Dushkin.org » annoying

Noob at scams

dushkin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:20:16 +0000

Still looking for a job, though I haven’t blogged about it much. I at least email my resumé for the most part, except for the really awful ones. The really, really awful ones.

I’ve been mostly unsuccessful and had few followups, even fewer interviews. That much isn’t unusual.

Recently I’ve in fact received a reply to one of my emails.

Date: July 11, 2009 19:27:38 GMT+03:00
From: XXX.casinomarketingneeds@gmail.com
Subject: graphic design
Hello Adi,
Would you be able to meet up for an interview Sunday at 4:00pm?
I really am interested in your work.
Best
XXX

I was pretty convinced it was actually spam but had my doubts. For one thing, it’s from a gmail account, and I rarely receive spam from those. Secondly, it seemed to at least be targeted at me. I took a chance and replied, said that, yes, I can meet her Sunday (which is actually a work day in Israel, too). I mentioned in my email that I would like to speak to her on the phone as well.

Fun fact: I got the email Saturday evening. The email didn’t say where other than what city, which isn’t really saying much at all.

The call came Sunday afternoon. After the meeting was “supposed” to happen. Not very professional maybe? She spoke “good” English, with traces of something else in her accent. This time she said we should meet at a café somewhere along Diezengoff which is slightly more specific. Slightly. Very slightly.

The company, she said, was “the first of its kind.” Some sketchy outsourcing business for casinos. Like that’s supposed to make me feel comfortable. A casino isn’t really where honest men and women decide to make their living – be it as a player or as the owner.

But what bothered me more was that it seemed like an attempt, and a very poor one at that (extremely, in fact) to make me work and then just disappear with that work and me not getting a cent back.

You know, if she at least, say, used the company’s domain name to send me email, stuck to the actual times and just overall didn’t make this sketchy – I would have probably gone for it. But guess what.

Makes me wonder – there are people who actually fall for these types of “traps”? Would you have taken that (freelance if I may add) job even at the risk of not getting paid?

A Blast from the Past!

dushkin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:52:44 +0000

It started last night. I was doing jack shit with a friend on wow, when I saw Mail.app had a strange email for me.

Dushkin.org was inaccessible to me: it was 404ing the whole time – probably my ISP’s cache to blame. None of my friends had a single problem, and the same was true for CGI proxies. I rang my ISP that day and they had clearly stated, “we have a problem.”

Fine. They have a problem. And fine, they cache my pages. And that cache is having problems, fine. It’s not the first problem I’ve had, and I’m honestly quite tired. Sick and tired.

The email though, read as follows:

Password Lost and Changed for user: dushkin

Password changed?

I had someone take a look at the site. Someone with… internet tubes that aren’t broken. At first I thought he was bullshitting me, “why is there a guy with a gun there?” But, no, he wasn’t lying, as I soon found out via a CGI-proxy.

In this picture: shitty javascript, real player and horrible English

Naturally, I freaked out. What else could I do? Of course I’d freak out, I assumed I protected myself against these things. But then again, wordpress is not flawless. It was to be expected.

I mentioned this one had something to do with Spice Girls? Well, I wasn’t lying, I’m serious. This stuff is a blast from the past. Some serious hardcore 90s trash. Take a look at some of the HTML: (Modified slightly for better lolz)

Holy shit. “Disabling” right clicking? FrontPage? All this page needs now is real player. Wait a second…

The only thing this page was lacking was a Spice Girl photo. And LASERS.

I reverted the database, changed my password and made changes to .htaccess among other things to ensure nobody gets in.

I don’t know whether the guy who did it was being even remotely serious. Namely because of the logs showing pretty clearly an IP in Egypt originating in Cairo:

41.232.6.15 – - [03/Jul/2009:13:43:26 -0500] “GET /visuals/?action=image&image=December%208.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 14458 “http://www.dushkin.org/visuals/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

The same IP is the one that changed my theme (which no longer has write access) in case you were wondering why I’m pasting this snippet.

Hey, at least he took the time to appreciate my gallery. I guess it’s something? I guess our Dr.MoZo at least appreciates art.

