I am looking at new and old technology

This entry was posted in Technology and tagged Thunderbird lightning gmail calendar on by

The New

I downloaded the Windows 7 public beta and loaded it on my Thinkpad T61. I was not a fan of Vista (the little bit I used it), but I am finding that Windows 7 is better. I have had very little issues with it. The only problem I had was installing the Checkpoint VPN client. I sent in a trouble ticket and Microsoft came back with a fix for issues with .msi files. I was able to load and run my VPN client with out a problem. Now I am looking at encrypting the hard drive with the built in Bitlock Drive Encryption. Has anyone had any issues with it and if so what.

The Old

I switched over the Bilancio.org mail accounts to Gmail apps a while ago and started using the Gmail interface for my main mail client, but I am missing some of the features of Thunderbird. Since Gmail has support for imap why shouldn’t I use Thunderbird?

I also started to use the web mail client also because it integrated the calendar so well, but with the lightning and the Provider for Google Calendar plugins I can get the same integration.

What do you use with Gmail based e-mail and why?

Catch up with William

This entry was posted in Family Personal on by
This morning I realized I am starting to really turn into my father. Yesterday I caught my self loading the dishwasher and this morning while Karma ate his breakfast I unloaded the clean dishes and loaded in the dirty ones in the sink…now I know I have caught myself doing other fatherisms…I have caught myself listening to public radio on the drive to work, going to bed early and getting up at the crack of dawn (I think this is a Bilancio Family thing..it seems all the Bilancio men do this one).

So 2009 has started and we have seen the washing machine die. The repair guy came over and took about 30 seconds to look at it and tell me it wasn’t worth fixing and then charged me $94.00. All he did for his money was turn on his flash light look under the machine ( I had already taken the bottom front panel off) turn on the machine and then turn it off. It didn’t take us long to get a new one. In the 2 hours I took off from work I spent a total of $400 for the repair guy and a new machine.

The TV is the next thing that is probably going to die in the next few months weeks. For the last 2 years our TV has had a green tint to the picture. Lately the yellow gun has been dieing and intermittently been tuning the TV off. So we have been saving our pennies to buy a new TV soon. I guess it wouldn’t be to bad if the TV died, but being a TV addict it would make go mad.

Christmas was a good one this year. I worked with my mom to make a 4.5 course Christmas dinner. We spent all of Christmas day cooking.

First Course

Crab Louie on a bed of Lettuce with a slice of Avocado

Second Course

Beef Tenderloin slatherd in a Mustard Sauce
Roasted Potatoes
Stuffed Tomato
Artichoke Hart

Vegetarian Second Course
 Instead of the Beef Tenderloin

Portabello Mushrooms drizzled with Olive Oil and then Broiled. Topped with caramelized onions and sauteed spinach.

Plated with the same vegetable as the beef.

Salad Course

Salad with dried cranberries and pecans drizzled with a vinaigrette dressing

Dessert Course

Hazelnut and Chocolate Cake
Eggnog Pound Cake

Avery has passed her drivers ed class at school and passed the test to take her 6 hours of mandatory driving with a certified driving instructor before she can get her permit. So after March when you see me my hair will have probably gone gray and my left leg might occasionally start pressing the imaginary break as I have flash backs of her driving. 🙂
Avery has also just finished her Midterms and it looks like she will be making the honor roll. (Hey a Fatherism my father was never able to say. 🙂 )

So that’s about all that’s been happening since Thanksgiving. I will be making a better attempt to get more info up on the site. I am working on a big side web project that I have been wanting to get done, but life has been getting in the way. More on that I hope in a few weeks.

The day after turkey day post mortem

This entry was posted in Personal on by

Looking back at Thanksgiving 2008 I see things that need to be changed:

  1. Don’t put turkey in the smoker at 6:44 now that I know it will be done in three hours
  2. Get the house cleaned and the tables set up the night before
  3. Eat some lunch while working during the day….maybe put some other meat on the smoker for lunch while the Turkey cooks.
  4. Set the dinner time earlier then four o’clock
  5. Have all the food ready before the first guest (cousin Tim & family 🙂 ) gets to the house, this way you are only dealing with the guests food in the kitchen
  6. Set the wine and drinks up in the living room

I am sure I will think of other things later and will add them to the list. Over all the whole day was good. I was really done with my cooking about 9:30 Am since the Turkey got done so fast. The dressing could have been done sooner and just thrown back into the oven to warm.

