Plantagenet Penguinista

Today’s mystery product is: lemon cashews. “Whaaaat?” was my initial response, but I tried one & it tasted quite nice, so I grabbed a small bag (about half to 40% of the price of supermarket plain cashews). The crew where I’m working quite liked them also. They also get a prize for selling Slovakian chocolate/rice bars (quite cheaply) called — Gilbert & Sullivan fans take a breath — Mikado. Finally, I grabbed some Brasiliano coffee powder for a workplace & they assembled me a cappucino. I normally avoid coffee because some of the common brands can quickly send me troppo, but I tasted this & reckon that the flavour is quite excellent — savoury & definitely caffeinous, but not intrusive or sharp. I can see how they spend all day drinking the stuff. (-:

When I moved some of the last set of flights, the only cheap MEL-PER flight available in the time-space available was on New Year’s Day. Now as I go back to add another seat to that flight, I find no less than 4 flights available then. None of them are at very different times (except for one that’d be a tad difficult to catch from a 6:30 AM flight from Tas, as it’s due to depart about when the REx ’plane goes wheels-down) or prices (they’re marginally costlier than the existing one), so I don’t have to change anything else, but it was fascinaing watching these new flights “materialise” out of the never-never. Apparently, Tiger are planning on offering flights to/from PER about mid-Dec, so I’m hedging the return flights until that happens.

Nice juvenile headline, but it’s refreshingly nice to pull down a gigabyte & a half of Gutsy Gibbon (peered from a WAIXed mirror, thanks AmNet & Pacific ) in a handful of hours to upgrade an entire server just before switching the thing on-line for another 40-odd domains.

When one mentions stars, the image called to mind is a massive, constantly-exploding ball of hydrogen & helium. Not so, claims ScienceNOW, the learned observer would be keeping their eyes out for the diamonds! Well... it’s a tad hot for diamonds as such, but a lot of white dwarves have been found — not resting on white toadstools at the bottom of the garden, but whizzing along through space — with predominantly carbon atmospheres. Naturally, this represents much confusion & surprise (well, what doesn’t in astronomy?) because the traditional way of looking at things demands that the carbon gradually formed from fusing H & He (via other elements), so there should be substantial dregs from this phase kicking around. To put it simply, there ain’t. My selfish reaction to this is “Excellent! We’re learning new things!” but many people express dismay at the fact that traditional approaches now have to be ploughed up & revised. Hey, guys, that’s how science was intended to

OK, back in WA for at least a couple of months, but the experience with Aussie airlines was kind of different. REx was excellent, buzzed through clear skies from Burnie/Wynyard with some nice tea & savouries to Melbourne (which cost us the clear sky, of course, although later it did sort itself out reasonably well). I’d booked a lateish Qantas flight simply because it was the only one left (prices escalated from a few hundred $ to about $650 in something like 30 seconds), together with the latest reasonable REx flight. REx got there just before 11AM, but Qantas wouldn’t let me check my luggage in until 4:40PM because the flight wasn’t open yet. This was tedious because my suitcase had gear in it (malicious wireless routers, PCI cards & such) which would not be accepted as hand luggage (“he slashed me with a LAN card!”), so I had to tote this about for 5 hours or so until someone realised that I was allowed to check in at 3:40PM. Then I hopped into the Jumbo at T1 Gate 23, sat d

...which is a pity, since the Independent I voted for, Ben Quin , seems to be scraping in a close 4th (after the Greens) in Lyons . Lyons seems to occupy most of the area of Tasmania, & include many population centres excluding Hobart & apparently Burnie & Devonport. A long row to hoe, & good upon him for first off making sense in what he says, second off for being willing to fly solo when the need arose & third off for being willing to have a go at such an, um, interesting electorate, including the cantankerous West Coast, misty Central regions, etc.

Got handed a pair of TP-LINK TL-WR642G wireless routers today & asked to link two buildings across a highway. Excellent little router, easy to configure, great antennas, WEP & the usual encryption, port forwarding, yadda, yadda. One small detail. No bridging. Oh, well, update the firmware... wait... done. Still no bridging. A bit of research reveals that it doesn’t actually do bridging. Bridge failure. Oh, well. Supplier is currently discussion solutions amongst themselves.

“No. I can’t.” Sometimes the simple answers aren’t the best.

