) mike: Actually, I haven’t decided if it’s that I hate the cats, or that I love to see a gal cry.
(10:19:28 AM) chris: twisted
(10:19:36 AM) mike: I’m so confused and emotional about this time in my life
(10:20:09 AM) chris: well if you need a hug, I heard JP is giving them out
(10:20:28 AM) mike: ewww.. You might get more than you bargained for with him.
(10:20:54 AM) mike: like some weird Canadian STD that nobody ever heard about, has no visible symptoms, and cannot be detected in any way.
(10:21:05 AM) mike: That has no cure
(10:21:07 AM) chris: ohhh!
(10:21:12 AM) chris: or ewwww!

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So to some that have followed my bodily harm escapades, here’s another one for the record.

Yesterday, walking to the train with a couple of coworkers, I spent some time chatting with one more than the other.

This guy has a hearing problem, so he reads lips, so I turned my head 90 degrees so he could see me clearly, and there would be no “slurred” words.

As we’re walking up a hill at a decent pace, I suddenly feel immense pain in right thigh, all at the same instant.

Yes, I just walked into a fire hydrant.

Snuck up on me. I didn’t stand a chance.
And I was going at my normal pace, full momentum smashed me into the immovable object.

So now my right leg is largely useless. Don’t ask me to run, dance, skate, or walk too far. It hurts.

Oddly enough, I was looking forward to posting an image or two of some huge bruising, but it seems like the damage was done too far below the epidermis for it to be visible.
Oh well.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

A little while ago I participated in another wonderful secret mission with Improv Everywhere.
We all got together and made a difference.

You can read the full article, and all the details along with stills here.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

I just finished watching my DVR’ed episode of the Battlestar Galactica two hour finale.

To those of you who watch the show regularly, this will not come as a surprise.

This episodic saga is quite the amazing drama, which kind of happens to take place in space. But that fact doesn’t make it purely a geek show, it is much much more.

For those uninitiated, it follows the lives of a bunch of people - some closer than others - put into extraordinary situations and forced to deal with scenarios that, while seem to be highly unlikely and sometimes unfathomable, somehow shows us a glimpse into something that no matter how far out, in a a galaxy far far away, touches you.

Call me crazy, and I’m sure some do, this is a series that I think most people can enjoy - whether or not they like Sci Fi genre stuff - it’s an amazing story about people, and how they relate to other people.

The finale had moment in which I laughed out loud, and others where I actually teared up, and really felt for the characters and their predicaments.

All in all, if you’ve had any reservations on watching this show due to its geekiness, try to put those aside for a minute and give it a chance to lure you in and learn to love them all.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

I was playing around with OkCupid’s site, taking some test and stuff, and came up with this:

So, thoughts, comments, or otherwise snide remarks?

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So last night I was watching late night television on Comedy central, and after midnight they run ads for Girls Gone Wild. The ads show scenes out of their DVDs, showing girls is a variety of locations, “going wild”.

Let’s clarify this - “going wild” seems to be lifting their shirts to expose their breasts and possibly making out with another girl.

Now that’s wild.

What bugs me about this is that the girls exposing themselves is always covered by a playful-looking “CENSORED” graphic - always covering the naughty bits - but when two ladies are kissing, that’s not required to be censored.

Now, I’m not suggesting that everything be censored, but censors, get your ideas straight.

Why are certain body parts censored, but physical activity is not? It seems that if the censorship is governed by the conservative puritan movement, then women kissing is a much greater offense to the whole “God’s way of the world” anti-same sex activity idea, much greater than the natural, life-giving mammaries that we all suckled on as children (apologies to those that were strictly bottle-fed, your therapist should try to sort you out).

I’m not suggesting that censorship is good, or needed, or that we should also censor these activities, but if you’re going to censor something, at least be consistent, or not at all.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So today I’m hanging around home, and figured I’d geek out a bit and play around with my home entertainment setup.

I have a Samsung 42″ plasma TV, great picture, connected via HDMI to my TimeWarnerCable HD-DVR box.

Also connected is my Xbox 360, via component, and I typically use that (when not playing games) to watch videos, stored on my Drobo, with the attached DroboShare running fuppes to front the files via UPnP.

And today, when I had sat down to watch a film, I turn on the Xbox, and it freezes. And then displays the ominous Red Ring of Death. Damn.