The second thing I have with regards to him is an email address on Yahoo, which was how he resetted the password by some unknown feat: mazika_aboezat@yahoo.com

Come on, that HTML is like sooo last decade.

Java sucks

dushkin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:21:05 +0000

There, I said it.

Why RP in World of Warcraft is as terrible as it is

dushkin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:17:58 +0000

I’m afraid that I just have to face it. The RP can suck a lot. So the game stopped being much fun, and so I tried turning to what I liked so much about it: RP.

After a few weeks in EVE Online I came back and realized what makes this game so RP unfriendly. You may think, “isn’t RP made by the players?” Well, it is, but it’s the system that limits them more often that it enables them – in any game – it’s only a question of how much. And so desperately trying to get something done, I realized I could only name a few roleplayers whom I had a good time with by now.

So this is a kind of guide, or list, of what is wrong with RP in World of Warcraft from the game’s point of view. Of course, the people are a different thing and I will touch on that too, but this is mainly about the game itself.

The mechanics won’t let me kill or be killed by the same people I RP with
The game has faction based warfare. The Alliance and the Horde. They can only kill the other side. Only. The side they don’t RP with.

But consider this. When I talk to people, I may sometimes make enemies, just as I will make friends. In that case, I may want to kill them. Actually, sometimes I really wanted to kill them. Strangle them to death.

And so usually fights are resolved as emote dueling, rather than actually trying to fight it out, as duel are not allowed in cities. It’s usually silly things, and they all too often end up in drama on either side, which means they go out of character to point that out.

Four out of five fights inside the RP hubs I reckon would have some element of going out of character.

So I find myself at a loss of tools to play out my character without a terribly headache.

Carebear players
They sometimes come up with the weirdest excuses. I am not kidding. At the moment, there are several terms in the community that I don’t like.

First of all, there’s something called “being out of character”. As in, RP is something you toggle on and off when you like to. And sometimes, especially in the new expansion leveling rush, you will find that most of your friends are “currently out of character.” Sometimes when they’re “out of character”, they find it fitting to fuck around and speak out of character.

What’s the point of that? Transfer if you don’t want to RP, damnit.

The second thing I hate is “RP armor.” Say you’re a paladin, a nice guy, but your armor (the one you use for PvE) is mostly black and evil looking. Happens. What people do then is collect a different armor set, usually called “RP gear”, and pretend that’s their usual armor, except it looks cool.

I’m not saying that they treat it in-character like two sets, no, they ignore the PvE set and pretend there’s only the RP set, and then they start whining about how you can’t duel them because they’re “wearing their RP gear and they will lose.”

Yes, that’s the point. When you wear armor that isn’t as good, yes, by right, I should be able to win, maybe because my sword can poke through your stupid tin can and kill you!. I wonder!

A complete disregard for any mechanic that you don’t like, even if it actually makes sense.

The best though, is when somebody tries to enforce the law. They don’t actually have a way to do it, they just try to get your cooperation. Sometimes it actually works. Usually nobody cares and they get offended that you’re a bad RPer and won’t respond to their “you’re under arreest!!!!1″ when what you did is likely legal anyway.

The amount of manure in the form of whining that comes out of their keyboards is sickening. They will spam general chat with “ur a bad rper!!!!”, they will speak with funny brackets around their text (like that makes speaking out-of-character any better…) and just act majorly retarded because they feel entitled. Entitled to do whatever they want or something.

RP unfriendly mechanics
You die and come back with no penalties, change your abilities completely for a certain sum of money and most PvE content is based on respawns of NPCs – some of which are named.

So raiding can’t be done more than once in character unless I either:

Forget it ever happened once I step out of the dungeon.
Pretend it never happened before.
Pretend we’re somewhere else.

But a raiding community I was in about half a year ago did this. And I am not kidding. We would go do Karazhan once or twice a week. Mostly because they were too stupid to do Zul’Aman, but I liked the idea of in-character raiding and so thought I’d try it.

They would pretend that all the bosses in Karazhan are resurrected on a weekly basis. Yes, resurrected. And that the Alliance gives us Badges of Justice via some teleportation after we reported kills via walky-talkies.

