Plantagenet Penguinista

I believe that the problems you are experiencing may be part of a current issue that we are experiencing on the site. I have included a work around, as well as a few suggestions that may be helpful in the future. Then follows the workaround... To clear your Cache and Cookies, please follow the steps that I have outlined below: Go to ‘Tools’ at the top of your browser Select ‘Internet Options’ Then click on ‘Delete Cookies’ and ‘Delete Files’ Please make sure that you close all your Browser Windows, as you would need to do this in order for Deletion to take affect. Note that the consultant has not asked what browser is in use, just presumed that it’s a particular version of Internet Explorer (on MS-Windows) & given instructions for that. They ain’t gunner work in Mozilla Firefox, even under MS-Windows. The presumption gets worse with the next paragraph: I also suggest, that when using the eBay site, you use Internet Explorer 6.0 for your web browser. This version of Internet Explor

It’s a little late, but the giver doesn’t get to come past all that often. The present is four small bottles of Nando’s sauces; Medium Peri-Peri, Garlic Peri-Peri, Hot Peri-Peri and Wild Herb Peri-Peri. All in a box . They’re all amazingly tasty for production-line sauces. Thank you, Aiyana. “Peri-Peri is a magical mix of sun-ripened lemons, a bunch of special spices and a touch of garlic against a background of African birds-eye chili.” Either way, it puts the zest back into pizza!

I have an AmCom ADSL line & about lunch-ish the rest of the world went off-air. Australian sites worked more-or-less fine, but Australian-named sites (like google.com.au — which happened to be off-shore — didn’t. Shrug. Waited a few hours, then by 16:00 got sick of it being broken (was supposed to be gleaning data from a UK site), so called Support. Support line’s hold-music-stuff told me that a cable had been cut & was expected back by 15:00. An hour ago. Grrr. Shortly, a human technician spoke & told me that a fishing trawler had driven through an overseas line and he didn’t know when it would be back. Sigh. Thank you. Hang up. Less than 30 seconds later, it all sprang back to life. Now I’m feeling paranoid. Who or what was watching? (-:

The computer center is empty, Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans. I walk the rows of CPUs, My skin prickling with magnetic flux. I open a door, cold and hard, And watch the lights dancing on the panels. A machine without soul, men call it, But its soul is the sweat of my comrades, Within it lie the years of our lives, Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy, The algorithmic exultations, The long nights filled with thankless toil, I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter, And in the darkened offices The terminals shine like stars. Copyright © Geoffrey James, from The Zen of Programming . This pattern is found here and in many other web pages; thanks, Brett.

A certain convicted monopolist has tightened down their media rights enormously. In version 11 of their player, they’re canning ripped tunes, recordings of some videos & backups of your media (or licences). And what else? Hands up all of you who couldn’t foresee this coming from Day One... Hands up again if you prefer this situation to (say) XMMS or MPlayer or Amarok on Linux...

Small Sir will be glad to have his Kart behaving well, instead of randomly falling through the ground, getting stuck in odd places etc as with Ye Anciente TuxKart. There is a new, independent version being produced by a German crew. The blurb says: SuperTuxKart contains new characters, new tracks and a reworked userinterface. This doesn’t mention lots of small repairs also done by “the GotM team”, producers of this new edition. Nice to see a second lease of life here.

LinuxWorld London’s Linux-based cyber-cafe will be done with two machines. No, twelve. Well... really two, but they’re acting as twelve using multiple screens, keyboards & mice. This is something I’ve done a few times over the years, but I only ever got up to three screens on one machine. It’s nice to see it being done more effectively & in batches of six at a time. The reduction in set-up effort allowed these people to get twelve screens happy from scratch in under 30 minutes. Individual machines would have taken roughly three hours to get going.

Interested in diff-ing written text ? Meet dwdiff , which produces a single output file (instead of a split one) with additions & deletions highlighted in context: {+ added text +} common text [- deleted text -] This makes it much easier to spot functional differences than a standard diff & much less likely that (as with a side-by-side eyeball check) differences would be overlooked.