[Velociraptor-style dinos] had one of the most efficient respiratory systems of all animals, similar to that of modern diving birds like penguins, fossil evidence shows. It fuelled their bodies with oxygen for the task of sprinting after prey It seems that in yet another way penguins are indeed a beastie to be feared. They can out-dive, out-swim, out-cold & now out-breathe yet another set of competitors... So it seems reasonable to propose... that if you want some genes to blend with yours in search of the perfect being (give or take a bilennia or few), you could probably do a lot worse than borrowing from Aptenodytes/Eudyptula. (-:

<click> Applications <click> Games... [list of maybe 100 or so games appears] <Master 8yo> “Oh. Which one is it?” We settled on Fish Fillets after trying out a handful of minesweepers & jewel games. So... what problem do I have with games on Linux? Well... too many of them. (-: SIITA: just got around to closing my outside window a few minutes ago after 21:00 (9PM). Not cold. Took the kinder for a nice putter around Mackintosh and Tullabardine Dams this morning. Sort-of participated in the Tullah Challenge (walked said kinder backwards through running-racers alongside Lake Rosebery). Warm, relaxing day. Now if Telstra extracts a digit or two, so allowing real GSM ’phone coverage & maybe even a DSLAM in town, I’ll be able to stop whining about services. A little. (-:

It looks like we’ll be toddling back to Perth for — amongst other things — a friend’s wedding in December. If so, I’ll probably have enough work arranged by then to actually pay for the trip. Which will lead to questions about why we wanted to make a “new start” with a sea change (Indian Ocean for Indian Ocean). That should make life interesting. Meanwhile, got some more work done on a Perth machine & probably arranged work on at least 2 others while I’m over there. & if I get paid early enough, might pick up the guts(y?) of a new machine or two so I can quit whinging about this one.

Minor spoiliation, but I’m grabbing what comes past. (-: Got to update a server in Perth which is hooked up by an ADSL link which downloads at more than 800Kb/sec — so I guess they’ve switched that across to ADSL2 or ADSL2+. It feels comforting to update SaMBa & to have it all done by the time you get my hands off the keyboard. The other minor spoiltness is having iiNet’s FTP server function correctly for everything (except having no rsync service for the piece of mirror I wanted) when I switched this server’s repository sources there.

One other aspect of the machine which has improved with the Celeroctomy has been keying in Blogger text. I now get about 2-3 characters echoed back per second instead of about 1. If you’re sitting there on your 3GHz dual Athlon with 2GB of RAM, you can rightfully feel smugly satisfied that it’s about as fast as typing into a console for you.

Saw a piece of snail-mail today from a crew called "Octa8on Australia," the promoters of the annual Targa Tasmania “Ultimate Tarmac Rally.” It included a “Certificate of Appreciation” for my role as “Post Chief, Mt Black Targa Stage” & also a little cloth badge which pleased SWMBO ’coz she can sew it onto her jacket. It also included an announcement that the newsletter would be email-only from now on. They use some odd little publication program, so they’ll be shipping it as a “print to” PDF file. Given the stark, functional simplicity of the Targa posts themselves, it was interesting to see this little step sort-of towards technology.

It turns out to not be a funny kind of hug, nor an odd part for a racing bike, but in fact a baby echidna or platypus. These marsupials lay eggs rather than bearing live young, & somehow it seems wrong to call it a “chick” or something like that. (-:

Having had to grind this Celeron 566 across to what claims to be a Pentium II (Deschutes) 400, I find that the random-muckups typical of the system have all but disappeared, although the bog-slow font selection style dialogs are still a part of life. This mobo definitely can’t manage more than 256MB of SD-RAM. This is a pity because I have enough DIMMs to ramp it up to 410MB, which I’m sure wouldn’t challenge any known speed records, but would make for a less-stalled operating experience. One thing which does seem to work better is that driving it into swap is less sharp & less complete despite the smaller real-RAM available.

...we don’t seem to have had one. There’s a piece of paganism that I definitely hadn’t been looking forward to. Not looking forward to the badly disguised, badly orchestrated Merchants’ Solstice due to turn up next month, either — although it seems that Neil & Horse-Vickey will be running evening cart rides (with blinking lights) in the lead-up & I’d be surprised if Ronn & Tavern-Vickey didn’t also have something planned. It seems that small towns do have some advantages, after all. (-:

This turns out to mean — on close examination — more along the lines of “I can’t (shouldn’t) fix it, why are you expecting me to?” — rhetorically, of course. The consequences are pretty immense, because in a child, this develops into the kind of learned helplessness which becomes the core of the Victim’s role in a Drama Triangle. Because I’m not responsible (in any way) for making a thing happen, I’m also incapable of fixing it — but that requires me to get grumpy about the “blame server” (person dubbed with responsibility) not fixing it & to claim injustice as a result. What this means in practice is that to fill my role properly, to claim indignancy & outrage as I “should,” I wind up encouraging the problem in various ways. The social consequences of this don’t bear describing. Let “miserable” suffice.