I am not kidding. That really was how they viewed it. It was plain stupid! Not to mention the lack of technical skill, the amount of drama mostly caused by one person and the idiotic space-warping HQ channel. So no matter where I was, I was actually in their HQ at the exact same time.

What the hell.

Battlegrounds weren’t quite a joy either except for maybe Alterac Valley, though even then, doing it a second time was out of the question. Warsong Gulch for instance is about capturing flags. Capturing flags? In-character? What do you think this is, a friendly game between the Alliance and the Horde?

All play and no consequences makes Jack a very dull boy
There really are no consequences to your actions, ever. Dying just means some broken equipment, which you will be able to repair for minor costs anyway. Murdering all the NPCs of an enemy town means nothing in terms of mechanics. You simply can’t change the universe.

I can’t own a house, I can’t be a guard, and territories never change. Talk about long meaningless grinds, battlegrounds don’t do anything and the Horde will own certain parts of the world, while the alliance will own different ones and never change except for say, Wintergrasp every two hours. The world is static.

I have to rely on people’s kindness in order to get anywhere

I can’t bump into people, I can’t shove them out of the way, and I can’t even threaten to kill them. That means, I have to rely on their kindness to cooperate with my RP style choices, in-character clashes between characters and our out of character relationship. So I want someone to move away. The only, yes only, thing I can do is ask. And if they say no – there is nothing I can do about it either.

And that is how I am subjected to others’ mercy.

They don’t really get us
It’s been said before, Blizzard doesn’t care much. The community has been asking over and over and over again to take action against griefers, OOC names and you name it. Rarely do they act on such tickets and when Jeff Kaplan was asked about RP items, this is the answer we got:

Jeff Kaplan: Well the role players, and I can tell by his name Wichdocta that he’s really into role playing, the role playing players are actually going to get a lot of items even before Wrath of the Lich King. We have a great event coming up, it is our Mid-Summer Fire Festival [...]
So there is a lot of really cool items, one of my favorite items was the Brazier of Dancing Light which is this brazier that you place down and it has this dancing figure all on fire and you can dance with her then it turns you on fire as well and it really is just a role play item but it is a fun toy for people to play with.
You can juggle torches, there is a robe that when you click on it, it sets you on fire and puts you dancing. So there is a lot of fun stuff that I think players will have and we are planning to continue that same concept – a lot of fun toys – we are looking into making for Wrath of the Lich King as well.

When RP means “dancing around a fiery figure and a robe that sets you on fire”, I guess I understand why they’re turning a blind eye: because they don’t know what we’re on about.

People don’t always roll on RP servers to RP and end up griefing
I tend to think the greatest issue is that most of the realm isn’t actually composed of just roleplayers. But also people who don’t want to have anything to do with it though hang around anyway. They don’t end up RPing, the end up not giving two shits and as I mentioned above – nothing can be done about them.

Bad, Bad Software Design

dushkin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:41:15 +0000

I rarely use windows and rarely had to in the last two years that I’ve owned a Mac. Before that, I was a Linux user for some years. But those of us who don’t use Windows all know that frustrating moment when you realize you need an installation of Windows to do something.

There is Wine, which works for some things, though admittedly, not always that great. There’s virtualization, which it seems matured greatly in recent years.

But I ask myself, why don’t I actually use Windows? Surely, you can get used to anything, and there are certain aspects of it that are tolerable, but maybe I needed a reminder. So I installed a copy on a virtual machine, booted it and off I went.

Retro’s not too bad
I really hated the new XP look after a while, much in the same way that I hate the vista look. But somehow I’ve grown to really like the old standard look. Why? I don’t know, maybe it’s familiar. Maybe it’s more to do with the fact that it’s easier on the eye. Or maybe it’s just to do with the fact that IT’S SIMPLY UGLY. And so I stuck with the old look on purpose.

Good old ugly look

That’s not a big deal, is it? I can deal with that.