Now I’ve submitted a repair for this, so even though it is out of warranty, M$ offers up to three years on this particular issue, and provide shipping and packaing for it all, so hopefully in a few days I’ll get their boox and send my dear console back to the for repair.

This failure spurred me into wondering how I could watch my films, so I hooked up my laptop’s video out and headphones up to the TV, and saw that work well. And then my roommate mentioned that I might want to hook up the mini-stereo system to the TV as well.

So I did. And the sound is pretty good compared to the internal speakers on the TV. They are ok, but the stereo speakers provide a much warmer sound, a fuller environment.

So now that there’s a new set of speakers involved, and my eternal desire to not have fivethousand remote controls around the house, I got a Logitech Harmony remote control a while back, so I updated it to use the correct sequence, and control the stereo volume.

So it’s all nicely playing together, all except the Xbox, which is dead. That lead me to look into other multimedia solutions, like XMBC and Plex, both pretty good looking. So I might figure out some way to create that link sometime soon, so it’s a very pretty multimedia interface.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

From my good pal joshbrown

If you saw me in the back of a police car, what would you think I was there for?

Answer me, then post this in your own journal (or not) to see how many different crimes you get accused of committing.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So today was election day in the US of A.

As a good citizen, I had previously registered to vote at the DMV last year, and today I went to my designated poll to cast my vote, alongside many others.

In the past, my votes have all been absentee ballots, sent in from Israel, and had a certain “boring” aspect to it. Fill out form, enclose in envelope and send in mail.

Yawn.

But today was my first interactive voting experience, and it was nice and simple, with a big red lever involved. I felt like pulling that should activate some sort of trap door, ejection seat or alarm, but no.

It also made me think about how the fact that my personal vote doesn’t really affect anything, since the Electoral College is the defining vote for the president elect.

So the knowledge of the fact that I had close to no affect on the eventual election of the president has somewhat made this election day a little more like the rest of the days of the year, and not that special at all.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So sometimes I get so busy that I don’t take the time to get thigns done - check my emails, follow up with some projects, and read my mail.

Right now, my inbox has over one hundred unread emails, so if yours is in there, sorry. I’m going to try to sit down and clear some out this weekend.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

A while back I wrote about using Nagios as a monitoring system.

Since then, I’ve had need to have it deployed via a packaging system called RPM, and since no “stable” community editions are out there, I have the need to “roll my own” for distribution on our platforms.

I’ve never used RPM from the “packager” side before - and it’s both very cool and infuriating. It has all sort of features and powerful macros, but debugging it isn’t a piece of cake at all.

If anyone has a great RPM tool out there that they want to recommend, let me know.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So for those of you following my life, you may know that I went skydiving last fall.

Since then, I’ve taken up the Accelerated Freefall Progression (AFP) course, which constitutes a standardized course that takes a beginner skydiver to a level of competency that most drop zones will allow self-supervised jumps upon its completion.

This typically takes about 10 jumps total, including a few tandem jumps, but mostly jumps with instructors jumping next to you, making sure that you can do what they expect you to do, as well as make it down safely.

It took me a little longer, due to a long winter break, as the weather was just not cooperative, with all the storms, snow, and other nastiness.

This past weekend, I left New York City with fellow skydiver Jen, in a hot yellow Pontiac G5 (thanks to the rental place only having conspicuous cars for me) and drove down to Skydive Cross Keys, where I’ve been jumping all along.

It was close to the end of the day when I finally got in the air, along with my graduation jump master Richard, a seasoned Aussie skydiver who’s been doing this for the past 28 years. We planned my skydive and then jumped it. I did what I needed to in order to graduate, and also learned that I have to focus on some items like legs for stability, etc.

In any case, watch it

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So the verdict was handed down, and now I officially am going to be homeless, unless I find a place to live.

How does one go about finding decently-priced places in Manhattan, preferably in the downtown/Financial District/Battery Park area? I’ve never had to do that part of living in NYC yet, and I’m a little lost.

The apartment I’ve been staying in now was owned by my grandmother, and was part of some sort of cooperative. The legal deal was that unless you can prove two years of cohabitation with the original resident, there is no right of inheritance, succession, or any of that jazz.

When she passed away, that kicked off their legal department, and there has been plenty of paperwork flying back and forth, with appeals and such, and that’s it - appeal denied, vacate by the 20th.

