Plantagenet Penguinista

Had a rainy day in Perth today, but in Freo in the morning it just spat & sputtered, so I dressed lightly (tee-shirt & jeans). Later, it ganged up on me. I left a customer premises in Northbridge, got half-way to real eves (shelter) & it started hammering down. So I ducked under a lone eve & waited. After about 5 it mellowed just a little, so my frustration got the better of me, & I dashed through it for the real eves. Just as I arrived — <click!> — it stopped completely. Grumble, grumble. Later, as I waited at Joondalup train station, it came thundering (literally) down after I’d had a clear walk from Candlewood (after missing two busses one close after the other). Strolled onto the train, wondering whether to stop at Stirling en route or not, & the announcement came over: “this Perth service will run express from Joondalup to Perth.” Hmmm. Decision made. However, the timing for several little things arranged itself just fine, so it worked out well in the

I’ve had the last 3 professionals I saw explain to me that moving to Hobart would be a Bad Idea, for three different reasons. I’d expect the next two (Wed & Fri) to assert similar things, reinforcing at least 2 of the 3 different reasons I’ve been given. This bears some thinking about & planning. Yay. I had nothing better to do with my time, no difficult decisions to make. )-: Well, this ain’t a perfect world, & expecting it to be so just because one wishes for it is both pointless & frustrating. Not to mention other, more harmful things, which a lady I know — a genius in her own quiet way — has a brilliant nutshell definition for.

Yesterday was kind of amusing, since Daylight Savings went away in WA. Some shops opened at the “right” time (ie, when DST said they should) & others opened at the really-right time. The first set pleased people who hadn’t changed, but also confused them when they ran into (literally: watched a lady walk straight into a sliding door & another push her externally-fetched shopping trolley into one) shops playing the second game. I guess the change happened for Sunday in order to minimise the damage, & I have to say that watching a Monday like that would have been both more amusing & more catastrophic — /ME wonders what traffic patterns would be like.

...has been young children spontaneously deciding that I’m marvellous, & wanting a cuddle. This started with a 3yob “going to see grampa” with his grandmother at Cottesloe Train Station. This kid had a very solid build (solid, not fat) for a 3yo, in fact looked about 5yo, & was running around prodding buttons & the like — had to be grabbed by grandmother before hitting the Emeregency call button — so you could put it down to sheer exuberance, but the others were a complete non-plus, e.g. walking through a Subiaco shopping centre & get spotted by (guessing) 4yog. I feel impelled to point out that I really don’t know these kids (or caretakers), am wearing black jeans, boots & a black LCA2006 shirt (so not especially colourful or attractive in any way), no not meet eyes or do anything to “buy” attention, do not frequent the areas concerned, <shrug> really don’t understand. <shrug mode="again"> seems to have simply stopped at about lunch time.

Here’s an interestingly different approach to nuclear-appearing scarring on an ancient stone-based site. Canonical explanations get the UFO crew hot under the collar, with ancient technology said to be capable of raising & managing such forces, but these guys take quite a different approach to signs of 1500°C & evidence of ionising radiation. They don’t exactly propose that such conditions could arise again today, but the effects on an electronics-based society if they did would be... interesting to an impartial observer.

I’ve had someone denying a specific set of symptoms to me (actually, asserting a state opposite to symptomatic) while the tone & pace of their voice were in fact symptomatic. This is as silly as complaining about a virus or random crashing while running MS-Windows on a machine: these are symptoms, the disease is a system with an inherently unstable, insecure design. Ditto pouring turps into your fuel tank, then complaining that the engine is all rough. CQ DX CQ DX the engine will run roughly at least as long as you continue to feed it junk. The system will crash as long as the design continues to suck. The symptoms will always echo the presence of disease. To cure the symptoms, trying to convince your subject to deny them is worse than futile, it trains said subject into pointlessness & into acting out a lie to please one person at the expense of another (& doesn’t it practically always?). Identify (don’t merely guess at or wish about) & remove the cause of the disease

OK, here we are in the middle of Perth suburbia, cycling smoothly along bitumen roads, & the (rather excellent) bike develops a problem. If I hadn’t physically seen it, I’d be struggling to believe it, since it hadn’t happened to me in about 30 years (& then in a remote mining town): I put a thorn through the tyre (& evidently the tube as well). By “thorn” I’m talking about a 3-corner jack AKA cat-head AKA double-gee. The tube wasn’t thorn-proof, & thinking back over those 30 years (many of them spent cycling in Perth) I can fully understand why. Sigh. I really need more stuff to fix — not. Let’s see if I can get hold of a thorn-proof tube.

