Mimor

This website is maintained by me, Mike Morraye, a guy with a little more concentration disorder than the average human being.

I’m living in a small country known for its chocolate and delicious pedophiles. People sometimes tend to call it Flanders, but I prefer Belgium. Flanders is just a product of lines that people, in particular politicians, use to create diversity between Belgian people. If the voting public is crazy enough, they even might demote Belgium and create an independent Flanders. In dutch we say “Van de pot gerukt”, translated as: “Pulled from the toilet-seat”. So that’s what these ideas are according to me.

I was created, don’t know the exact place , but somewhere around Roeselare I suppose, as that’s the place where I got dropped from between my mothers legs. This incredible world-changing (although, for my parents & teachers) event took place on Tuesday the 28th of October MCMLXXXVI (1986). This doesn’t only mean I was born a little after the third quarter of the moon but it also means that I’m a Scorpio, the eighth astrological sign in the Zodiac.

Back in the old days, when Pluto was yet to be discovered (pre 1930), Mars, the Roman god of war and bloodshed, was the ruler of the scorpio.
It actually still is, but I prefer the modern one… Pluto! Ok, since 2006 Pluto is no longer a “real” Planet, but that luckily didn’t influence the astrological significance to astrologers, as I prefer the role of Pluto more than the one from Mars.
Pluto is the god of the underworld and wealth. He’s called “The great renewer”, and is considered to represent the part of a person that destroys in order to renew, through bringing buried, but intense, needs and drives to the surface and expressing them, even at the expense of the existing order.

The discovery of Pluto in 1930 coincided with the rise of fascism and stalinism in Europe, leading to the Second World War, that brought some splendid changes to the world. It made the world a little, still not enough, more aware of what hate can lead to. It also improved the air- & naval/harboring techniques. But the most important changes were the construction of the worlds first programmable computers and remote controls.
Those programmable computers were the Colossus and ENIAC machines that were used to cipher messages. Ow yeah, they also invented more complex Cryptography algorithms, witch resulted in the invention of even better decryption techniques. Back in those times, the cyphering techniques where not as powerful as we know them today, but they made us win, so still a good thing.
When I upload this page to my website, it’ll happen over an SSH connection that’s encrypted with a password protected RSA key. I just don’t understand people that still transfer files over the Big Bad Web over a non-secure FTP. Considering the 73 000 000 military and cevilian people that died for us to be able to use this awesome technology. Shame on them doing so!

And before I forget to mention, I’m a straight male from Ghent.
I work as a 1st line support-guy for Digipolis where I get confronted with computer-problems, usually pebkac, from 9h till 17h.
SometimesI experience that people underestimate this function. (Quite often, these people are programmers or engineers).
But it requires far more skills than most people think:

• Sitting still all day long is quite hard for me.
• Stay polite and helpful, even if the customer likes to shoot, stab, poison, choke and burn the pianist. Sometimes it feels like offering a cup of thee to someone that has a running rail-gun aimed to your eyes.
• Know the basics on all custom build applications. Of course this includes their flaws.
• You have to know how to explain people what you did after you let them click the right-mouse-button and select properties on a desktop item. This in a polite and understandable manner.
• Know how to make delicious coffee.
• Know how to eat cake.
• You have to be able to stand working with MS Windows. And instead of dealing with the flaws of your own installation, try to deal with the problems on >4000 machines.
• Stand the sound of a constant ringing phone when a server goes down.
• Be able not to burst out in laughing when a user reports a problem.
• Have the skill to translate words on the fly. Some examples: harddisk = computer, Computer = screen, the computer can’t… = I can’t…, hold on = I’ll take another call and make you wait half an hour, I’m not that good in computers = don’t even bother explaining what you’re doing! Just hit the ok button for me will’ya?, etc…

Anyhow, I enjoy my job. It requires the knowledge of operating systems, scripting, sys-administration, and a lot more.  The diversity is what I like about it.

At home I’m a proud Linux user. And that’s not to be geeky, but because I like messing around with things.
I started using Suse 9.x till the release of Suse 10. All this time, I tried to get my Asus usb ADS modem working without success.
Then I switched to Fedora Core 5 where I learned my first real steps in using Linux. When Fedora 8 was released, I set up my first home-server, along with a fixed IP (yes, in Belgium this is still a rare/expensive luxury to have).
But after a while, I started to experiment with network-monitoring tools, web-based hosting tools, GPS tools such as navit and gpsdrive and noticed the pain of converting the packages so they would work PROPERLY on Fedora. So I started to search for an alternative, without too much hassle to go around.
At that point, I started to use Ubuntu 6.10.
As a proud member of the Ubuntu-be community I even organised my first Release-Party in Ghent. Woohaa… it was a succes.
Whenever I have some more time, I’ll put some more information about myself and my systems on this place, but for the time being… I hope you enjoyed this first part.