Category: Personal

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An Almost Very Embarrassing Moment

I was sitting at a restaurant today as this couple (the normative boy-girl kind) came in and sat next to me on bar stools. The girl sat on the stool near me. I gave a short glance and she looked familiar. Since I couldn’t recognize her I decided not to say anything and continue eating my lunch. She went away (apparently to the bathroom) and when she came back a few minutes later she looked straight at me, said “Hi” and smiled.

Since I thought I recognized her earlier I decided to reply with a friendly hi and a smile. Still not remembering her name or where I know her from, I started to feel more and more nervous. I apologized for not recognizing her and hoped this was all over before she realizes I don’t remember her name (or anything else about her.) But then she decided to introduce me to her companion. Introducing me, she said a name that wasn’t mine and told him I was the friend of someone’s daughter (which I’m not), and then it hit me: I don’t know this girl at all.

So while they were contemplating the menu I asked for the bill and decided to flee the scene as fast as I could before conversation develops and my deceit uncovers. There was a moment of fear there for me when the guy decided to go to the bathroom, but luckily the girl didn’t start talking to me and I was almost out. Wishing her a good time I was out of there in a few seconds.

And thus I avoided a very embarrassing moment.

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I Blinked And Now I’m An IBM Employee

It’s all over the news: IBM acquired Diligent Technologies, the place I work for (or worked for, I wonder what the right term is.) I think IBM made a good choice because I truly believe that ProtecTIER, our flagship deduplication product, is a great product of great value to customers.

I joined Diligent Technologies just about 2 years ago (April 23rd 2006 was my first day at work.) This is the first time a company I work for has been bought. From a personal point of view there are mixed feelings – on the one hand, the ride was too short. I wish we had more time to operate as a (relatively speaking) small company so that I would feel I contributed more than I did during the past 2 years. Also, even if we won’t feel the change immediately, we are probably no longer the small family we used to be. On the other hand, being an IBM employee is definitely a good thing for many obvious reasons.

Diligent Technologies (now “an IBM company”) is a great place to work. We have great, award-winning products and technology. Most importantly, Diligent has great people who care about their work. These were definitely 2 good years, career-wise. I hope the next 2 will be at least as good.

p.s.

In the past, during the difficult post-bubble times, IBM’s HR would not even consider interviewing me for a job despite my many attempts. Kind of funny :)

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Tomorrow I’m Moving My Daily Schedule 1 Hour Forward

I’ve been thinking about moving my daily schedule one hour forward for a long time. Currently I get up at around 5:10am and start the daily workout at around 6am. This is mostly for historical reasons: when I worked out in Motorola’s gym there was only one cross trainer and I wanted to be the one taking it. Now that I’m in a larger gym there’s no need to be one of the first-arrivers.

The reason I didn’t do this until now is that I didn’t want to get stuck in any traffic but mainly I was afraid that this will affect my workouts somehow. However, the benefit will be greater than the risk – saner wake up and bed time hours and mostly living like a more normal human being.

Hopefully the drive to the gym won’t be a nightmare and the change won’t affect my workouts for a long time (I’m pretty sure I’ll adjust.) I know I’m going to feel the pressure when I see all the familiar faces leaving, but I’ll get over it :)

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The Prodigy – New Website, Hopefully New Album Soon

This is going to be a great year music-wise for me. The Prodigy have revamped their website, preparing for the new album that is hopefully coming out this year (after waiting 7 years waiting for “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” anything can happen.) nekosite, the no. 1 Prodigy fan site has also gone through remodeling and the new design looks great. This is also a good sign for fans like me.

This time I decided not to download any illegal material related to the new album. Last time it kind of ruined the experience of the first listen. I’m going to even try and not listen to official singles, but I doubt that will hold.