When ESA reported on a Hubble deep-field galaxy survey , they came within a whisker of stumbling over a connection which seems to largely evade modern astronomy: The reheating, driven by the galaxies' ultraviolet starlight, transformed the gas between galaxies from a cold, dark hydrogen soup, to a hot, transparent plasma over only a few hundred million years. OK, so if space is full of plasma, why not treat it as such? Plasma is magnetically & electrically active, vastly different from the colder, gravity-driven cosmologies upheld of late. So many features of galaxies — of our own solar system — make much more sense if interpreted as being formed relatively quickly by active plasma fields rather than by cold rocks rattling around loosely. Comets are a classic example, radiating where they shouldn’t in unexpected ways. But it only starts there — so many planetary & lunar features yodel “plasma” that they almost defy counting. It’s good to see the concept being at least hinte

Xming is an X server for MS-Windows. With it and something like PuTTY , you can connect to a Linux box & make your ’Doze workstation slightly useful again. Today, Xming was updated. It’s now more compatible with ’Doze and with the “original” X.org server (from which it’s been ported), featuring ever-more-sensible keyboard mappings and increased SFU/SUA compatibility. It doesn’t bring you a empenguinated machine, but it does bring you a big chunk of the utility very quickly. You get some very odd looks running KMail or Konqueror from a ’Doze box, but it can be very handy.

Another piece of SWMBO shopping judo: she found some Belgian chocolates for a small fraction of their retail price, branded... Duc d'O ...which I interpret to mean “Duke of Gold” if not a basic “The Duke” although given my fabulous knowledge of Belgian, it could just be a water-fowl slapping its own forehead. Either way, the ingredients looked boring, but the “duck doo” itself tasted excellent!

I wrote a few articles on debugging for International Developer magazine & en-route ran across a reversable debugger for Linux called UndoDB . This straps onto dgb or ddd or whatever, and adds reversability. Where you once stepped the cursor over instructions, now you can step it under those instructions, back-stepping or completely time-jumping your program backwards. Smoothly. Needless to say, this can make debugging much easier, since you can now start with an exposed problem, and back-track until the problem goes away. The rewinding even includes putting back the pseudo-random values initially placed in local variables (in C), so a bug which depends on one of these values can be re-created. This made choosing examples for my articles very easy. I was also pleased to see free “not-for-profit” licences available, and a 30-day trial run, so one can test it out for one’s self, to see how well it really does work before buying it. Very reassuring.

“ Four wings ” claims a University of Calgary PhD student of Archaeopteryx, one of our best-known bord fossils. “The idea of a multi-winged Archaeopteryx has been around for more than a century, but it hasn’t received much attention,” Longrich said. “I believe one reason for this is that people tend to see what they want or expect to see. Everybody knows that birds don’t have four wings, so we overlooked them even when they were right under our noses.” Archaeopteryx looks very much like a South American bird known as a Hoatzin & its feathers etc seem to be fully developed, all of which speaks against it being a proto-anything. The discovery of penguin fossils amidst dinosaur fossils in New Zealand in recent years also tends to hint that birds & dinosaurs aren’t temporally arranged as simply as one might hope, so it’s interesting to see a fresh approach to this fellow. Longrich asserts that “birds descended from arboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to modern flying squirr

This afternoon’s social exercise was sister-in-law’s birthday near the spring in downhill King’s Park (down on the road near the Swan Brewery). Lots of happy, well-fed people & of course happy cameras. We had a kookaburra sit in a tree about 5 or 6m away (littlest girl often calls them “kookabuggas”) which the camera freaks all went crazy with. It also scared off (& poohed on) a couple of crows ravens. There were many wattle-birds & much bush for der kinder to crash around through. Monica & Roslyn contributed their special character to the occasion by lobbing things like beans & pistachio nuts (“misstashio nuts” according to littlest girl) at everyone. A good time was had by all. We even photo’ed an excellent personalised number plate on the freeway en route home.

Well, Ubuntu have surprised me again, with a modern, full-speed distro based on the Xfce window manager . Why is this special? Well, for a leading-edge company to do something this retro-looking is a classic Shuttleworthism. Mark is a very bright lad, and has realised that not everybody wants the biggest-horsepower flashest-technology window manager. Mark’s talk on his Soyuz (TM34) flight was quite an insight into this insight. He speaks wonderingly of molten metal running across the capsule’s window, clear that this was a deliberate design choice by the engineers who built the thing. And why did Mark fly? He realised that it was something he’d always wanted to do — a little risky but noble & ambitious — so he did it. Xfce has a reasonable amount of flashness — don’t get me wrong there — but manages to do it without dumping the fuel-guage through the floor. It will work beautifully, for example, on machines which Vista just laughs at. For everyone else, it will be faster & smo