The food others brought was great and I am Thankful that I have a great family who like to cook and of course eat. There were a ton of leftovers so we will be eating them for the next few days.

Now it’s time to figure out what we are going to do for Christmas dinner. I am thinking of having the whole crew back over for that but on a smaller scale….no Turkey.

So to those who are traveling this holiday be safe and have a great time.

Happy Thanksgiving

This entry was posted in Family Food/Cooking on by
Here in the United States, it’s Thanksgiving today so no work for William….but I am working in the kitchen cooking t-day dinner for my whole family except for my uncle who is in Michigan with his family…stupid snow.

So the day started at 5am with a quick download of a Gov’t Mule show to listen to while I got the smoker fire up and the turkey on. I got the bird in the smoker by 6:44 and it’s a cooking. 🙂

I have gotten the turkey giblets in the pot with some onions and celery and carrots and bay leafs so the stock simmering an making the house smell great. I have started the Cranberry BBQ Sauce I am using as a dipping sauces. I will be doing starting the stuffing in a few hours as well as the gravy when the turkey is done.

I want to say that I am thankful for my family and friends, even if I don’t get to see my friends all that much.

So have a great Thanksgiving with your family and friends….

UPDATE: Turkey came off at 9:44am it took 3 hours to cook on the UDS

IPcop VPN issues

This entry was posted in Technology and tagged checkpoint Ipcop Technology vpn on by
The other day I brought the new checkpoint firewall for the new building and tried to get the VPN tunnels up between the satellite offices and failed. At the satellite offices we use IPCop as our firewalls.

I had set up the policies on the IPCop boxes and the corresponding ones on the Checkpoint firewall. When I went to bring up the tunnels I got nothing. There was no traffic going out the Checkpoint unit and I saw nothing on the IPCop boxes. I spent 3 hours on the phone with Checkpoint and got the box reconfigured and started getting errors on the IPCop boxes but still no tunnels. The Checkpoint tech was stumped as was I. I went so far as to blame the new T-1 provider of munging my packets so they would be accepted at the other offices.

So the error I was getting on the IPCop boxes was:

packet from X.X.X.X:500: initial Main Mode message received on X.X.X.X:500 but no connection has been authorized with policy=PSK

Now most of the information on the internet talks about this being a problem with the IPCop box getting a request from a box that it isn’t expecting. Well the policy was set up right on all the boxes. I even took out the checkpoint firewall and replaced it with an IPCop box..same error. So after spending all day and most of the night I headed home.

Around 3am I woke up and started thinking about the issue. In my mind I started going over the list of all the VPNs I had set up at the time and it came to me.

I got up and headed back to the new office. When I got there I made sure that the problem was still happening.

Now I had named the VPN policy on the IPCop boxes 1200Lenox. Well the problem is…you can’t start the name of the policy with a number. So the minute I changed the policy name to l1200lenox the tunnels came right up.

So for all of you who are getting the same error make sure the name of your policy starts with a letter and not a number.

What a long strange trip it’s been

This entry was posted in Work Stuff and tagged Arora technologie on by
So last month on October 16th I celebrated the bingeing of my 9th year at Arora and Assoicates, P.C.. When I say I celebrated I mean I went to my boss and told him that I was starting my the year and he said the same thing he says every year..”wow it’s been that long!”

So looking back at the 8 years that I have been at Arora I have realized that I have taken the company to new heights on the technology scale. When I started we had 2 offices. The one in Lawrenceville and a New York City office. The Lawrenceville office had an IDSL line that went down every few days. The New York office was sharing a 56K modem for the whole office. The e-mail server was hosted with the ISP and was unable to handle the small load the company was putting on it.

In 4 months after I started the IDSL line went down for a month..in which time I was able to talk the powers to be to go with a full T-1 line with the argument that the only time a T-1 goes down is when some person with a backhoe cuts a fiber line somewhere in the US. After the T-1 was installed in Lawrenceville I moved the mail server in house and rebuilt the network.

