Plantagenet Penguinista

Many of our 13#### calls get routed through to Melbourne, but I hadn’t realised that our weather came from there as well. Last night, it rained. Seriously rained — the house shook. Then ths morning it rained again. And kept on raining. We’ve had maybe four five-minute rests in between. Now I think I can understand why West Australians are called "Sandgropers" — it’s the opposite of “sludgegropers” which appears to be what we’ve become here in the Apple Isle. Here’s one for Davyd, by the way: I’ve discovered that Mongolian Lamb Mix tastes really great as Mongolian Vegetarian Dim Sim Mix. These little taste bites may be dodgy on the definition of “Dim Sim” but they're fairly clear on their vegetarianity. The only spice on them is a touch of chili. The Mix adds a vaguely artificial flavour but the nett effect is rather yummy.

Changes may be afoot! (-: I’m on AUUG’s Talk list, & was interested to see them discussing this year’s conference — & that it would be their last . Hmmm. Then the suggestion was made that LA take over AUUG. Ummm. A cross-suggestion was made that LA take over both organisation & name with the idea of LA now being responsible for keeping the name alive. I mentioned that I’d heard discussion (in 2003) of similar proposals, & I CC’ed Committee on my reply. It looks like an interesting discussion to take part in. Since it’s already underway on AUUG Talk , that seems an appropriate place to continue it.

This morning I was tossing together breakfast for der kinder, & we’d settled on toast. However, I’d already used the boot polish (Vegemite®) & glue (peaner burr) so was looking for something different to use. I don’t have to share Barbara’s wonderful (& local) Saville orange marmalade, & nor do they like Mountains & Miracles’ (Zeehan) ginger marmalade... so I grabbed some choc-chip biscuits (a rare acquisition by SWMBO) & plonked one in the middle of each slice of toast. When I presented these, both AnnéRose & Alexander looked carefully at me as if I’d just sprouted large tentacles, or offered them sliced Devil or Wombat; then they laughed & tried some. They had tremendous fun reconciling the biscuits’ hard discs with the (relatively) soft home-made bread while they ate, so I have to declare this breaksperiment a success. One does wonder where juvenile demand will lead the next meal, however. (-:

OK, so here I sit before a dialup-backed copy of Firefox, needing a handful of fonts for a project I have in mind. So... do I spend a day clicking on font lists, looking for the perfect typestyle? Not when I use a shell-backed operating system packed with tools — like Linux! View, Source to have a look at the page structure, then crank out wget . Yes, even limited to 3kb/s to head off busyness complaints from SWMBO, this combo will drag down about 3,000 TrueTypes a day. I’ll give it a run on another site tomorrow, at which point it’ll be pushing the boundaries of a CD image. From a dialup modem. Now, the hardest thing is figuring out what GAEILGE_.TTF actually is. I’ll be looking for a program I can hack a TTF-name reader out of. Then I’ll either have patience or be a patient. (-:

One doesn’t really appreciate ADSL until one clicks on “Fish Fillets NG” on one’s dialup computer (Ubuntu #3 for me) only to discover that this few-hundred kilobyte game has sixty-odd megabytes of data files in tow, which are going to take most of a day to download, or that your updates include a new version of OpenOffice, which will take a day all by itself. In case anyone thinks this is Linux-specific, I plugged a USB mouse into a ratty old Win98SE system we were using for CD-based edu-games (the PS/2 mouse was pretty close to cactus) & the system died — won’t boot — & it wants about 3 days worth of full-on downloading to fix that — only, being a MicroSoft system, it won’t officially let me download that. The same mouse flawlessly & painlessly (& instantly) replaced a PS/2 mouse on this Ubuntu system into which I’m typing — only it constantly colour-cycles its entire suite of high-efficiency LEDs, making...

Richard Branson isn’t exactly in the same class as innovators like Mark Shuttleworth , but it’s definitely unsafe to presume that you know what he’s doing, & turn your back on him. This time, it seems that Virgin America saved more than it spent on IT by using Linux & other FOSS . If so, well done & another fine business trump card played to the surprise of many competitors. Thanks to Steve Jenkin for dropping the link onto the OSIA list .

How bad is it when SWMBO cuts loose at you for wanting the two littlies to write those big, milk-giving moo-ish things down as ‘kau’? On a completely unrelated topic, I went for a trundle down to Zeehan yesterday, & re-learned how bad Rosebery’s roads actually are. The chunk between Rosebery & Renison (“BlueStone Tin”) is at least as bad for slippery corners etc as Mount Black, but loses some of the interesting trees — in favour of big, solid rock-scapes, & at the cost of waterfalls (which were all up & thundering ’coz it was raining all day). It does avoid most of the steep slopes, & I gather from evidence of past earthworks that there was a fair bit of running around with bulldozers, sticks of jelly & large trucks involved in this. The few remaining km from the highway turnoff into Zeehan proper (over the well-named Pea-Soup Creek) is quite level & straight. The poor blighters pay higher supermarket prices (by rough...