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Ubuntu Linux – Continuing The Switch

Yesterday I finally had the time to continue moving to my new computer and the Ubuntu Linux installation on it. It was easier than I expected. I decided to put my old Windows installation in a VM and use it on the new Linux box, instead of burning all my data on DVDs and moving it bit by bit. I decided to go with a VMWare based solution because of two reasons:

  1. VMWare Player appeared on the list of software in the Add/Remove manager in Ubuntu. I thought this meant I can install it from there, but I was wrong. I had to go to VMWare’s website and download a command line based installation.
  2. VMWare Converter, which turned out to be a great tool (more about this in the next paragraph.)

VMWare Converter can take a physical machine and make a VM out of it that you can run inside VMWare Player. That’s exactly what I did. My entire Windows installation, complete with all the programs and user data, became a 10.5GB VM in 7 separate files, which I copied to my home directory on the Linux machine. There was a scary moment when I found out I can’t install VMWare Player from the Add/Remove manager, but the command line installation went smoothly (albeit with many questions I wasn’t sure about the answers to, but chose the default, which turned out fine.)

Another scary moment was when my (legal) Windows XP installation told me, while running inside the VM, that I need to activate the copy of Windows because the hardware changed. I was afraid it would lock up, but it managed to activate itself over the Internet without any trouble. An amusing thing is that Windows works faster in a VM inside the new computer than it did installed natively on the old one. It’s really an old computer. One thing I didn’t manage to set up is shared folders between the VM and the Linux host. It’s supposed to be easy, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work.

I got Flash to work on Firefox as well. I was afraid I’d have to install Firefox 32 bit just to get Flash to work (like many websites suggest.) Luckily I continued searching and as it turns out (from this bug report) in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 64 bit, if you ever get this message after installing Flash but it still doesn’t work:

flashplugin-nonfree already installed

Then all you have to do is type the following two commands in the command line:

sudo apt-get remove –purge flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

So now my Linux installation is my main computer. I still have to:

  • Transfer all the user data from the Windows VM (emails, pictures, documents.)
  • Set up MySQL server and Apache so that I can have a development environment for the website (without such an environment I can’t completely dump Windows.)
  • Move the hard drive from my Windows machine to the Linux machine. This would be the final step, after which I’m putting an old hard drive in the old computer, installing Hebrew Windows and giving the computer to my mom.
  • Make sure I have a decent backup solution that wouldn’t suck like my current burn-the-data-to-DVDs-every-few-months solution
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31st Birthday Pictures From Work

I spent most of my 31st birthday at work. The highlight of that work day was the birthday “silver grapefruit” organized by a coworker for me. With 31 candles on it (and another one in my hand for next year) we went outside in the cold, windy weather.

Lighting the birthday candles

Lighting the birthday candles

About to blow out the candles

About to blow out the candles

Blowing out the birthday candles

Blowing out the birthday candles

The silver birthday grapefruit

The silver birthday grapefruit

By the way, this is the first time ever pictures of me appear on the blog. About time, I would say.

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Next Week I’m In Eilat

Next week I’m in Eilat on vacation, so this blog will probably not be updated at least until February 3rd. All six readers of this blog are welcome to check for updates after that time.

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Happy Birthday To Me. I’m 31

Today I’m 31 years old. It feels weird. The day I turned 30 was like “I don’t feel much different than twenty-something”, but turning 31 makes me feel very much closer to 40, and that’s scary.

The previous year was mainly characterized with routine – mostly work and workouts. Both are very satisfying, but together take up most of my time. In general, time seems to fly lately, especially weekends. I think it’s a good sign that means I enjoy them. However, I wish I could have some more free time to work on my own ideas and even just to have some more “me” time. I didn’t take a vacation longer than a day over the past year and it is starting to show. To compensate, I’ll be having next week off in Eilat :)

Having a routine life is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it’s predictable, easy to manage and allows for a calm, unstressful being. A curse because anything out of the ordinary seems like a big issue. Go out late when tomorrow there’s an early workout? No way. An invitation from a friend to visit New York for a few days over the weekend? Seems impossible (eventually I was sick that weekend, so no dilemma after all.)

For this year I would like to feel that I have enough time to accomplish some out-of-routine goals. Phone in your happy birthday wishes and have a great day.

