Plantagenet Penguinista

Thanks to Dr Chris Newall, of the Cottesloe Medical Centre in Perth. Chris has been a patient and imaginative GP and deal competently with not only my own oddities but with the administrative maze which Centrelink respresents. Chris has an ability to do things according to the rules, but with his own flair, so both the rule-makers & his patients are satisfied with the outcome. Thanks also to Dr Lulama Ntloko, of Rosebery General Practice. “Dr Lulu” has picked up the reins on this strange patient (me), halfway through the case, & also dealt strongly with Centrelink’s maze. She is very careful in what she does, but is also not lacking the courage to step out & do things the hard way when needed. It’s inspiring to see that care in someone who evidently knows so much, because otherwise the expert becomes “full of themselves” & starts making knuckleheaded mistakes. No such risk with Lulu! Also, she has had another advantage fall her way which has avoided Dr Chris: she’s pret

Ran across these random words from an old mate of mine, Remo Ponta. Thought that they might add some polish to your day, as Miss 6 belts away at Commander Keen 2 next to me (the virtues of DosBox) and from the sound of it, Master 7 is doing the same around the corner. Latest terms to add to your vocabulary for the 21st century office: ADMINISPHERE — The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve. ASSMOSIS — The process by which some people seem to absorb success andadvancement by kissing up to the boss. BLAMESTORMING — Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or project failed and who was responsible. CHAINSAW CONSULTANT — An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the brass with clean hands. CLM (CAREER LIMITING MOVE) — Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activ

I’m facing writing a passel of web-based applications. So I started doing what any self-respecting semi-sane geek would do: started writing web applications to help write the web applications. OK, so far I’ve got a skeleton which lets me design and to a certain extent lay out PostgreSQL tables within a web form. Yes, I’d be delighted to be motivated by the MySQL people to make MySQL a participant in this system. (-: Rather than write a bazillion reports, I’m about 2/3 of the way through a thingy which turns a PDF into a report. The benefit in this is that the user hits a button in their web browser and is suddenly facing a PDF (which they can print) of the results. I’m highly tempted to add this capacity to an ODF document, so one can sit down with OpenOffice Writer & churn out report templates effortlessly. Spitting out .odt files to be saved is easy enough, but I’ll have to look into automating a shell-based ODT printer to basically turn an .odt document plus a bunch of SQL rows

I went for a few days’ break at the Rocky Cape Christian Community, which was a nice change & nothing like church. I got to pick up some eggs, helped to slaughter some turkeys, did some woodwork, went for a walk along the creek to the beach, & saw a Platypus. Break from doing nothing? Well, even that gets wearing, & as well as a change of scenery & people, I got to do some useful stuff (such as untangling a computer which had somehow been set to boot from just about every device attached to it, so started v-e-r-y slowly) & chat on completely random topics with some very knowledgeable people, including folks from Holland, Germany, the USA & Canada. These people are immensely practical in their faith, & not nailed down to some remote authority. It reminds me a great deal of Open Source: whatever works is accepted, modulo some very minor quibbling. I watched them help a pair who had arranged to have a baby together, but didn’t like each other (what a combinatio

If you have ADSL and it’s too slow, then this is for you. I walked in this morning after leaving my laptop doing a set of updates overnight. It was about 1/3 finished, so I left it for half an hour to get done with the current update, to see how long the next one would take. OpenOffice 2.0.4 — 7.5 hours — oh, well. Tonight, then. ^C. BorderNet, it seems, have given up on the government’s remote access subsidies, waiting until July when a better plan comes out, maybe. Meanwhile, I’ve given Active8me a ring. Their prices aren’t so crash-hot, but they look like they can install within about a fortnight, & like BorderNet it’s an appliance-style device rather than a funn card and lots of MS-Windows-specific special software & drivers. We’ll see.

These things have a couple of oddities worth watching for. One of them is that adding a port-forwarding rule (“Virtual Server”) doesn’t automatically grant any access through the firewall, you have to add a separate firewall item to allow the traffic that you’ve just enabled. The next thing is that saving to Flash doesn’t always work across the board, so do your saves, reset the modem, & test it. One place this bit me was that setting up port-forwarding rules, then firewalling rules, then saving the lot resulted in only the firewalling rules being saved. The next thing is also port-forwarding: the forwarding won’t change the port, so a connection to 1.2.3.4:22 might be forwarded to 192.168.1.250 on the LAN, but always to port 22. So if you want to do my typical security trick of putting things like SSH services on odd ports, this has to be done on the machines themselves as well as adding a port-forwarding rule & a firewall rule to the ADSL router. A final thing is that their

Bulk Frozen Foods (385 Bass Highway) do, as one might suspect, good frozen foods including stuff like bulk-packs of raspberries and peas, but also non-frozen stuff like eggs, 3Kg tins of tomato soup, choc chips & so on. A couple of doors down the road (East), we have Youngs Vegie Shed (yes, that’s how they mis-spell it), which does bulk fruit, veggies & Ginger Honey, amongst other things. Actually, I need to correct myself, as that chunk of Burnie seems to be called Camdale. There’s also a trendy-looking wholefood place on Cattley Street in Burnie’s little chunk of sawn-off city that I haven’t looked into yet. Pretty good for a country town (sort of, the CBD looks like someone sliced a section out of a city & pasted it onto the map, including (grumble) parking meters). Nathan’s taken one of my ancient laptops & squeezed it into a flat-looking standard-ish PC case to become a DVD burner for a Tullah bus... driven by a Chef. Passengers will be able to plug in camera cards

It ain’t Winter here yet, but some people seem to not realise that. This “Drive Scribbley When Frosty” sign has been neatly hit so that it’s spun to a right-angle. Not only that, it’s on a straightish bit of Murchison Road, a 5km bitumen road leading up to the Murchison Dam, not out in the middle of a wiggly highway somewhere. One of the handy driving tips I was given by Ronn, manager of the Tullah Tavern, was “Don’t pull over.” Change flat tyres in the middle of the road, that kind of thing. The ice tends to slide off to the sides of the road, and get slushed there by cars driving past, so when you pull over, you tend to keep right on pulling over, and your car sits there until Spring. I’ve seen photos of cranes, vehicle-moving flatbeds and all sorts of heavy, stable, won’t-happen-to-me vehicles sitting sideways (or upside down!) on the side of the road because of this. Suddenly, the unending lengths of Armco we have lining the roads around here makes sense. (-: I also found a symptom