As the years moved on I have installed bigger faster and louder servers. We now have over 8Tb of space total in the Lawrenceville office. We have expanded the company from 2 offices to 5 offices all connected by VPN. All the offices now have full T-1s. There are more advances that were made in all the offices but there is so little time to list them all.

At the bingeing of this month we moved the Lawrenceville office to a bigger brand new space. We had over 46207 ft (8.75 Miles) of data cable installed with over 276 data ports installed. This was a new build so we put in as many drops as we could while the walls were open. We got rid of our old 3COM switches for brand new Cisco switches. With the new office also came with a new server room with the proper cooling and security.

So as I sit in my new cube…yes I took a cube instead of an office because the more space I have the messier I become so I took a cube tucked in a corner and out of the high traffic areas…I can’t help to think of what is in store for me in the next 9 years at Arora….

I know I look forward to keeping the company on the cutting edge of technologie.

Atypically Detailed ‘Staff Wanted’ Sign

This entry was posted in Fun Stuff on by

I found this on another site and laughed my ass off. If I run a “fun” retail business I am going tailor this add.

Photograph from Noface2

Murder Burger in Auckland, New Zealand, may have the best “Staff Wanted” sign ever. Student teachers, yes! P (methamphetamine) addicts, no! Here’s the transcript of the ad:

STAFF NEEDED FOR GOURMET BURGER BAR THAT NEEDS STAFF

Right Oh, Murder Burger is opening up on Ponsonby Road in Ronsonby and we need a bunch of people to hang out with, make burgers and talk shit. No previous experiences is needed as we teach you everything you need to know and we kind of factor in you buggering something up along the way.

The sorts of people we think will be good for the job are:

Arts, Architecture and Humanities students: No real reason for this, well actually I suppose there is, it’s just that if we’re going to be working with somebody for hours on end it’s quite nice to talk about stuff we’re interested in as well.

Student nurses and student teachers. I’ve gone out with two nurses and two teachers in my short life and they were all awesome. More awesome than me as it turns out which is why I’m not going out with them anymore.

The sorts of people we think won’t be good for us:

Politics students: Nothing personal, we just don’t understand you.

P addicts: Again, nothing personal, it’s just that the benefit of you being able to work 7 shifts in a row is pretty much outweighted by the probability that you will one day flip, grab a knife and become Mr Stabby.

So if working with us sounds like something you might quite like to do instead of staying home watching telly then send an email to Geordie at

Nice one.

[Logo featuring an intimidating kitten]

Why a person should visit and use the local library

This entry was posted in Opinion on by

I remember getting my first library card at the age of 10 at the Bucks County Library System Fallsington, Pa Branch. It was right up the street and easy to get to. Age ten was about the time that I really started reading other things then comic books and stuff for school. The library had the complete collection of the Hardy Boys novels. I read all of them one summer, usually 2 a day.

So do you have a library card? If not why? With the way the economy is these days the library is the place to go. I spend a few hours a weekend at book stores just browsing and taking it easy. I rarely buy many books though…I write down the names of books that look interesting and then go to the library and just check out the book. If they don’t have it I try for an inter library loan.

Tired of paying for movie rentals…guess what go to your local library and see what they have. They probably won’t have the most recent releases but they may have a few you haven’t seen yet from last year or a few months ago.

That library card also can get you on the Internet, most libraries have free Internet terminals for there library card holders. This service is also available to non residents for a slight fee. I always tell people who are traveling in the USA that if you are in a bind and have to get on the Internet to always check out the local library.

Remember that the library is a great place to do research on things as well as a quiet place to do work. When I need to get out and work on projects with very little distractions I go to the library. Some libraries are starting to add coffee shops so if you have one of those what more can you ask for. The coffee at libraries is usually cheaper then at the local coffee shop so another savings.

Also check out the events or meetings being held at your library you may find out there is a group meeting about your favorite hobby or computer operating system.

So lets run down why you should visit you local library and why you should have a library card:

  1. Free books to read
  2. A place to rent movies at no cost
  3. Free Internet if you are a resident of the area (small fee if you aren’t)
  4. Great place to do research and work

I have only listed a few of the benefits of the local library and each library is different. So go visit your local library and see what is available. Hey your taxes are funding it so it’s yours to use.