Plantagenet Penguinista

OpenOffice Writer. No, I kid you not. It quells all of the riotous JavaScript etc, gives you a plain layout, & best of all you & your friend the Delete key can have fun culling useless rubbish, making font sizes meaningful, readable, & you can save the most successful results as Writer ( ODT ) files for later. Oddly enough, I’m starting to look forward to my email — even wading through a hundred or so spam a day — thanks to SMS (/ME WAVEs across 12 megameters).

ACAICC2 == “As Close As I Can Come To” but fits into the Title. Plugging in extra RAM was a no-brainer... except that this laptop has a dodgey socket which allows the RAM to sit right — but not quite right. Sorted that out by removing/replugging & all was then fine. PS, if anyone in Perth wants a 0.5GB SODIMM, give us a whistle via email (forename @ cyberknights domain). I put a new 250GB hard drive into a caddy, plugged it into USB2 socket, was then able to cp across the live system (plus another 10Gb of data files via another USB2 caddy, which seemed to go faster, perhaps because it was coming from a new 200GB drive rather than an older 60GB), reconfigure grub for the new drive, fauxed as internal (sda not sdb), then I shut down services, cp ’ed only changed files again (logs, etc: a few seconds), remounted all oft-modified partitions ( /home , /var ) on the new drive, brought up services. Now running effectively on new drive via USB2 with maybe 1 minute ...

...& you’ll get video of this dude climbing a 45 storey hotel in Hong Kong — with no climbing gear. Eep! It’s amazing how stunning “random” can be.

...nice mushrooms, too. Tried a Mars Bar™ milkshake, which was not noticeably different to a Turkish Delight™ except the lumps were harder (& I’m such a softie that I’ll choose TD next time). Hmmm. May be I should help them to invent a Cheery Ripe™ version? (-: I’ve had a stab at “instant” pizzas (Margarita or Cheese-n-Garlic plus ingredients like eggplant, dried tomato, olives etc) then nuked, & discovered that grilled capsicum (“oven toasted red peppers” according to IGA) adds a nice burst of flavour. In other random news (’coz you need it :-) I discovered that living with a baby is an educational experience. Met a Mum trying to calm her whining 8wo, the quality of whine hinted at internal pain to me so I suggested she burp him. She reluctantly tried, got a burp, & sir immediately calmed down. A couple of minutes later, a similar whine started, so I met her eyes, raised my eyebrows, she nodded, sighed, said ...

...a Turkish Delight milkshake, which has also been dubbed a “must-have” now. I did manage to restrain myself to just one, this time. (-: Cafe 6.9? :-) I’ve also started to dabble in arty things, have begun to re-learn how to sketch, particularly as a foundation for acrylic/oil painting, & it’s turning into a very entertaining challenge. Hopefully, I’ll become actually skilled at it, & it’ll provide an adequate way of expressing the new things I’m learning.

Customer had copied some photos from a camera onto server N in a tearing rush about a month ago. N had been set up by others, made files available only by SaMBa shares, we had no root/superuser password, & the photos weren’t in evidence anywhere. Hmmm. Customer declared that he had “a sudo password” — eh? So we SSHed in as that user, did a “ sudo su - ” & set ourselves a new root password. Also added a couple of non- sudo -capable users, & searched the entire machine. No matching photos on N at all. Hmmm. Searched workstations (numbered clockwise from the aircon) 1, 2 & 3 with no joy. Double-hmmm. Having nothing better to do, I searched server O — & bingo! there were the photos. They’d been copied onto the ancient server by mistake. It’s always the simplest errors that cause the most fuss — because everyone assumes they can’t happen. Deeper hmmm. I could almost certainly write a decent book about this pat...

I went to the Perth Blood Bank yesterday morning, & donated. They had a sign up pleading urgently for platelets, so I asked about that & donated those & plasma ( apheresis ) instead. I wound up giving a double lot ( 2 / 3 of a billion platelets , over 600ml of plasma ) & did it so well (56 minutes instead of 59, no interruptions or crises) that they want me back in a month instead of three. A nurse named Beatrice (“Bee,” an Indian-based lass of about 30) will even be studying the results. I had a happy little coincidence in arriving, as well. The #344 bus which I’d planned to be on went through earlier than expected, so I grabbed an 887 & rolled up at 07:30 instead of 07:00 as was written on the card, which turned out to be a good thing, as the 07:00 was a mistake, the blood centre didn’t open up until 07:30 anyway [links to the shiny new Google Transit , featuring TransPerth ]. Happy little coincidences are good — more useful than ...