So at this point, I know that some of you know people “in the know” in New York, so if you know of someone’s place that’s sitting vacant and needs someone to house-watch it, or know someone with good connections in the real estate field, connect me - I don’t want to have to move out of the city.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So after my last post, I actually tried to catch up on my emails.

I did, and now have some time to tell a story.

This past weekend, I spent the day out white water rafting with a group organized by ZogSports. A bunch of coworkers and I joined a group of about 50 young persons and headed to the Lehigh River, where a Class 2 rapid awaited us (Rapids of moderate difficulty with passages clear. Requires experience plus suitable outfit and boat).

None of us had any experience rafting (as far as I recall) and we spent a couple of hours on the bus there, and then some more time waiting around for organizational things to be dealt with (that could have been performed on the bus. Once we actually set out, I was in a 7-person group, 4 co-workers and myself, and two ladies we met and joined ranks with.

We set out, and paddled hard, and moved along the river, and got a feel for it, but not nearly enough. As we progressed along the river, not very far in, we picked up some speed and rammed into another raft that was stuck against some rocks, bounced off them, and then our raft flipped over, throwing us out. I got flung clear, and went under for a second, life vest bringing me back up, my shades still nailed to my head. I turned backwards, fighting the current, and saw that my pals had either surfaced and were being pulled in, or someone was looking after what was going on back at the raft’s location. I turned around, and saw people in boats, and they seemed to chant to me in unison, “swim for the shore”. My brain wouldn’t process their message, and another raft paddled up and hauled me in.

My new family, a group of boy scouts and a couple of dads, seemed to have an ongoing war with another couple boats, with water guns, and use of the bailing bucket to toss heavy loads of water on the rivals. It was fun, for a while, but got old after a while, but as a guest in their raft, I didn’t complain.

We rode a few pretty crazy rapids, got stuck a few times, and even once required external assistance getting off a pair of huge rocks. That had everyone piled up in one side of the raft - literally piled - as someone wedged the raft over the edge of one rock and then switch for the other side.

We hung back, and followed other rafts, watching their progress and learning from them what not to do - a solid strategy to adopt. This helped us make a nice ride, while not getting stuck on anything.

After a few hours, we finally stopped for lunch, where we all broke out the sandwiches and had something to eat. At that point, anything was better than nothing - no matter what it was. I had a PB&J, and wanted more, bu more wasn’t to be had. Ah well.

Re-formed with my raft crew, and met Ed, who joined. Ed seems to have a grip on things, so as we progress down the river, we all have a good time, slipping by the rapids, moving somewhat smoothly over treacherous terrain. The water thrashes you and it’s a lot of fun riding the bumps.

Finally, we make it back, get the bus back to the starting point, and grab a shower (mildly warm), dress in dry stuff and get on the bus home. On the bus, beer was distributed to those that wanted it, and our chaperon treated us to some horrible jokes. At some point, I fell asleep for a bit, only to wake and have a spirited conversation about reality tevelision with someone whom I believe watches way too much TV in the first place.

I can’t wait to go again next month!

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes it seems that after I’ve tried tackling my inbox (personal, not work!), I end up after a full day of emails, back and forth, writing a lot, and I’ve only cleared another three from the overall total.

Ah, where were those days of clean inboxes?

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

Today, some crazy Frenchman decided to climb the New York Times building. A more detailed story here.

I was set to meet some improv pals at 39th and 8th Ave - one block away from the NYTimes building, and as I approached, throngs of people were in the streets, yelling and pointing.

It seems like there’s a second climber, who also wanted to scale the impressive building.

So naturally, i stopped, yanked my camera out of my bag, and snapped off a few.

See here:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

So some of you might remember that I have done some secret IE missions here in NYC.

It’s always a ton of fun joining a bunch of people to do something a little odd.

This time, we congregated in the Brooklyn Bridge and took pictures of the Manhattan Bridge. In the rain. And cold rain.

There were tons of us - about 700 - and we lined the bridge. I came early to the meetup location, and randomly met Matt, who had ridden in from CT on the train and needed somewhere to dump his travel bag. I offered my place, with a provided his bag wouldn’t tick or something like that.

We headed back to the meeting spot a few blocks away, and join a huge group of people, hear the instructions, and head across the bridge. In the meantime, we find Matt’s lady - Autumn - and we all set across the bridge and find a spot about in the middle to stand.