I have a potential career adjustment pending, which revolves around setting Asus eeePCs up as conceptual appliances. The eeePC would have another chunk of Flash for writing stuff like log entries, DNS updates, cache records, maybe email onto, which would conceptually be replaceable in situ by staff. The idea would be to plug in another (USB2 stick-based) chunk of Flash, which gets the structure & basic data from the old writeable Flash copied onto it, then remounted to replace it, allowing the old Flash to be unplugged & (if necessary) snail-mailed to head office. One immediate “appliance” function would be to act as a VPN, proxy-cache (& filter), DNS secondary, perhaps SMTP sender, & also (potentially alongside the VPN) as an ssh (potentially equals PuTTY ) port-forwarder. An aspect which seemed initially appealing (but the wireless connectivity issues in one client city will probably can this idea) is to deploy it behind a suitable ($85 retail) wireless ADSL router ,

It seems that the OK shop no longer stocks almond jelly. Well... HeavenTemple Grass Jelly seems to be an acceptable (if more colourful) replacement. Pity that the milk in with it has to be lo-fat, but I suspect that’s a useful compromise to make when the alternative is a possible heart attack. Oh, yes, & it’s only a buck for a half-kilo tin.

For those of you who are interested in medical factlets, apparently the psych damage I’ve been taking has conspired to whiz my cholesterol levels up from mediocre to oops — otherwise weird for a more-or-less veggo. So... farewell chocolates, eggs, cream, non-lo-fat milk, anything else I can find to dispose of. Hello, 85kg or less. Amongst other things in my life, I’m apparently moving to Hobart, so any residents therein, please chirp up with tips. You can also mail me at forename splat cyberknights dot com dot au, especially if the details get very specific. I’m looking for a small house or farmlet rather than a flat, doesn’t have to be central, does need to be near public transport & have DSL. As a separate issue, I might also need somewhere to stay for days or weeks when I arrive, while I sort out a residence. In contrasting advice, I’m under medical instructions to defer the move to Hobart for as long as possible — unfortunately for that idea, I have to go, soon. In sort-of rel

...well, a little bit, anyway. There are now some people I’m no longer allowed to refer to on my ’blog, which is one of a number of ridiculous-seeming handicaps which have been enforced upon me recently, along with a number of... imaginative accusations; & of course that means that I’m not allowed to tell you who they are. If you notice anyone censored from what I post now, that may be the reason. I’m also not supposed to post “personal” stuff, which is a pretty nebulous term, but I think I gather a reasonable understanding of what the invoker of that ban meant, so I’ll be carefully avoiding certain subject matter. Thankfully, there is no serious way that I can read “computer stuff” into that directive, so I should be able to post about getting a QuickCam Communicate STX & making it run with Skype on my laptop under Mandriva 2008.0.

I discovered yesterday that Innaloo has a King Kong junk shop, which pleased me because... it was open on a Sunday, so I could buy stuff nearby when I wasn’t busy elsewhere; I could replace my lost/broken/dunno mic headphones for my laptop... for $3; I could get cheap CD cases, as in the canvas-like plastic sheafs rather than the tacky, hard, thin, brittle plastic boxes... also for $3. So... it seems like my singing career can re-start (“Oi! Put that down !”) & I can pack bunches of CDs/DVDs including install/data CDs, backups & free ($0) book CDs into a neat, simple bundle for customers.

A while ago, I wrote a post on the Karpmann Drama Triangle . Today, I had the mixed satisfaction of experiencing a highly qualified psychiatrist carefully explaining that yes, I had been forced into one, & then pointing out the roles, & the people matching them, pretty much exactly as I’d deduced them to be. She also identified specific damages & risks, again pretty much along the lines I’d deduced. She also prescribed an acronym city to help me physically deal with the damage done. So... I may be “mad” to make such posts, but now I’m “officially” mad! Or call it “professionally” mad. That sounds so much more, well, formal. (-:

Ordinary powdered coffee from a tin/jar has a tendency to contain stuff (preservatives? not sure) which sends me a bit troppo , & it also has effects which kick in quite strongly, leading one to go from vaguely tired to an incredibly overshot awakefulness. However, some ingenious Indonesians have found a simple way to make this all manageable — yet attractive. “ Intra® Jahe Kopi ” comes in boxes of 20 bungkus, each of 25g, & it’s basically Ginger Coffee. As unlikely a combination as this may seem to some, the spicy ginger adds a nice bouquet (or whatever; pick a fancy word you like) to the flavour, yet makes consuming enormous amounts difficult. The result is that you (well, I) can enthusiastically consume the stuff without losing the plot: allegro ma non troppo . It’s a moderately gentle way of remaining alert. Oh, & it tastes excellent ! (-:

