Plantagenet Penguinista

I was surprised (& grumpy) to discover that of the roughly $100 it costs to fly between Burnie & Melbourne, only about $50 is actually for the flight. The other $50 vanishes in fees & taxes & other forgettabilia. Of the roughly $250 it costs to fly MEL -> PER, only about $60—$70 vanishes. So it almost looks likes the airlines are getting taxed about $50 a flight by the government, plus about 7%. Um, it’s not like they have roads to resurface or anything, & with (say) 300 passengers in a medium-sized ’plane, that’d be about $17,000 a flight dedicated to maintaining the runways etc (ie, costs not directly attributable to that particular flight). Wonder if anything sensible can be done about that?

Y’know how miners’ wives complain about the crud their husbands come back from work plated in? Now I have a matching complaint. Lucy did a stint of cleaning work at a mine this morning, & came home dirty & smelly. As well as the funny lead powder (which apparently permeates the mill area near the offices she cleaned), plus the greasy stains on knees & elbows, her fellow-workers both smoked, & did so in the car during the thirty or so k’s out to the mine, both ways. I must find out what sort of powder we’re using, both so I can buy some more, & because it chewed quite handily through all of this grot in our Elecrolux front-loader.

No, it’s not as violent as you hope^Wsuspect. I had a stainless-steel wok-like bowl to wash, which had been used for mixing up bread dough before feeding it to the fabulous Black & Decker Mystery Bread Maker (we have never had a manual for it). It turned out that much of the gunk couldn’t be scrubbed off, but gunk which had been sitting in the bowl soaking for hours just fell away. However, the bowl was determined to not sit steadily in the sink (it kept sliding around to be completely upright, & that bit had been done), & I had nothing heavy to hold it at the appropriate angle (no, the bread-maker wouldn’t do :-) so I fetched a hammer in from the shed, scrubbed it off, & used that. It does look a little... odd, that hammer, sitting in the sink, but it has done a good job. I’m about to go to brush off the last of the muck.

Tried Ubuntu on a new (ish) server for the first time in a while, today. The installer’s very pretty, running in a nice GUI from a LiveCD. This actually made things a little difficult, as the only spare screen I have is a klunky old 15” CRT which goes all fuzzy at any reasonable brightness. Ctrl-Alt-GreyPlus was my friend. The package installer is much faster at picking up package indexes than the RedHat-ish systems. Pulling down packages is just as slow, of course, but bringing everything up to date (including a new kernel) only took half a day versus about 2-3 days. Remember that this is over a dial-up modem. I’m using Pacific’s mirror in Sydney, not that it makes the slightest difference over dial-up. A lot of the config info is in different places, but it didn’t take too long to puzzle out. So now I have a pet server again, one that doesn’t matter if I trash everything on it, so I’ll be throwing together a set of short articles documenting ...

Mary wrote about the Romanian heat-wave she’s currently experiencing. I remember heat-waves, & driving away from Perth across the Nullarbor in 40-odd degrees C, but something happened on Monday morning which kind of changed my perspective a little. At about 08:15 I remember driving carefully along a snow-lined section of main highway (Murchison Highway) up towards Bulgobac River — & crawling carefully past a truck which was gently wending its way downhill at about 20km/hr. Why was it doing this? Just my opinion, of course, but the fact that he was driving on sheet ice may well have contributed a little. By “sheet ice” I don’t mean that gentle fuzzy white stuff which clings to the road poles sometimes as I drive over Mount Black to or from Rosebery in the early afternoon, instead I refer to clearly visible sheets of crystalline ice which literally occupy the entire road surface. My side had been scoured clear by a few sets of eager tyres as vehicles...

He who would live must fight; he who does not wish to fight in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. — Adolf H, My Struggle Something to bear in mind next time someone describes something as “natural selection” in action. It also highlight’s FOSS’s non-destructive approach to development. Perhaps we should whomp up an official philosophy & call it: “main() { kampf(); }?”

Yesterday’s snow on Mount Murchison was a herald, it seems. I can stand in our lounge-room & see snow on top of Mount Farrell, which peaks about 1km East of town (Tullah). Might go for a walk up there, later. Can’t say that home is ever that much warmer, when this is the first place I’ve lived where you have to put your butter into the ’fridge so it will melt a bit & be spreadable. (-:

OK, so modern birds are supposedly derived from beasties like Argentavis magnificens , a little feathered friend with a 7m (23 foot) wingspan. I was impressed many years ago when cousins of mine caught an eagle with a wingspan so wide that in order to pose it on a truck (semi-), they had to stand on each side of the tray & stretch their little arms wide. Magnificens is at least twice as wide as that, & weighed about 70kg (not far short of my own weight). One would hope that birdie was a delicate scavenger, since an angry or starving one would not be a kind thing to meet while out walking. While a veggo bird that big is possible, this one is drawn with the long, sharp beak typical of a predator. Nyeh! Keep the kiddies inside! At ¾ the wingspan of a Cessna, this would be something to watch out for while flying, & I don’t think even a Jumbo would do so well after sucking one into an engine. With its powerful beak and big clawed feet, Argentavis would have made a fe...

The weather has been a little odd recently. We had a coolish but not freezing day yesterday, & when I looked up at Mount Murchison yesterday afternoon, its sides (bare in the morning) were covered with snow. I also had a tiny event make me stop and think about the complexity of the systems we use. I inadvertantly brushed against the Tab key (auto-completion) when I started to type a command in to BASH, and it said: Display all 5151 possibilities? (y or n) All how many? This is a simple desktop machine. Typing a rarer letter (j) & Tab shows up 37 programs (jpeg2swf, java, jamin & jw, for example) which include complete programming languages, DocBook converters, audio system managers and image translators. Oddly enough, this illustrates some of the value in Free software, since the people making up this free ($0) Linux distribution would have been packing in software that they had been asked for. Rather than asking if the users are willing to pay $700 for an office suite, the...