And wait.

And wait.

It seem that it took a little too long to get a large crowd organized, and then even longer to get the event rolling.

Some people left, as it was, after all, cold and raining.

But the effect itself was pretty cool, once it happened, and gave us a lot of cool pictures to show the world.

I stuck with my newfound pals, and we had a lot of fun talking and playing in the line, arguing with someone else whether Pi is a real number (or just not a whole number).

After taking a bunch of pictures, we all headed over to the Beekman Pub, where we had some drinks, and I regaled my captive couple with my (newfound) knowledge of NYC. I felt like a “real New Yorker”.

We split from there to Two Gold Street for food and more drinks, and then after that ended up in my beloved Fresh Salt, where we played a resounding few rounds of Apples to Apples with th bartender and two other patrons.

All in all, lot of drinks, good company and shared experiences make it all worthwhile.

The IE event page is here - there’s even a short video. See if you can find me (hint: I’m in the first 30 seconds!)

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

Today I was waiting for the train, and some young guys were tossing a football, back and forth.

At some point, one must have dropped it, as it bounced off the floor, on to the track below.

They seemed to deliberate jumping down there to retrieve the ball, and I had a shutter waiting to catch that, but they must have thought the better of it.

When would you risk jumping down there? Other than the obvious, you know, screaming baby and such. What would drive you to taking that kind of risk?

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

A while back, we began investigating centralized monitoring tools for multiple systems, cross-platform, alerting, etc.

One contender was a package from MS, and a few others were tossed in the ring.

We did a proper match-up (or shootout, as I prefer) and tested a couple of candidates. While the all-inclusive MS offering is probably the best-functioning one, the cost is too prohibitive for a monitoring tool - about $1500/host monitored.

The extensivity and ease of use is uncomparable, but cost being a factor, we looked at another popular solution - Nagios.

Open source, modifiable - or should I say - Build Your Own - as it comes wth some basic egine concepts,a nd then you pretty much have to build every single monitor you want to look at.

The result is a more targeted monitoring solution, inasmuch it does exactly what you set it out to do - but absolutely no more.

The comparison showed this past week when I got an alert from my test MS instance about a SQL job running too long, something that I would have had to create some code, adapt it to monitor that specific job, and hope it could deal with exceptions I hadn’t thought of.

That’s a difference between a specialist in a particular field (i.e. DBA, mail admin, etc) and the overall concept of a systems administrator - sometimes a jack-of-all trades.

The MS offering is combined of “Management Packs” that are written by the developers of the systems that are being monitored - i.e. Exchange developers write the monitors for exchange and so on, whereas in Nagios monitoring world, you are expected to be able to figure out all of your own monitors/thresholds, etc.

I guess it makes it a little more interesting in the long run, as building something from scratch allows you the familiarity of knowing the ins-and-outs of the systems, but it’s time consuming and the returns are not as immediately apparent.

But it’s affordable. And we’ve got the techie know how to do it. So we do it.

If any readers have used Nagios, are interested in it, have advice, want advice, want to see what the color blue tastes like, let me know.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

Some of you may know that I don’t hold much love for Apple’s operating system.

It feels so clunky compared to my Windows-fu knowledge, and the change from one to the other is not at all simple.  I’d rather use Ubuntu, to be honest.

But here’s my current beef with Mac OSX - my machine is bound to Active Directory (in a corporate environment, they ALL  should!) and as any good computer, looks for a Domain Controller after a reboot, to check your login credentials, apply any scripts, etc

If it’s a mobile machine, typically you’ve set it up as a “mobile user account”, meaning that the machine is to cache your credentials, and in the absence of a DC, check the local cache and allow you to log in.

However, whenever MINE reboots, it takes about half an hour delay to log in, and there’s no progress, cancel, notification, etc as to WTF is it doing. Eventually, it might let me in. But in the meantime, time is a-wasting.

I finally got fed up enough to really research this, and it seems that there’s a way to fix it manually (in what all OSX users will deny vehemently is NOT a Registry!)  by modifying the values to a few keys, to reduce the timeout wait. But you can only do that once you’ve logged on.

So I’m stuck using another machine until mine logs me in and lets me change it. What a waste of time.

Windows will time out within a minute and let you know why.

Grumble. grumble, grumble.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I left for my visit home, and while I have to complete my full vacation post (and it’ll be a long one), suffice to say that I am still alive, despite random attempts to change that, and had a great time.