Annoyance kicks in
I CAN’T BELIEVE I JUST PRESSED THAT BUTTON. It’s the windows key. I was doing something in full screen on the virtual machine and Command-tabbed out of it only to realize that the I PRESSED THE WINDOWS KEY.

The first problem with windows is that they don’t give you the tools to fight their own stupidity. So you have to get external tools to do the job.

I hate this key

Fine, I install it, much better now. I’m happy at least. I don’t have that thing getting me out of full screen now at least.

Idiotic software designs
Installing programs is usually done via wizards in Windows. Due to the lack of a complete unified installer, programmers rely on things like:

InstallShield
NullSoft’s NSIS
Various self extractors and such
Praying.

Apple solved the problem already. Programs are packages, you put them in your applications folder or wherever you like. For the uninitiated, this is what it looks like:

See the funky icon that reads DOSBox?

The file named DOSBox is an actual application. It contains everything you need. All you have to do is drag it to your favorite folder (/Applications is usually it). That’s ALL you have to do.

Hell, even on Linux installation processes are usually summed up as ‘apt-get install emacs‘ or ‘emerge emacs‘ or at worst as extracting a tarball and typing in ‘./configure && make && make install‘, where as on Windows installation processes are all different and horrible in their own unique ways.

I’m going to make a point and try to install audio drivers. No big deal, just audio drivers for a very simple card. So I downloaded a .exe file from the vendor’s website, I launch it and get a screen. “Reading package contents”. The Bar fills up completely and there it is extracting files. Then it appears that wasn’t the ACTUAL installer, and it needs to start another InstallShield installer inside it.

This process takes quite some time, though. But, hey, look! Something’s happening! It’s taking up all of my screen space to do stuff, yay!

I was gonna use that screen space!

So I had my screen space ninja’d by an installer which was launched BY an installer. I think I must be trippin’ serious balls here because this is what I see:

There's more of you?

Another installer. Another progress bar.

But this is what really ticks me off about software for Windows. They are intrusive as hell. This is merely a sound driver by same I think Taiwanese company. They somehow thought it’s a good idea to add this useless program to my startup called “SOUNDMAN.EXE” which does practically nothing.

No matter what sound card I was using under Linux, I always, with no exception, used the same tools to control it. Alsamixer. And though some hardware will rightly need extra utilities to deal with them (such as the wacom tablet I had), those utilities don’t run on start up.

In other words, they don’t bother you unless you use them.

Mac OS includes every single printer driver out there, and that’s cool because they’ve all been tested and approved by Apple so you don’t need their Printer Monitor X 2™ to use their printer, but Apple’s own printer monitor, which fits uniformly into your OS X desktop.

The CEO says I’m speshul
Some companies think it’s a good idea to make their software look different. That is to say, throw everything the OS developers have done out the window and substitute it with their own stuff. You guessed it: they never fit into the overall design. For instance, software that I like a lot:

I'm so special and I stand out so much!

But don’t get me wrong. I like what it does and not how it does it. Why even waste time on skinning those widgets? Who the hell wants to see that?

Why can’t we all learn a lesson from ~~software~~ windows software and avoid that stupidity?

Update: Check out this atrocity.

Me vs. Work

dushkin — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:47:59 +0000

To reasonably accurately describe the way I felt about that job, Kafka’s The Castle comes to mind. That is, I felt powerless against the oddly clueless bureaucracy which (somewhat innocently so) serves as the root of the problem.

My job was to hand out shopping carts to costumers at the tax free store in the Ben-Gurion airport. Either that or “guarding” the exit, which primarily involved telling people where the entrance was, that they shouldn’t leave with the cart and where various facilities were located.

The goal of each and every actor in this charade had been to subject the docile minds of weak travelers to as many temptations as possible. For instance, the store’s manager had ordered for the passage between the tobacco section and the checkout to be conveniently obstructed by shopping carts, hence forcing smokers to take the long way around and hopefully buy a few things on the way. It looked like a supermarket, one where excess was displayed as a necessity and sold as if within anyone’s reach, if only they wanted it.