Grabbed an Epson CX5500 the other day, as it was on special for about 6x the price of lunch, & it prints & scans & copies. Next, I had a go at bunging it onto my Mandriva 2008.0-running laptop. None of the installation packages (named pips ) matched the distro version, so I grabbed a .src.rpm to rebuild a matched one. This requested a gazillion or so -devel packages, but did compile... then didn’t produce all of the required RPMs, specifically missing the one which contains the proprietary extensions, I soon discover. Grumble. So I plugged it in (is USB). The software manager for it (HAL daemon via D-Bus) chose a driver which looks almost right (one model number away), but which doesn’t quite work: it prints about 6cm of output, gets most of the colours wrong, then powers down (!) the printer & stops (discards the rest of the binary for the printer). Grumble , grumble. So I grabbed the “installation” package, to discover that it’s a tar-gzipp’ed shell script, which

Well... probably not so much a Near Death Experience as a Near Hospitalisation With Broken Limbs Experience. The reference to azaleas is from the movie The Man With Two Brains . Whizzing down the hill on Brighton Road, Doubleview (right to left, past the dark vehicle shown on the map) , when a chap strolls out of the shops, looks around, climbs into his car — with trailer — starts it, checks in the rear-view mirror, then pulls out & does a U-turn across the road. Slowly. Chances of stopping this push-bike in the space not provided? About zero. So I carefully optimised my path to squeeze between the tail of the trailer & the protruding chunk of kerb... & let’s just say that I’m glad I was wearing some skinny jeans, because floppy cuffs (or a carelessly placed pedal) would certainly have caught on the end of the tailgate (instead of just brushing it with heart-stopping suddenness), causing me to slam sideways into the kerb & following driveway at about 40km/h. Yes, I was

Mandriva sent me an email to announce that it has “relaunched its programme fighting linked sales: OS Refugees” as an EU free-market organisation has just joined the courts in pronouncing MS to be officially evil . There is an interesting nudge line in their marketing: Plug in a USB key, start up your computer and in just a handful of seconds the Mandriva Linux 2008 operating system is ready for work, listening to music or surfing the Net. No doubt, we’ll see MS turning desperado & offering a similar service using a super-turbo-hyped WinCE version or the like.

It seems that bats can be programmed fairly directly but crudely. The clever little blighters seem to have collected & learned how to use magnetite to help orient themselves (that & using Earth’s magnetic field for navigation), so scientists tried reorienting the fields in the magnetite, discovering that many of the bats changed their initial heading to, er, reflect the changes in their sensors. It’s a long way from there to a bat-directing joystick, but they did very much prove their basic point: that the magnetite is a discrete & effective component of the bats’ navigation systems. There are a few links on that page toward other interestingly batty stories, too.

Much has been writ about the cost of bubble-jet ink, & today I’m not going to make an exception. Oh, yes, & I seem to be in whingey mode anyway... One person I carefully instructed to get good-quality 3rd-party ( Calidad ) cartridges for their printer had a dependent (instructee is visiting relatives) complain to me yesterday that the printer would not print. On surfacing at the premises, I discover that the instructee had paid $17 a cartridge for branded ink instead of $8 a cartridge for Calidad ink (which, for that printer, comes in double-doses) & that the printer had exhausted not the black ink which they were printing with, but the Yellow & Magenta cartridges (within a few percent of axeing the Cyan as well). Replaced the cartridges with $8 ones & all works well. While I was grabbing the ink, I noticed that the wholesaler had an MFC (MultiFunction Centre; ie, printer plus scanner, usually fax, often copying facility) on special for $59. Now it happens to use t

A few of the people I know are wary of being helped by me, personally, because they’re aware that they don’t know the full story, so they’re overly cautious. This trips processes over, causes minor losses & damage, & is generally annoying but their point of view is rational & reasonable: they know that they don’t know, which in turn means that it’s sensible to remain at least a little unsure of how I’ll react, even if it occasionally gets socially-expensive. Now, that doesn’t mean that I have to like the procedure, but it does leave room for me to understand, to sympathise, & to some degree to work around these difficulties. For the next part of the tale, we’ll be dealing with The Recipient. It would be normal to abbreviate that as “Rec.” In this case, however, “Wreck’ seems to be a better fit. Wreck receives money from me occasionally through a bank account. They routinely drain the account completely dry, even though they know that they’re going to want to use it (e