Shami’s Blog

Weird title, I know. It’s the title of a ShowTime series hosted by Penn & Teller, which I thought was appropriate for this rant. The thing is, I hate it when people act like jerks.

I work in Shmeasani, one of the busiest neighborhoods in Amman. It’s so jammed you can barely find free parking, and if you go with paid parking, you can pay up to 3 times the normal fees. As always, some people think they are better than everybody else, they erect poles and chain them together in front of their houses so people can’t park there. What kind of attitude is that?

I have seen this with my own eyes, when someone wants to visit this guy, they park in front of one of the neighbors’ houses. Quoting Penn. “And then there’s THIS a**hole” who actually has blocked parking in front of his house, where does he park? You guessed it, in front of his neighbor’s.

Does it annoy me when lots of people park in front of my house, yes, because I can’t park, but it’s no big deal. Does it happen? Sometimes. What do I do about it? Nothing, people need some place to park.

Word of advice, don’t do to others what you don’t like happening to you, A**hole!

An hour ago I needed some sticky notes for a project I’m working on. Since it was past 9PM the nearby stationary shops were closed, so I had to go to one of the mega stores in Amman.

When I reached the cashier lines I was holding a pack of sticky notes, a roll of tape and a pen. Looking at the lines I saw one that had a sign above it that read “Express Line, 10 items or less”. The other lines had people with lots of stuff in their carts so I thought I should go to the “Express” line to finish faster.

This is not the first time this happens. Apparently this store always makes the SLOWEST employee handle the Express line. He was so slow, so clumsy and so inconsiderate that the so called “Express” line was in fact slower than the other lines. This line should be labeled “The extra slow line, use it if you have time to waste!”.

I guess those of you who go to that store will know which one I’m talking about.

I spent the past 2 days working on getting 2.5 up and running. I lost some of my entries but at least it is now back up.

Enjoy the new upgrade

My current employer is switching from FirstClass to Microsoft Exchange. One of the questions I got from an employee was how to make Outlook print the first page of an email. When I went to the print dialog I was surprised that it doesn’t have a page range selection option, which surprised me. Having used Windows since version 3.0 I found that option in all Windows applications.

Anyways, according to Microsoft, you can’t. That’s right, they removed one of the very basic options in email from their flagship email client.

The best alternative I found it is to preview in Internet Explorer and print from there.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I’m giving you four. Introducing, one of the unpublicized casualties of the bombings on Gaza:

A young lad, 5 months old. Old enough to master all the weapon systems you can think of. So kudos Israel, and keep up the great work.

So the Tawjihi results this semester should go online in about 5 minutes. As always, I’ve been getting calls since this morning asking me to check if the results came out or not. Tawjihi is the most important class in a student’s life, which faculty you go to depends entirely on the results of the exams you take during that class.

I pick up the newspaper, it says there are 33 web sites that will have the results online, which is quite impressive if you ask me. I visited each and every one of them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that about 25 -or maybe even more- only display a link to one of the other web sites. Now that’s not good, is it?? And I’m talking about those that actually worked (Not a load issue, just aren’t configured correctly)

At first, when I visited the web sites that actually hosted the results, they all said they will announce them after 3PM, that was more than 2 hours ago, but people kept calling every few minutes asking me to check again :/

Anyways, it’s about 3PM now, and to give you a small sample of how it’s like, some of the sites that actually published the results were, The ministry of education, which is currently down, Next, a major ISP, down (Actually all their web sites are down at the moment), and Cyberia, another major ISP, you guessed it, is also down. The only one that was actually working www.elearning.jo and it only posted the results at 3PM sharp. I got the results while I was writing this, and finally got rid of the nagging.

At the end, For those guys hosting such important web sites, here is a piece of advice, don’t design those web sites with the same concepts you do for sites that don’t get more than 10 hits a day, make sure to test them under high loads, before you even say you’re hosting those results. And please, if you’re only giving a link to another website, don’t even bother having your name in the paper :/ you’re giving people false hope.

Over on the O’Reilly Network, there’s an interesting piece about how Microsoft tried to hire people to contribute to Wikipedia. Not wanting to do the edits directly, they were looking for an intermediary to make edits and corrections favorable to them.

Shame on you Microsoft

A few weeks ago we switched one of our clients to use a hosted anti-SPAM/anti-virus solution. Everything was fine before that, but ever since we did so I started getting delays in the initial welcome message the mail server gave. I thought (And that’s where I went wrong) that it might have been caused by the provider, sending the messages in bursts.

Yesterday I got sick of all the warning messages I got from the monitoring server and decided to do something about it. The customer care people pointed me to a page waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay deep inside their interface to see how much traffic is passing, only to see that the server is getting much less traffic than it can handle.

Anyways, a short session of troubleshooting leaded me to the cause. So my advice to you, troubleshoot, never think.