It was another day apart from the incident with the carpool which never arrived. I stood by the entrance, dispirited, broken and demotivated to do anything. Not that I needed to. Saturday mornings aren’t exactly ever full. The alcohol salesman approached me and, slumped over a shopping cart, he complained endlessly, praising himself. Poured his heart out on me like those liquor samples he was to give out. His stories were, without a doubt, over the top. Tall-tales he conjured, though not all of it I would imagine. How he worked as a bartender at one club or the other and that the entire town knew him. About how he “did” Swedes in Thailand and how he used to work in telemarketing.

I truly did not want to believe most of it. The part with the 13,000 shekel salaries in particular. And to think he was working on 24 shekel an hour plus commissions (and evidently didn’t sell much).

Complaints about the economy came and kept coming and by the end of it I felt bitter myself and began to question why I was there as well.

When I told him about my experiences with the carpool that morning he answered, “they’re stupid. They’re animals. It’s a dead end” and I didn’t argue. He was right after all. The drivers were those marginal leftovers that entered the workforce regardless of their utter lack of professionalism. It was enough for their accents to give that detail away, and I almost felt a hatred for them for having them – though I know, that’s just a convenient thing I can blame.

We and the drivers were both prole trash. But we weren’t on the same team. We hated them, and they hated us, and with such passion. Hard working men who didn’t give two shits whether I got to work or not, just as long as they could get paid. Did they even have free time?

A woman, maybe in her late twenties, a smoker, with the same light blue sweatshirt every day shared my woes at times in trying to make sense of this situation. Asked me if I wanted to share a cab once, but I brushed that off. I simply don’t have the money, it’s quite simple. The perfume promotion worker – a tall Romanian who was equally unhappy as I was about being a victim to this system had unlike myself a useful way to vent her anger. She told me how she on her first day of work gave a little bit of “straight-talkin’” to the driver on how he should watch his tone with her.

“People like that have no limits. You’ve got to draw the line.”
I shrugged and said, “I just try to let it go.”
“But you can’t let it go!”

I would have told her she was right, but I knew I couldn’t do it myself at the same time. I had to either soak the blows or avoid them altogether. But knowing myself for long enough, as much as I’d like to spit in their face and kick them in the eye, that never would have happened. At least not to their face.

The way it worked, my schedule for the next day or so will be sent out to the drivers and their respective companies and thus I will be put down on a list. The pickup location I chose, though, did not actually exist. That is, it showed up on the list of locations given to me, but if I wanted it I would simply be dropped from the lists for the way back and occasionally for pick-up too.

And so one day I made up my mind and decided to change my pick-up location to a different one. The “deputy” referred me to the shift manager. When I spoke to him, he said he would fix it temporarily, and told me to talk to someone who can only be reached during office hours for a “permanent solution”. But since it’s a Saturday, I have to wait until Sunday – office hours in particular – and speak to one of the two women in charge. Both of which had ridiculously similar names and functions. Lee and Lee-at. The latter was described as a “revengeful bitch” by the aforementioned alcohol salesman. Or it may have been the other – I quite frankly don’t know as they practically have the same name and job description.

He never actually did that “temporary solution” and I was dropped from the list on the way back, along with four others.

By the time I managed to get to one of the similarly named clerks, it was technically speaking the wrong one, and that took two days as well as she was in meetings (who would a lowly clerk meet?), generally unavailable (i.e. not answering the phone) and mysteriously gone (not in the office). That link between my employers and the carpool service was impenetrable to me.

Calling Bontour directly resulted in being shoved aside very rudely so and be referred to See & Tour, a different company. Though the logos on the side of the car did say Bontour, it’s unclear to me why. See & Tour gave me the same treatment. Some rude secretary answered the phone, gave me the usual “I don’t know” sorts of answers and rudely hung up on me. I recommend neither of these companies solely due to their employees’ lack of professionalism, repulsive behavior and failures to simply do their job. Getting me from point A to point B and back.

The carpool failed to come again. Or maybe it did come, except not to where I stood since the list failed to come through as intendede again and left me there twenty minutes before work wondering where the hell was my ride to the airport and how was I supposed to get there?

