Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Jumbo

Yesterday I have found out that Jumbo shop in Limassol has 2nd floor!!! Not that I am a regular visitor to Jumbo, but was in that shop for many times and I always thought it has only one (big) floor with a bunch of stuff there. Few days ago I was looking for a new bag for CDs to put in my car and one guy told me I can get one in Jumbo. I went through all those rows of stuff and didn\’t find one, so I came back to him and told that they probably don\’t sell what I need anymore. After 2 minutes of trying to find out where exactly he saw the bag he told like on the 2nd floor and that was the moment I got very surprised since I never saw stairs or lift in Jambo. Few minutes later I was in the shop and saw that the bloody hidden 2nd floor exists indeed. So if you didn\’t know about it as well – stairs are on the left if going from cashiers towards the other end of the shop. They are kinda 10-20 meters away from cashiers :)

Few photos

I have uploaded few photos on my flickr. One set is all about my rest in Columbia Beach Resort over this weekends where I was invited for (early) Christmas party and second one is about my short trip to Troodos mountains to see the snow (and test drive my Subaru to the mountains). In the second set you will also find couple of pics of my car (red one) which I have promised before

BTW, have replace car audio with Pioneer CD/MP3 player (which I already had from before) as well as put 4 Kicker speakers – ummmmitssamazzzing :)

Two internet connections: how is better (past year)

I have noticed a post called \”Two internet connections: how is better\” I posted two years ago in the \”This week last year\” box on the right of my blog. That time I did two firewall and so on (as explained in the that post), but now everything has changed and I am glad.

First of all I got a server with 3 ethernet cards and put all the ends into it (two WANs and one LAN). Then I setup load balancer and line failover which works really great. All of the above was done with pfSense firewall (which I really love and have installed at many places, including three places I maintain, plus my computer supplier office as well as two offices of Kean factory). pfSense works just great and has a lot of functionality free of charge :)

Currently I have tested all basic things like DNS forwarder, DHCP, filtering and so on, plus IPSec (static-to-static, static-to-mobile_client), PPTP, Load Balancer,  Traffic Shaper, Failover and ntop module.

Changed my transport

Having a lot of trips (around 1000km/week), low budget and nice people around, I got myself a better car :). This time I got Subaru 16GL (1986 year built) in almost perfect condition with low overall trip (~80000km).

Good things about this car:

  • Very good condition
    • Engine works like new, though I will do full inspection and maybe some renovations just make it completely perfect
    • Saloon in perfect condition
    • All buttons and whatever is inside works perfectly well
    • Paint is like brand new
  • Low fuel consumption. It needs less fuel than any of the cars I used before
  • Fully equipped with fancy stuff like
    • Central door lock
    • Electrical windows control
    • Electrical mirrors control
  • Very comfortable seats (which is very important if you have to drive smthing like 200km/day)
  • I got it completely free (thanks to Alexey)
  • Quite cheap to fix if any problems (as people tell on the web)
  • Very reliable (again as people tell on the web)

So now only few things I wanna do about this car:

  • Give it for complete service/inspection in order to find out what needs to be changed (if anything) and make it perfect
  • Change audio (I have this, just need to put it in)

Now just some interesting points about this car:

  • Spare wheel/tire is under hood in the engine room and don\’t ask how they do it :)
  • Handbrake blocks front wheels instead of rare ones (important to know before trying to do a police turn involving handbrake)
  • It is not a racing car and does not have fast acceleration, though can go pretty fast on highways
  • Very nice noise isolation inside, which will dramatically improve the quality of the sound :)
  • Engine is 6 cylinders horizontally 3 on each side going outwards. Very balanced one.

I don\’t have my own photos of the car yet (coming very soon) , so for the time being here is how it looks like (found on images.google.com), but red color:

  1. \"Subaru_16gl_2\"
  2. \"Subaru_16gl_1\"

that\’s it for now

Back to LinkedIn

Some time ago I used to have LinkedIn account which I have later deleted (don\’t ask me why). Yesterday I recreated it and this time it will stay there :), so if you are there as well, feel free to get in touch (http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmamchenkov/).