Plantagenet Penguinista

I recently uncovered a couple of Personality Disorders (which, unfortunately, are not yet safe to explain in detail). You could summarise them in vaguely slangish terms as “Control Freak.” One of them (possibly both of them) results in fear of intimacy (yes, genuine intimacy, not mere sex). I have watched another person with the same Disorders drive their spouse to suicide, trash the lives of at least 3 other people (driving one of those to prepare for suicide twice), basically because they dread intimacy, so are more than willing to lie about stuff to protect themselves against the possibility of experiencing real intimacy. Another probable symptom is frequently speaking ambiguously or cryptically, which breeds insecurity in their victims. Chronically being late or forgetting things is a slightly more subtle way of asserting control. Ironically, another prevalent symptom is acting the victim — utterly failing to recognise their own responsibility, so blaming others fo...

From the Apache logs: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE63-3/100.21.110; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 This was using the web browser between Burswood & Vic Park stations. The phone was included with a Virgin contract, is full QWERTY keyboard, good (for a plastic brick) sound including MP3, fairly good colour video. Their broadband USB thingy works fairly well in my laptop. I did a little wvdial setup akin to Pia’s, which was klunky & slow on Day One, but fine afterwards (including Sunday afternoon). The ping times suck, as you might expect (≈500ms) but the actual throughput (including on sites highly unlikely to be cached for the general public by Virgin) seems to be fine. Their 5GB a month is a fairly reasonable quota ($34 on top of a phone plan) even for most ADSL these days, & they clamp it to ≈128kb rather than charging you for excess traffic.

A little boy went up to his father & asked: “Dad, where did my intelligence come from?” He replied, “Well, son, you must have got it from your Mum, ’coz I still have mine.” A doctor examining a woman who had been rushed to Emergency at hospital, took the husband aside & said, “I don’t like the looks of your wife at all.” “Me neither, doc,” he said, “But she’s a great cook & really good with the kids.” An elderly man seeks a wizard to ask him if he can remove a curse he’s been living with for the last 40 years. The wizard responds, “Maybe; but you’ll have to tell me the exact words that were used to put the curse on you.” The old man replies with no hesitation, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” [the laugh of those who have suffered time with a passive-aggressive personality disordered (PAPD) spouse will have a thoughtful tone to it, ditto the next one] Moe: ...

Want to grow your own food with out using nasty chemicals & pesticides? Want to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle? Want to meet & connect with people interested in creating a sustainable future? Heard about permaculture & want to know more? What is Permaculture? Permaculture is a worldview which opens people up to the vision of a sustainable future. In this introduction you will learn about intelligent organic gardening & design principles as well as issues surrounding sustainable behaviour! Permaculture is much more than just growing your own food, it is about skill sharing, using resources wisely & connecting with your community. It incorporates everyone, & encourages diversity, whilst empowering individuals into self sufficiency & resilience. This info session runs this weekend (25/26 April) at CityFarm Perth, adjacent the Claisebrook train station in East Perth , or 11/12 July, running from 10AM to 4PM in either session. Cost is $80 for concession, $1...

If you live in or about Perth & have a definite use for a free PC, a number of them will become available this week. All will have CRT (not flat/LCD) screens; Available processors vary, from about 600MHz up to about 2GHz; Available RAM varies from 128MB to 512MB, mostly DDR2 (retails for $15/24/35 for ½/1/2GB) Available hard drives (all IDE, 160GB for $85) vary from a few to a few tens of GB, will arrive with a clean KUbuntu 9.04 installation; All will have keyboard & mouse; Email me <leon at cyberknights spot com spot au> if interested.

There is a supermarket & coffee shop in South Perth, at the corner of Angelo & Coode Streets named “Scutti, a taste of Europe.” I was pleased, after wandering in there one day while waiting for a bus, to find good-quality hot chocolate on the shelves, at slightly better than Woolworths/Coles/IGA prices. Vittoria Dark Chocochino . I was even more pleased, while examining it, to be told by the supermarket staff that this was used by the coffee shop. Making some up is simple, as the container has a spinnable shut/shake/open setting, so one simply shakes enough into a mug, adds hot water, then white stuff. When I use Harvey Fresh whipping cream, the result is a pleasantly “American” creamy chocolate taste. Yum! Use & recommend! (-:

The word in question is WAIT. I needed to update OpenOffice Writer on two MS-Windows 2000 Pro machines today, from 2.2 to 3.0.1 in order to take advantage of a particular corrected feature which makes 3-fold brochures possible (almost easy) when printed out on an ordinary A4 printer. Because MS-Windows software has intermingled sort-of dependencies, I first needed to update a virus scanner version, then (on one machine) Java, then OpenOffice. While I was there, I updated (on one machine) or added (another machine) The GIMP. The virus scanner update failed on one machine. The machines are same make, model & specifications. The error message (at least there was one) was singularly useless. Running an MS-Windows workstation on-line, sans virus scanner, is essentially software suicide. So I hunted around to find another suitable virus scanner. 20 minutes after finding it, all done. Then I updated Java, which would not start until after the scanner update. Then I updated/installed The ...