I called the shift manager, whose line was busy for some time, who told me to wait. I waited for a call back, and when it came, the answer was, “he was there at 18:03, you weren’t. There was also a bookstore worker there, but who knows. The only thing you can do is try to get here on your own.”

I tried to explain how there was no such way. I didn’t have a car, no money for a taxi and hardly even a train (which would have taken an hour as well). I said I can’t do that unless they stop pulling that shit on me. Except I used much nicer words.

I shouldn’t have, I should have just punched her in the face through the phone somehow.

The job itself, disregarding any flaky systems to get me there and back is just barely under the threshold of enjoyable. The costumers don’t hate you (though that’s because I wasn’t a cashier, who probably get more flak).

I speak of it in past tense and it saddens me to think that I may end up coming back to it after all. And it worries me to think I “have” to get along with these inferior types. Unfortunately, as someone who holds grudges, perhaps I ought to find something else to do.

Pew Pew Air Strikes

dushkin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:30:29 +0000

In the past few days I’ve been asked several times what my opinion was on the air strikes in Gaza. Yeah, since then they’ve sent actual forces in, which I’m not sure whether I’m too happy about either.

It’s not really that easy, is it? It looks like something an Israeli right wing party would have done, but then again, the purpose looked – to me – akin to what the average left wing politician would have had in mind. Usually I’d be thinking somebody’s finally making sense up there, but the truth is more like… that they just can’t decide what the hell they want to accomplish and how.

Say they bombed 95% of Hamas’ military facilities. That’s all great except that in reality all it takes is just one Hamas official alive to get up and say “by the way, I’m still around” and rebuild that whole damn thing up again. Simply because there are enough Palestinians who are absolutely sure that this is the right thing to do.

Alright then, let’s say some “genius” down in Jerusalem had this bright idea one morning: we can nuke the shit out of them. So long story short, nuke gaza area, everyone’s dead. Let’s assume we’re in a universe where something like that will just kill anyone who identifies themselves as a Palestinian and will leave minimal mess to clean up (nukes aren’t exactly safe).

I do believe that’s called genocide.

So bomb anything you like, as long as not everything there is dead, finished, done – you still have the Palestinians to deal with.

So before I get angry emails, please read all the way to the end. Look, people, what I’m saying is that there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent a Palestinian state and Israel’s future interaction with it. Meanwhile, I don’t think there’s much that can be done to prevent the continued existence of Israel in the future. Though I hope it will finally change its own definition of itself as a nation from “a Jewish nation” to something that actually allows for (gasp!) a multitude of religious and ethnic groups being in the same country and not necessarily kicking the shit out of each other just because.

So learn to deal with each other, is all I’m saying and will say about it.

(;_; I can’t believe I posted about this bullshit.)

Jobs, jobs, jobs!

dushkin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 15:17:32 +0000

There comes a time when you just have to get out there and do something about unemployment. If I want to get out of Israel, it has to start somehow and with something.

It’s not that easy, though. I started aiming moderately high: a print shop, Mac guru, some degree of a sales rep. That was no good, I went searching lower. In the, let’s say, hospitality business.

So I go to this place, Aroma it’s called. Café á la Starbucks if you will, it’s that kinda joint. You see it in the way it runs, the way it handles, it’s just how it is.

So I walk up to the “bar” and ask if they need anyone. One girl, about eighteen years old or so I judge. Her face caked with some twisted inexperienced expression that made me want to kill her, pointing towards another girl, around her age, with a name tag just like hers except with the words “shift m.”

Great, I thought. I’m dealing with teenage girls.

Little Miss Shift Manager colloquially instructs me to sit somewhere and that in five to ten minutes’ time she’ll be there to interview me. Sure enough, I sat and she arrives with a blank clipboard and a pen.