It seems that some people are difficult to please . Statements were made to the effect that funding will stall-out or confuse Debian development — & even that Microsoft or some other puppet-master might be behind dunc-tank ! Blow that poster up? I bit my tongue — hard — & made my response to that last one short & pointed. And social. It’s like most other FOSS: it’ll be tried (by some very smart people) & if it works it’ll be adopted; if it doesn’t, it’ll get the boot. End of story. Besides, I think it’s something which really needs to be tried. Remembering Mandriva’s most recent burst of funding, it won’t be painless, but it will be very much worthwhile. And it seems to work for Ubuntu reasonably well.

Some supernovas appear to be too bright , possibly leading to their demise as “standard candles” for scaling distant events with. The only constant thing is change, it seems.

Well, facing Cydonia , anyway. This view of the “face on Mars” should put paid to many of the “aliens built it” theories, anyway.

It turns out that you need less time to keep fit than has been thought; in fact, these students were notable for “similar improvements in muscle health and performance induced by two such diverse training strategies” as 30 seconds of exercise every 4 minutes (2.5 hours a fortnight) vs 90-120 minutes a day (10.5 hours per fortnight). The researchers concluded that “short bursts of intense exercise may be an effective option for individuals who cite ‘lack of time’ as a major impediment to fitness”. The basic idea is short, vigorous exercises with rest periods in between. The article links to others, for example, on how hiking can cure depression & more vigorous exercise can help a person to heal faster.

SWMBO has been doing some interesting shopping at op-shops, including buying three sets of reasonable-quality leather boots at $10 a pair, thus equipping the Mills family (wife & at least one, probably 2, children out of 5) with footware in the course of about fifteen minutes. Such marvels of economy can’t be universal, of course, otherwise the being-strapped-for-cash terms in one’s life wouldn’t be so bad. It turns out that now is the time I set out to discover that certain ADSL routers can’t really forward inbound UDP traffic correctly through their NATs . It took a while to eliminate all of the other possibilities, but that seems to be it. 5-letter name, begins with a ‘d’, no surprises there. Even though there’s not a lot of control to exercise here, to do this doesn’t make one look stellar as a technician. Ah, well, hopefully a TCP VPN won’t be such a bear over ADSL. I can DMZ the server end, and that gives me half a connection, but can’t DMZ the client end. Hooray that their m

[Borrowed from a Yankee friend] A woman named Emily renewing her driver’s license at the County Clerk’s office was asked by the woman recorder to state her occupation, She hesitated, uncertain how to classify herself. “What I mean is,” explained the recorder, “do you have a job, or are you just a . . .?” “Of course I have a job,” snapped Emily. “I’m a Mom.” “We don’t list ‘Mom’ as an occupation. ‘Housewife’ covers it,” said the recorder emphatically. I forgot all about her story until one day I found myself in the same situation. . . this time at our own Town Hall. The Clerk was obviously a career woman, poised, efficient & possessed of a high sounding title like, “Official Interrogator” or “Town Registrar”. “What is your occupation?” she probed. What made me say it, I do not know? The words simply popped out. “I’m a Research Associate in the field of Child Development & Human Relations” The clerk paused, ball-point pen frozen in midair & looked up as though she had not hea

Just don’t try it using MSIE . Simple, eh? Of the 4 browsers I have here, all are safer in JavaScript than MSIE ( FireFox , SeaMonkey , Opera , Konqueror ). Three of those are easily available for 'doze & even Konqueror can be made to work in it. Er... sorry, I also have lynx , links & w3m available, plus Galeon and a few other GNOMEish built-ins kicking around. Spoilt for choice!

It seems that Andrew has taken up digs at Google. One wonders what impact a core Linux kernel developer (he’s ’Strine, too) will have there. Have you ever heard Andrew give a talk? I’m betting that his impact won’t be easy to shrug off. (-:

When you get to see how wide the variety of people who go by a certain tag can become, statements like “I hate Xxxxx” (substituting a pet belief for Xxxxx) make no sense at all. I have associates who are Islamic, Christian, Atheist, Buddhist & belong to other groups — & yeah, some of them are jerks. But most of them are not jerks . Whenever someone says (or implies) “All Xxxxx are jerks”, the vast majority of Xxxxxers who are not jerks get socially hit as well. Think about it, before slinging off next time. And don’t sling off. I’m pretty sure that’s the big secret to world peace. I know that it ushers in local peace fairly well.

