Entropy Reducers Amalgamated

So I have one client who just migrated from using Trixbox (neé Asterisk@home) in a VMWare as his telephony platform (along with a bunch of Grandstream SIP phones) the newest version (2.2) natively on the machine. (They were experiencing the things you'd expect by running a timing-based application from within VMWare—bad sound quality, odd playback of audio files, etc.)

So we backed up the old data stores, installed Trixbox natively, and things went about as smoothly as you could expect.

One function that had never worked out of the box, for some reason, was call waiting: even though users would enter *70 to enable call waiting, for some reason the asterisk DB (an oldy moldy Berkeley DB database) wasn't taking the change.

The solution was to run the following from the asterisk console (asterisk -vr):

For each extension, execute the following command

database put CW <extension> ENABLED

...and that does the trick!

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, after yesterday's excitement, the wife and the boys went out today to an animal shelter and found and adopted our newest family member, Poogy the guinea pig:

Poogy is named after our first guinea pig, Piglet (who died in 1995) and Buffie, who left us yesterday. It is also the nickname of the early-70's Israeli rock band Kaveret, whose music is much enjoyed by the children. (In fact, you probably could hear their pun-anthem "Yo Ya" at many Orthodox weddings nowadays...) He's a 6-9 month old male, short-haired guinea pig. (The photo, taken from my cellphone, may not bear that out.)

Shafan, the bunny

has taken quite handily to his new, somewhat more energetic neighbor.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 7:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in June of 2004, we received from my son's school a guinea pig from the science department to care for the summer. We were trying out the whole "pet with kids" thing; Elana and I had had a guinea pig before who needed to be euthanized back in 1995, right before son #1 was born, and we weren't sure if kids and pets were going to work for us, so we gave it a try. "Buffie" came to us, and sons #1 through #3 were instantly enamored of Buffie. She learned quickly to squeak and beg for food every time the refrigerator door opened; she had us trained in no time.

In the fall of 2004, right before we moved to our new house, the school science department was being repainted, and we were told not to bring Buffie back in, so as not to expose her to construction dust, mess, and paint fumes, etc. One month led to the next ("Don't bring her back now, it's the holiday season." "Um, do you really still have her, we got another one.") We held on to Buffie throughout the 2004-2005 school year.

Come May of 2005, the original provider of Buffie felt that she should be returned to the school, or at least to the original provider. A short custody battle ensued, during which time the school gave the original donator a new guinea pig to replace Buffie, as we had become quite attached (read: "We'd rather fight than switch!") to our little critter.

When we inherited a bunny in June of 2006, Buffie was even accepting of the new interloper, in her own way.

Now, it's 3 years out, we didn't know how old Buffie was when we got her but she was at least 4 years old by our reckoning, and probably closer to 5 or 6, which is pretty old for a guinea pig. We had noticed lately that she had been slowing down, and not quite as hippity-hoppity as her next-cage neighbor.

This afternoon, after returning home from services at our synagogue, the boys found Buffie barely breathing, out in her cage the sun and fresh air. (As a special treat, we had put her out in the shade on our deck this morning, also to make room for lunch guests.) We brought her inside, where she looked up at all of us once, and then expired peacefully among her doting and adoring family. (It was somewhat uncomfortable explaining this to our 10 or so lunch guests. As you can imagine, it cast a pall upon the meal. Were the kids not among half-a-dozen of their friends, it would have been much harder.)

We buried her this evening, amidst a river of tears and good-byes from all of us.

Rest In Peace
Buffie the Guinea Pig
2002(?)-24 May 2007

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

(I should have written this earlier; I guess lack of sleep is getting the better of me.)

Congratulations are due to Son #1, who competed this Sunday in the US national championships of the חידון התנ"ך (International Bible Contest) held at the Ramaz school in NYC.

He didn't place, but this was his first year competing, and he was the youngest participant from his school. The syllabus covered most of the books of Exodus, 1 Kings and 2 Kings, and parts of the books of Ezra and Nehemia. The contest consisted of two examinations (one 90-minute written test and one 40-minute written test), followed by a small presentation. The winners from the US will go on to the International Bible Contest in 2008 in Jerusalem, Israel.

Just getting to this point is a major accomplishment: out of hundreds of participants nationwide, around 150 were selected, covering both junior high school and high school divisions, in Hebrew and in English.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it wasn't quite like that, you hoser.

Elana presented a poster at the 2007 PAS conference in Toronto on Monday, and so we (all of us) went up. Sunday we spent driving hard from Brooklyn to Toronto, arriving in the evening and getting pizza for dinner.

Monday, while the conference went on (and Elana picked up her share of swag; only pediatricians' conferences would be giving away rubber duckies and stuffed giraffes in addition to the usual pens, bags and sticky note pads), the kids and I went to the CN Tower right next door to the convention center.

The kids enjoyed jumping on the vertigo-inducing glass floor (at 342 m. above ground), much to the horror of others who just wouldn't step on the floor (yes, I did go on it):

...and later we went up to the highest point in the tower (the "skypod", at 447m AMSL) for a beautiful panoramic view of Toronto (it was a bit too hazy to see all the way to Buffalo and the falls)

On Tuesday, we ended up going to see the marvelous horseshoe falls on the Canadian side of the falls.

and drove hard back to home.
The route we ended up following didn't keep us in New York directly to Canada (as you might imagine) but instead took us through Interstate 80 in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Interstate 81 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and on to New York, to Interstate 90 (the NYS Thruway) in Syracuse, New York into Canada—keeping the whole trip in New York State would have added an extra hour to the trip and taken us much further east than we needed to be. The added advantage is that coming back on I-81 is quite picturesque as it follows the old US Route 11: Elana took this photo with my cell phone camera (as were all these other photos)

Any lasting effects? Well, son #3 now goes around telling the joke:
"How do you Canadians spell Canada? C eh N eh D eh"
I guess you had to be there.

Posted by Jerry B. Altzman at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)