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Showing posts from April, 2011

Single parenting?

Ignoring Desiderata for an instant, I would be delighted if over a decade of dishonesty & manipulation were swept aside, in order for single parenting to become possible here. For context, an intimate friend of mine was unable to even read the last batch of dishonesty. I really wish that in some significant way, even an iota of this was really my fault — because then I could change what I was doing, to allow better things to happen for the children involved.

Automated Me

What can’t you get an app for doing? Very little, it seems. If I want to read stories for children, Audacity will record my voice, the DVD-Slideshow app collection will layer slides with the text over that to make a video sequence of it, then DeVeDe will convert that into a standard DVD format & burn it to disc. Viola! A clone-able Me who can read stories to thousands of children at once!

Technical is buried in non-technical

This performance happened when I was in Year 11 of high school, yet another Brooks from midway through last century would agree with it. Frederick mentioned this in his book, “The Mythical Man-Month,”published 3 years before the performance: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” while he regards this as a drastic oversimplification, it is accurate in that some aspects of the coding situation have little or no dependence on your ability to actually invent code, more to do with the social context (teaming up 10 women won’t get you a baby 4 weeks after conception). One recent aspect of this is that I have enough pieces to assemble maybe 10 or 12 fully functional computers, yet for social reasons, very few people are at all interested in such a computer. Another is that becoming aware of having been subject to over a decade of social sabotage was the key to understanding the hidden limits of my abilities to ramp up my IT business. Aftershocks of the same sabotage

It turns out that CRT monitors are still useful

I stayed at a B&B two weekends ago which has an ADSL Internet connection, an office PC & a WiFi-connected personal laptop (which I redid the config on so it actually connected, happily the WiFi router's password set was still admin/admin ). Next visit to the area, they’ll also have an Internet cafe workstation since they have room for a 19" CRT (old-style glass television) screen, since I have 13 of those sitting behind my house, plus a few “old” PCs including a couple of dual-core 3GHz to which I can fit a pair of 512MB DDR2 DIMMs & a random (80GB) IDE hard drive. A selected PC is about to grow a copy of Maverick Meerkat Kubuntu & simple instructions for manually re-creating the default user (as in, Ctrl-Alt-F1 , log in, “ sudo su sh scriptname ” to remove the home directory tree & unpack a new template from a .tar.bz2 file). Said template will include a Flash plugin, a Video DownloadHelper plugin, a reasonable set of bookmarks, an “empty” Thunderbird con