Behold as many of the trendy, flashy window-manager frills you’ve always wanted appear in a version of FVWM. You too can have transparency & representatively minimised windows on a small, old PC (or have it very rapidly on a large, new PC). This looks like it’s about a round away from being a one-click release. There’s a little fiddling to get it perfectly set-up now, but there’s obvious work being done to automate that away. It comes with a range of impressive themes, from elegantly simple to overwhelming, & a number of thoughtful, practice-oriented shortcuts etc. And it works with underpowered machines, too, which implies reasonable performance on machines with poorly-supported hardware.

Ah, the virtues of direct experiment! (-: I spent a fair while stirring the sago while it cooked, so it was quite a relief to get an excellent result out — especially for an essentially non-cook like myself. The blandish flavour of the sago makes an excellent contrast with the sharper flavour of the chocolate. It could have survived a small chunk of ginger or mint as well, I guess. There’s scope for the next experiment...

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition have extensively reviewed earlier studies of this assertion — however, after some reservations... Dairy foods varied widely in their content of nutrients known to affect calcium excretion and skeletal mass. Foods such as milk and yogurt are likely to be beneficial; others, such as cottage cheese, may adversely affect bone health. ...they went on to state that “most had outcomes that were not significant” or in other words, they can’t tell for sure, either way. However, they were able to say that ingesting dairy was probably helpful for white females under 30 years. Scratch me on two grounds. These values suggest that there is little risk of harm to the skeletal system if recommendations to the general population to consume dairy foods are heeded. However, these values do not provide a solid body of evidence to support this recommendation. So... not as clear as was once thought, but based on the premises of the study, probably not too harmf

It seems that AfC’s fiancee wants today to be a software-free day . Historically, it turns out that she has a point — well, half a point, anyway. Several religions have a rest day every week, and a common one is (kind of) Saturdays, known as Shabbat or Sabaoth. Most practice along these lines runs the day from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, although some run it from 6PM (18:00) & a few want to run it on Sundays instead. The basis for this is typically either celebration of a dramatic rescue of the creed, or memorial of the day of rest at the end of the creation week. These Saturday traditions seem to have a far stronger basis than the Sunday ones. For example, the word for “Saturday” in many languages means or sounds like a rest day (Italian gives us Sabato, for excample, & Portugese gives us Sábado). However, I did say “half a point” & the missing half is that the day of shutdown typically includes no work (ie, no computers) & no trading (ie, no shopping). I

It seems that Aiyana will be up this weekend instead — not sure exactly why & she’s coming up by coach instead of train, so there may be a detailed explanation to this. Today was quiet but otherwise very jet-lagged (arriving home & sacking out by 01:30AM seems to do that) & how how-to-raise-children meeting (ie, how to do it neatly, without trashing them) this morning was cancelled so I’m feeling slightly de-railed at the moment, despite being among familiar scenery again. I re-set my laptop’s networking again, so my flat/boring 8139-clone LAN interface works as it once did (ie, no fiddling) and my “Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG” card likewise. That was it for excitement today, such as it was. Looking forward to a top weekend, now.

The VirginBlue flight was a non-event and I cannae recall many of the later chunks of it, from which I deduce that I actually slept through part of it. Lucy wound up being a temporary doctor & avoided having the ’plane divert to Kalgoorlie for a sick lady passenger. Long-term airport parking worked fine & turned out to be about half the price of a pair of taxis. Fuel is $1.21 a litre here instead of $1.08 as it typically is in Brisbane. )-: The last afternoon there was spent at a Wynnum beach , with nifty water effects at the shore & memorable park toys (including some literally blue whales & the paddle-pool to end all paddle-pools (not shown on the satellite photo)). I miss the family (Mills) that hosted us there already. They did many encouraging things & also supported our two littlies well. I think Aiyana would really have enjoyed the people & the stay. Ah, well, it’s not the perfect life. Said family is planning to move to Tasmania, so perhaps we can visit

It seems that most (or all) birds have molecules called cryptochromes which are magnetically sensitive — enabled only by blue light . This implies that magnetic birds won’t do so well at night, but also prevents them from going (literally) bonkers in caves or other places where the magnetic fields may not be so trustworthy for navigation. Because cryptochromes have been “strongly conserved” between species, “all biological organisms could have the ability to detect magnetic fields, even if they do not use them”... so, if you see someone tottering about with blue glasses on...