Today, a woman working on an MS-Windows XP workstation in an adjoining room was sent an MS-Word 2007 document. LookOut was sore confused about what to do with it, & her MS-Word 2003 application refused to deal with it. So she forwarded the email to me. It went out through a Perth-based ISP, in through a different Perth-based ISP, arrived on my server in Melville. I fetched it back through those ISPs again to East Perth. Saving the .docx file from KMail on my Mandriva 2009.0 Linux-based laptop, then opening it with OpenOffice Writer 3.0.1 worked, so I SaveAs’d it as an MS-Word 2003 .doc file, then exported it as a PDF, & sent those back... where they wound up on a virtual host in Malaga. She fetched the email back to East Perth, was then able to read & edit the document. So... a document assembled in Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows could not be read using Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows, but could be read under a non-Microsoft application under a non-Micro...

...made almost too easy (step by step AKA click by click). Starting Writer here in Australia will open a blank, A4, portrait-layout page. Click the Format menu, Page. Click the Orientation radio-button to Landscape. Triple-click the 2.00cm in the Left field to highlight the number. Type 1 <tab> 1 <tab> 1 <tab> 1 to set all of the margins to 1cm (which may need to be varied for your printer; experimentation is necessary). Click on the Page layout dropdown & set it to Mirrored. Click the OK button. You are now done setting up the page. Click the Insert menu, Frame. In the Size section, click the Relative check-box under Width (to ON). Double-click in the Width field to select the numbers, type 48% . Click OFF the Autosize check-box under Height. Click the Relative check-box (to ON). Double-click in the Height field to select the numbers, type 98% . In the Anchor section, click the To page radio-button. In the Position section, click the Mirror check-box (to ON). Cli...

Here’s a little puzzle which hopefully falls within your specialty. I may need to set up a system so that wireless users can clock on using what amounts to an Internet account. The idea is that the wireless itself will use standard routers (WAPs) talking WPA2, the clients will then “connect” through the wireless to a server, which then transproxies, records traffic, maybe rate-limits when talking to the main link. The idea which first floated to mind was using PPPoE, but the RP-PPPoE service only speaks of using an Ethernet interface without an IP address, which seems incompatible with that idea. PPTP (PopTop) has also been suggested, but that requires kernel patches rather than standard software, & can apparently be broken. A major utility factor is minimal setup on Windows-XP or -Vista clients, hopefully also Mac & others. Local security (encryption) is also good, but not critical. Ideally, a laptop is powered up, finds the wireless, is given a WPA2 key, cloc...

I had winsomely hoped for a little more honesty, but a decade of habit has just showed through. I have a form in hand (version 4, it seems) from a Registry Officer which paints me as a disinterested lout & casually fails to mention the enormous amount of interference employed to directly prevent me from doing anything useful. The outright errors (to say nothing of the falsehoods) are multitudinous. I have about two dozen individuals around the world who will patiently explain that in every dealing with them I’ve been absolutely honest & shown total integrity. I can probably round up half a dozen individuals who will mention times (many times, for some of them) in which they’ve experienced the liar lying (& in a few cases, been hurt & or distressed as a consequence). At least some of the above may be necessary in order to circumvent an act (a ploy) of “poor, poor, pitiful me.” I think this is what is referred to as a “no win situation” ...

Here, we have Stephan's Quintet, a bunch of five galaxies which hang around together. Or do they? Some people became curious, so they did a little research, & discovered that NGC 7320 (lower left in image) has a redshift of about 800km/sec versus roughly 6000 for the other four. The indication is that 7320 is much closer than the others. Unfortunately for any triumphalism which this may invoke, 7320 (& 7319, upper left) has faint but continuous gas/dust tails leading to another galaxy, 7319C, illustrating that they’re all connected, so at roughly the same distance. Oops... Meanwhile, 7319 has a quasar (QSO) within it. Interacting with the dust near the core of the galaxy. With a massively higher redshift, indicating that it is much more distant than the galaxy it rests in (over 90 times more). All of this is of course impossible. But it exists, it is still happening. We can see it. We can point to it. Never mind... Oh, one other little impossibility: as well as being wild...

Mr Obama’s proposed Financial Stimulus package, which he is (wait for it) trying to borrow the money to implement, is serious money. How serious? To equal it, you would have to earn more than a million US dollars in every single day since Christ. If you slogged through a ten-hour day, that’d be USD$100,000.00 an hour. If you worked Mondays to Fridays only, USD$140,000.00 an hour. For me, even spending that much would be difficult. Spending a million dollars (about 1½ million Aussie dollars), no worries. Doing it for the thousandth time (having earned a little over a tenth of 1% of the package) would be a bit harder. When you got as far as the crucifixion (call it ≈25AD from a birth in ≈2BC, so roughly 8 billion dollars), what would you spend it on? After being visited in the green nation by his two brothers from overseas, Paddy wandered into the pub to order 3 pints of Guinness in three separate glasses. Then he sat at a table on the other side of the ...