Jet lag is annoying, and I think I’ve finally kicked it, and I started my 201 improv class - it’s gonna be great.

Back in New York City, I am happy to report that it’s still on the map, and hasn’t scurried off and hidden under the grandfather clock in the foyer in my absence.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

In these last few hours before my wings of steel bring me back to the family and Holy Land, I’ve had little time to reflect upon what it is I am actually doing.

I’m about to get on a plane, a little larger than the ones I’ve been jumping out of, and it’s going to hurtle itself into the sky, thanks to years of design, trial and error, aerodynamics, and lots and lots of fuel.

Incredible what we can do, huh?

Last night, a friend of mine, Gadi, sent me a quick message that he’s in town, and I popped over to his hotel, and we went out for a couple of drinks and something to chow.

Amongst the MANY things we talked about - because it’s always FUN to talk to other people that have hobbies and pastimes that they are passionate about - was him taking an interest in understanding body language. We discussed different aspects of it - him from his more educated position, and me from my if-I-can-make-this-sound-good-it-might-be-true position.

It was interesting to discover that one of the books he’s read approaches body language from a “pick-up” perspective - how to use what you know to help you pick up chicks.

Discussing this brought me to the fact that I am one of those “few”, fearful of rejection, therefore firmly staying within my comfort zone where I know I rule, can be awesome and never have to worry.

A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of us went out to a bar, after a company function, and an attractive gal was part of the group, whom I had never met before. She seemed a little reserved, so I jumped in, opened the floor, and we got to discussing about thirty different subjects, all in a fun mess.

Off to the side, my friend from the office is making huge gestures that even a blind man could understand that she is telling me that “she’s into you, ask her out!!!” (with exclamation points, as well.)

I immediately try to figure out how, why, when, wherefore, who???!, and cannot broach the subject at all.

Another half hour goes by, and my friend pulls me aside, and almost dictates my next lines, and I ask her, (with absolutely no sleaze in my tone) “I know you’re heading out of the city tomorrow noon, would you like to grab some breakfast/brunch before you go?” (The sleaze bit is for a friend I told the story to, and he commented, “It kinda sounds like you were mentioning the ‘What kind of eggs do you like?’ line” Which I wasn’t.)

She stutters out some lame excuse, turns cold, and takes three steps back.

I, figuring that “that was that”, head back to the bar and down another drink.

Anyways, no matter the outcome, I learned something important. No matter what happened, I am still walking around, still living, and it’s no big deal.

So thank you, my friend, for encouraging me to step outside, and feel the weather. I think I might just do it again.

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.

In recent times, I have posted about attempting to lose weight, work out more, be more physically active and such, but I recently was asked if I would like to join a proper league.

Now, the person asking this is a very physically active friend. He’s a snowboarding instructor, plays football, volleyball, used to play dodgeball, and probably a few other sports, too.

Oh, and we skydive together

Now, he’s asked before if I was interested in joining in the aforementioned sports, but my response has typically been some stupid excuse: “I might hurt myself”, “I’m in horrible shape” and more.

But when he asked me about this sport, I had to take pause and think about it. Yes, that’s right.

Kickball.

Oh, what a wonderful sport! A lot of us remember being young, and some can further remember the illustrious game of kickball. The game where almost anyone is ensured of hitting (or kicking!) the ball, and trying to make it to first base. (Admittedly, on an entirely other note, getting to first base is pretty hard to do.)

So I agreed to look further in to it, and I checked out the web site and the rules, regulations, etc.

Now, this is a real league, with divisions, teams and ultimately a championship. However, I am a little conflicted as to which division I’d like to be in.

Players, Sorta Players, Casual and Extremely Casual.

Seriously? Yes.

Sounds like the type of sport for me, I’m sure.  Now, since someone from my company is organizing this, I have little to no control over which division I’d be in, but that doesn’t matter - they all seem pretty laid back.

Oh, and the regulations get VERY specific about the amount of women that have to be on each team, and how the kicking lineups have to be as well. Interesting. All in the name of fairness, I guess.

So in any case, when I get back from my pilgrimage I will be in a Wednesday night improv class, and when that completes, I’ll hopefully start a in a weekly kickball league.

Odd, eh?

Originally published at Mike's House. Please leave any comments there.