Quoting a Technology News article: The Malaysian government has saved up to 30 percent on information and communications technology costs among its agencies under the Open Source Software (OSS) initiative. Nice to see Malaysia making significant, quantifiable savings from FOSS. I wonder what tricks our determined enemies will pull out of their corporate hats in an attempt to answer this? M$ — by the way — is the standard symbol for Malaysian Ringgits.

...the bitingly cold, blowey Scarborough beach . The food was excellent & we had a dude running around on a sailing thingy with wheels on, pulling broggies, which was entertaining. There were also some extremely climbable trees in the playground & some excellent beach-walking — including some very heavy, very dark little stones & some interesting shells. And a cap, which said “Cowboys”. Young Ryan wore it home. Afterwards, we stopped & looked at a bunch of surf-kiters, which was amusing in itself as one of them stepped off his board & accidentally went barefooting. We were impressed & evidently so was he. Traffic on the way home was sluggish, once we’d got to the Gateway bridge , as the peak-hour traffic bunched up on us heavily after that.

Yesterday’s lunch expedition was much more conventional. We trundled down many tens of kilometers of 8-lane 120km“Motorway” (the Smith Street Motorway and the Pacific Motorway) into Brisbane and ate at the Sizzlers there (well... at Mermaid Beach anyway). These banana-benders are fairly serious about their bus-lanes — there were braces of them in six-lane & even some four-lane roads. They are also quite up-front about the risks in yakking on one’s mobile en-route, as active signs on the motorway reminded us that it was $225.00 & 3 demerit points per offence. They’re pretty slack about speed-limits, though, as we saw many vehicles doing well over 120km/hr in a 110 zone. We almost came a cropper before a careless driver. The vehicle we were following crossed an intersection , then two other vehicles entered our road by turning rightwards across & into it towards us (out of a stopping zone). Uphill. The second one followed the first & if Lucy hadn’t danced on the brake pe

InformIT has posted a new OpenVPN tutorial , which is excellent because it’s a neat, simple link and/or VPN utility — portable, too, because it runs on other than Linux as well. If you need to set up a VPN or just need to get a remote user hitting an office server (platform almost doesn’t matter), then OpenVPN seems to be an excellent way to do this. Read on & connect away!

The TwinHead dudes did something else unexpected: they plugged in a FireWire ethernet adaptor to run their diagnostics through, and of course Mandriva auto-detected it just fine... Unfortunately, it replaced my ordinary, boring, wired-LAN interface and this wasn’t as evident as I expected it to be. I’ve been using the wireless interface exclusively, so it took me while to figure out that eth0 was no longer the RJ-45 (wired) port. Once that was clear, setting it back to “dumb wired port” again was simple & easy.

Went for a drive up Tamborine Mountain today (the missing “U” is deliberate, it ain’t there on the signs either) & had a picnic lunch at The Knoll with our hosts (Peter & Diane Mills), followed by a walk down to see Cameron Falls (pictured) AKA Sandy Creek Circuit. There was a set of country markets ( Tamborine Mountain Country Markets ) running at the top of the hill, & I picked up some truly delicious Hot Chilli Chutney there (Lucy scored some delicious Lemon Butter) from E Petersen’s “HomeMade Preserves” (really based in Toowoomba). The Chutney is apparently used as a curry base by genuine Indians and Sri Lankans — after tasting it, I can see why. (-: The rainforesty bits were impressively beautiful & we had turkeys (Australian bush turkeys, not the common gobblers of Yankee festive seasons) come to supervise our eating. Driving up there was a bit bouncy, but the walking track was well fitted-out, with an edge of flat rocks on the dangerous side plus fences across t

Rutgers have run Linux on an XboX to privide hand-rehabilitation routines for stroke victims. Commercial hardware, “But such systems [...] could open the door for supplemental home training” — how well that fits an (open) Linux-based system. If you like it, take it home... unlike the alternatives, you ain’t gunner get sued for any EULA violations.