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An Apology To One Of This Blog’s Readers

Two days ago I was at a party. Even before I went I was informed by the party’s organizer that her friend, who reads my blog, will be there. I always think of the readers of this blog as a collection of people I know, so learning about this “unknown” reader was exciting.

At the party I was introduced to this girl (who also played the guitar during the party. Very cool) and she said “I’m a fan of your blog.” I should have just said “thanks” but I was completely out of words. After running the options through my head I said something I thought about that day. I said: “Now I know all the readers of the blog.” That thought made me smile when I thought about it during the day, but I think maybe I came out a cocky asshole by saying what I said.

So this is an apology to this very nice reader. I’m sorry and thanks a lot. You gave me a great compliment, which made me very happy.

p.s.

From now on I will refer to you as “all 6 readers of this blog”

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Ubuntu Linux – First Impressions

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on my new computer. The installation was as easy as an installation can be – no annoying questions, no tough and unexplainable choices. Just some simple steps (like setting the correct time zone) and it’s done. The nice thing about the Ubuntu Linux installation CD is that it’s also a Live CD, which means you can actually play around with the operating system and see that it works fine even before you decide to install it. However, this may be confusing to some people at first because when you first boot from the CD, immediately everything seems like it’s installed (even though it’s just running from the CD).

I wanted to partition the hard drive manually, however I was met with two questions that I didn’t know the answer for:

  1. Which partition should be primary and which should be logical?
  2. What does it mean to put a partition at the beginning or at the end?

So I decided to let the installation do whatever it wanted to do, and it just created one partition and put everything on it. Shouldn’t be a problem.

The installation also tried to access the Internet to get updates, which is a good thing. However, expecting a home user to be constantly connected to the Internet at installation time is not so realistic (specifically here in Israel, but I think this is the common case). After the installation failed to access the Internet it told me something like “I added commented out lines to /etc/apt/sources.list”, which is really not a very nice thing to tell a new user. Later on, when I had the Internet connection working, I uncommented the lines.

During the installation I was asked to give a user name and a password, a normal thing for every installation, be it Linux or Windows. Later on, to do some changes from the command line (like editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file), you have to switch to being root. But my user’s password didn’t work for root, so I had to go to the user manager and set a root password (luckily, I was able to do that). I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but it worked for me.

At the end of the installation, I got a message telling me that it’s time to restart the computer, but that I had to make sure there was no CD during the next startup, or otherwise Ubuntu will start from the CD again. I ejected the CD at the point where I got the message, but apparently it was a mistake because the computer wouldn’t shut down and I had to manually reboot it. Everything worked fine after that, as the installation correctly identified my hardware and so the computer was ready to work immediately after.

Ubuntu Linux is a great distribution. One of my pet peeves about Linux distributions was always the many choices of the same thing: multiple consoles, multiple office suites, multiple everything. Ubuntu has one choice for each function, making the menus small and easy to understand. Anything else can be installed using the “Add/Remove…” applet, which is very well organized and comprehensive.

Setting up my Internet connection wasn’t easy. Having a cable modem that uses PPTP, I tried to install the PPTP client as described in the PPTP client website. After I installed it (that required going back to my Windows computer and downloading the network-manager-pptp package) I couldn’t get it to work according to the instructions in the PPTP client website. So I tried to look for specific instructions for Israel and found Carmit Levi’s PPTP GUI installer for Israel (Carmit is a manager in the Nana Linux forum). After I followed the GUI’s instructions, the script it created was still missing my password so I added it and the connection worked.

All this was very frustrating – going back and forth from the new computer to the old one to download files, burn them on a CD and try and retry. I hope both Ubuntu Linux and the Israeli service providers (in my case, NetVision) will be better at this in the future.

With the Internet connection working I updated all the packages and also installed NVIDIA’s non-free driver for my video card, and now my desktop has some bling, too :) My efforts will now concentrate on moving my Windows installation and files from the old computer the Linux computer (as I said before, I intend to run Windows in a virtual machine. Hopefully I can move the entire thing intact without a problem)