“Your name is?”
I told her. She wrote it down. She spelled it right, too.
“So, do you know what work is like in here?”
I thought this for some time. I felt like saying “in shifts” or, “you serve coffee”, but that wouldn’t have been the proper answer. I tried to look decent, placed my hands on the table, looked straight at her and said, “I’m not sure I do, maybe you could tell me.”
“You start out as a cleaning person. You roll that trolley around, the one you’ve probably seen. You represent us, no one else does, we’re all behind the bar otherwise. It’s not that great, you need to touch garbage and other people’s food. After some time you progress to the next rank, in which you do slightly better things.”
I nodded at her.
“Washing dishes. And after some time later you progress to prepare food in the kitchen. And lastly, you will arrive at the bar, as the last rank.”

I imagined some kind of hierarchy, or tried to. Looking back and forth between the bar and her, it seemed even stranger. I gave a glance to someone with the trolley she spoke of.

Never have I imagined this sort of thing could actually be there. It never occurred to me that walking around with a trolley is worse than doing the dishes, but it’s very interesting regardless. Some vaguely enlightening experience.

“No traffic shaping” my ass

dushkin — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:15:50 +0000

Yes, they do it. They shape my traffic. They cap my connections, my non port 80 connections mind you, at a crawl.

Sure, this is a 2 Mb/s connection, but that shouldn’t mean my shit should be capped at 5 KB/s. Yes, 5.

My ISP is by the way, 012 “Kavey Zahav”. A tech support rep officially told me that they don’t cap connections. However, they do. The way she wanted to me to check it was (strangely enough) to point me to their own help site which contains a test file. Over HTTP. Over port 80. On their server. Sorry, what? I told her it makes no sense. Her response: “must be the hardware.”

I got sick of tech support’s stupidity at that point, but they haven’t heard the last of me.

Here’s what I checked so far:

SSH to a certain remote machine on default port. Uploads at ~20 KB/s, downloads at about 10 KB/s.
Uploaded a file to dushkin.org. Downloaded via HTTP yields reasonable speeds. FTP however is capped at about 15-20 KB/s or so.
BitTorrent is crawling, enough said.

Exhibit 1:

4 KB/s

6 KB/s

I’ll be talking to tech support tomorrow yet again.

And another thing. Non-israeli websites seem to run significantly slower. For instance, a comparison between the download speed of downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server:

Downloading Ubuntu from a Danish server

As opposed to the exact same file being downloaded from an Israeli server

Clearly no issues

Stupid Forum Posts: Misconceptions about Draenei

dushkin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:29:39 +0000

I blog, therefor I don’t flame.

This time I’d like to bring an example of somebody writing a guide, but simply being too conservative.

This is my reply to his post, which I won’t put on the official forums out of fear of offending him directly, but merely express my opinion:

Barvradl’s guide really is great, except for a tiny little flaw.
[quote]Yes, but we aren’t talking about a nationality here, we are talking about a race, a race that is highly subsceptible to changes in its enviroment.[/quote]
True, African Americans did become white. And I suppose the reason for environment change really is religious views.
[quote]The Draenei are more than a ‘group’ of Eredar now, the Draenei are their own race, they differ from what they used to look like by quite a great deal now due to the amount of special racial abilities the Light has given them, such as the Gift of the Naaru.[/quote]
Absolutely, all native Americans are still animists, none of them have converted to Christianity (not even one) since Europeans (inherently all of them were good Christians, of course) were responsible for the annihilation of most of them (directly and indirectly). (Jared Diamond, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”)
[quote]Draenei society is based on integrity and unity, notice that there are literally no rebels amongst their own people? Draenei view eachother as equal and respect the opinions of others.[/quote]
Well, yeah, believing in the light or not isn’t an “opinion”, it must be genetic or something, the same way Judaism is genetic.
[quote]Also, Draenei are not humans, so you cannot apply human morality and human behaviour to a race that is incredibly different to ours. [/quote]
[quote]It just isn’t plausible for a race, such as the Draenei, a race that is based on integrity and honour to suddenly revoke the teachings of the Light after it is directly responsible for their own existence.[/quote]
As I see you are not reasoning this with your human morality, I can see your point. Indeed, and it isn’t possible for a child to turn against their parent(s). (as we don’t see in King Lear of course) Patricide never happened in history, and people have never left the Holy Light in the Lore and have never done anything “evil” to anyone else (as we all know Arthas never left the Holy Light)