Not on Perth ? Looks like I’ll need to stay in WA for SFD 2007, then. Not an inspiring reaction from LCA2003’s hosts. I’ve plenty of both CDs & words here to give away.

I get to polish up an upgrade from Mandrake 8.2 to Mandriva 2006.0 today, the last details of which are quite slow (I have to do a trial upgrade of part of its packages, then add non-obvious dependencies and maybe temporarily remove some packages, then have it try again, repeat until done & the big bunch it’s doing now takes about half an hour to process). Tomorrow night, we get to fly off to Queensland for a week, to visit some friends of Lucy’s and interrupt some of the dispiriting social & mental loops we’ve become stuck within. Unfortunately, Aiyana won’t be accompanying us, as her Collie family have said “ No ” and made all manner of unsubtle suggestions about how angry they’d be if she went anyway (basically, there’s a risk that they’d “cut the rope” on her if she did). Never mind that the excuses have no real basis in fact, or that we’ve OKed her going to places like Sydney with her bio-Mum in the past. )-: Tomorrow morning, I get to update a customer’s server from Man

In past CT scans, I’ve had the automated part feel very clunky and uncomfortable, but today it was smooth and gentle. The operator-bloke seemed very pleased with the results, although to be honest I don’t have a very clear idea of what might appear pleasing about a CT scan to radiography tech. I got down to RPH, head-scanned, & re-trained fast enough to use the same train ticket for the return ride, which these days is unusual given the ticket timeouts. Hopefully, the plate production and surgery go as well.

The penguin wins on security & price, which are two points in which MS would have to be swimming strenuously uphill to hope to match. This mentions the Indian state of Kerala’s decision to fly with the penguin: Running a Windows desktop PC has become increasingly annoying for users who must cope with spyware, adware, viruses, security patches, upgrades, crashes, reboots. ...and their education minister went on to say... We have decided that we will use only free software for computer education in Kerala schools. We have implemented the Linux platform in high schools; it will be implemented in other schools step by step. Another excellent micro-quote: Kerala is following the footsteps of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Goa, West Bengal, and Delhi, who are also in the thick of bringing Linux to schools. That’s a fair chunk of India named there, already. I wonder if/when Australia will wake up and follow?

Turning back to some fine old words... ...and quoting “Proverbs 26:12” ( from a New American Standard Bible)... “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” Some truths evidently do stand good for a long time (-: well, so I claim :-) This saying explains a lot of politics, marketing — oh, & some science, too :-)

This is another, more-lasting birthday snack. To my surprise, the mint sits at a nice level, just giving it a nice flavour without being too dilute or “loud”. I’ve just noticed that most of the foodish things I got for my birthday are full of chuckalot chocolate, but it’s almost entirely the nice, flavoursome stuff rather than the flat-tasting “milk chocolate” syrup typical of Easter eggs.

Quoting from here : His former clients have run out of puff, but Arthur O’Connor hopes his new invention does not. The ex-funeral director has developed a slient, micro-wind [1m diameter] turbine that could revolutionise sustainable energy in Australia. Mr O’Connor, who left school at 14, said the internationally patented device could potentially halve residential electricity bills. He has had no engineering training and spent 23 years fine-tuning the Hush Energy turbine. “If we had one of these on every home we wouldn’t need to worry about nuclear power or anything,” Mr O’Connor said. ...now quoting from here : Power output for the turbine has resulted in much higher power generation than previously recorded. With a wind speed of 15 metres per second (54 km/hour), output has increased from approximately 680 watts to 915 watts, based on a 1 metre diameter model. One of the best results of the testing was the increase in the performance of the turbine in moving towards higher efficienc

These things are a lot yummier than they sound, and came cheaply from the Gnangara Markets today. Something a little different like this makes quite a welcome change.

It seems that the hospital has held onto my bits of skull for too long, so they’ve officially run past their use-by date. This means that I get a Titanium plate instead (call me “ Ti n H ead N ed”), so Professor Stokes has been making arrangements to put me through a special CT scan (Computer Tomography, xrays steered by a stepper motor) to take pictures and have a suitable one built. This will set my cranioplasty back a couple of weeks (so call it late September or early October), but makes me glad to live in a country in which such technology is pretty much — to use a Perthite term — “par for the course” (of which Perth shelters 42 and more dot the highways around the state ).