I used to write articles for computer magazines, but am wondering if there’s anything else you know of which is begging to be written about? For a random example, I get on well with all children, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d be good at writing for them. For another, I enjoy reading a wide range of SciFi, but again that doesn’t mean that I’ll be much chop a creating same. So, if you have a favourite obsession which you reckon is begging to have more writing done about it, please drop a comment with some key words. (-:

I have bought myself exactly two expensive toys in the last year (well, technically, it could be called three). One was a Canon 40D DSLR camera kit including a Sigma 50-80 lens (the lens was about half of the cost of the kit proper). The other was an 18-200 lens, featuring nine-fold zoom. Bought just in time, too, from a rather special staffer at the Northbridge shop, who also goes photographer for Heavy Metal concerts, & is amused by the security dudes literally catching idiots leaping the fence at her. The price has just risen about 15% (not due to AU$ falling, due to suppliers being hammered by the global recession), & is due to rise another 15-20% about now. I’ve had opportunity to take a few real photos with these, but also managed to have a little fun. Fun is actually quite important — from a functional perspective — & quite a significant achievement at the moment. Yesterday, en route back from Lesmurdie Falls , I ran across Honey Rd . Rather than pu...

Today, I was able to sing a brace of duets with my girlfriend in Wisconsin... except that she was in the next state, a bit over 3 hours from home. Never mind, duets it was. The site which enables this modern wonder ties you to it by only publishing the songs as a Flash video... so, with the DownloadHelper plugin for FireFox, I was able to capture said video clips... Now, more modern technology starts to kick in. Using FFmpeg plus lame , I can rip the sound-track from the FLV file, cramming it into an MP3. All of this software technology so far is completely Free & portable, it runs on Mac & ’Doze as well. Next, we jam a $10 exHardlyNormal MP3 player into the USB socket, to copy on those MP3s. Now I can listen to us singing as I wander around the local foodWorks store... hmmm... should pick up a set of $3 mini-headphones to replace these ghastly earbud thingies... a set of the SuperBass ones from King Kong Innaloo should do...

Borrowed from someone else’s ’blog, but this really hits my sense of humour. A gynæcologist had become fed up with paperwork, rules & malpractice insurance, so was burned out. Hoping to try another career where skillful hands would be beneficial, he decided to become a mechanic. He went to the local technical college, signed up for evening classes, attended diligently, & learned all he could. When the time for the practical exam approached, the gynæcologist prepared carefully for weeks & completed the exam with tremendous skill. When the results came back, he was surprised to find that he’d obtained a score of 150%. Fearing an error, he called the instructor, saying, “I don’t want to appear ungrateful for such an outstanding result, but I wonder if there is an error in the grade.” The instructor said, “During the exam, you took the engine apart perfectly, which was worth 50% of the total mark. You put the engine back toge...

I took a ’phone call today from a bloke whose company was once neighbours for a customer of mine. Their Linux server, after sending me statues emails every day for over 8 years, & not being touched at all in the last 5 years, had stopped working. SecureSHell will be your friend. The /var partition is completely full. So... axed a few log files which were not being rotated, restarted the services involved, working in about 40 seconds. I arranged with the IT bloke to get a new IDE hard drive, will drop in to spend half of an hour copying the partitions across (but making bigger /var & /usr partitions en passant ), done. It does in fact have a virus scanner. Inbound mail is pumped through it. Otherwise, no worries. The server, built on common-or-garden hardware, has not blinked in 8 years.

It turns out that I had not been on said Pension for 2 weeks at the time of my last post... nice of CentreLink to say so... I eventually saw paperwork dated 23Jan, advising me to destroy cards on 12Jan due to termination on 16Jan... d’oh? I have found a potential ThingToDo, short-term at least, namely set up wireless Internet connectivity for the small country town of Kellerberrin. This town (205km east of Perth in Western Australia) is kind of unique. It is the only WA country town to have grown in 2008. It sees Prospector trains 9 times a week, each way (at 160km/h), plus AvonLink trains (3 times a week, each way, cheaper) plus coaches. It has a hospital, swimming pool, a few excellent shops, 7-day IGA supermarket, many sporting clubs, numerous tourist attractions (like Shark Mouth, a very special rock, & some impressive salt-lakes). Champion Roadhouse in the area goes to neighbours Tammin. I am thinking of hooking it up through a flat-strap ADSL1 link, with local DNS, we...

OK, the insurance stuff has been secured, set up so those who should not have access to it, cannot. Soon, I will probably soon not be on Disability Pension. That & being isolated from the root cause of the bulk of the problems in my life means that real work again is a definite possibility. So... What’s next? Suggestions, please. So far, I’ve been told that ♦ I should ramp up my computer business again; ♦ that I should get back into photography; ♦ that I should resume writing articles (but that market has changed, a lot); ♦ I should find a way to use the psych stuff I’ve learned (qualifications? been there, done that); ♦ what else? I am likely to me married later this year to someone I can actually trust. Trust across the board. Honesty incarnate, this girl. (-: Said super-woman is running an organic chemicals production line, has skills in a variety of areas such as interior design, is competent at a wide var...