One of the many/various things which OpenOffice Writer allows me to do is to open an HTML file, swiftly hack through it (converting tables to text, wiping odd styles, etc) adjusting it to be actually readable, etc. Then I can save it as an ordinary document (ODT), and/or as a PDF for someone to just read, or an MS-Word DOC file for them to play with on their ’Doze box, or RTF for someone on a Mac without MS-Office installed, or just plain ’ol HTML again, for re-publishing on the web in more readable form, lighter-weight, easier-to-Copy-Paste etc. Or just plain easier-to-deal-with HTML sans a lot of the crud that “commercial” HTML editors enjoy adding (or just plain crud that MS-Word buries the HTML in). Philosophy Alert! (-: Those of you who know Jethro Tull’s song Thick as a Brick will begin to recognise that this kind of virtue becomes fairly much inevitable as a spin-off of software written by the end-users for the end-users instead of by employees...

...well, the menu said “Milkshake” & it sounded odd enough to be worth trying, so, recklessly, I did. The result proved so incredibly more-ish that I had to try a second one after my Penne-whatsisname-with-mushrooms. The whatsisname was delicious — as always — but now I have another “addiction” tying me to Cafe 7. (-: Ah, life is soooo hard! :-) Seriously, little pleasantries like this tend to help keep the damage from the big misses to a more controllable level. I think the cost in calories is quite trivial compared to the potential for damage repair.

The Problem I ran across an example of visual/spatial perception today which fell into place when I thought about how I’d arrived at a conclusion which happened to use it. Customer was using Squid at a remote office to interact with intranet work pages served by Apache from a central machine. Clients were sometimes getting good results, sometimes getting part-pages, occasionally getting nothing. This did not “feel” right for either Squid or Apache, either of which tends to die fairly obviously, with an error page or a log entry, or both. So I asked a simple question: did the internet pages get fetched over the VPN ( OpenVPN ) or directly? Through the VPN. Hmmm. Careful scanning of the VPN config files revealed that it was using ping & ping-restart to keep the link alive. The ping time had been set to 280 seconds, which is right for not hammering the NAT/Masquerading on a router, which is often set to timeout at 5 minutes (300 seconds). The ping-restart time, ...

...& my hat’s off to the blonde, smiling staffer who’s become startlingly good at the simple task of making iced chocolates with cream & ice-cream. (-: Got to see a Ray Walston impersonator , too. He seems to have a useful sense of humour. (-:

Whoever they are, they need to be strung up for leaving FrontPage footprints all through their clumsy effort to forge a notice from the ANZ Bank, including their name, & fragments of their filesystem. Society’s getting quite poorly when we can’t even drum up competent greedy idiots any more. (-:

Getting a place to rent is harder than it used to be. Rentals in Perth sort-of start at $200 a week for the basics, & house prices seem to launch from about $400k. Tried a couple of places around the $170 mark & faced over 10 competitors each time. A pity, because some of those were in fairly convenient locations (good transport, shops, accessories like beaches). They also require fairly lengthy commitments, which only sort-of fits with the idea of eluding the trap which has been established for me should I try to do anything real or useful in personal social terms. Said trap could only be eluded by sacrificing the one remaining past component which I place any value at all on. To say that “this hurts” would be a massive understatement, but by itself it outweighs any of the extensive personal erosion (yes, even the plethora of lies told to & about me) I’ve suffered in recent years — except one particular ( non-malicious intent , for a change) altera...

Some of the markets which are supposed to be open on long weekends aren’t, & some are. Ditto shops. Pity that the Midland Military Markets burned down & haven’t been replaced, although some of the stalls press on in the Farmers’ Market in Midland proper & I did meet an amazing artist there (she was selling clothes & dolls; the language was a bit short but otherwise had a lot in mental common, almost exactly half my age but that didn’t seem to phase her at all). Also met an 18yog on a train to Fremantle (both Markets open there) at about 10AM who had got to sleep at about 6AM so was not exactly firing on all cylinders but held a hilarious (if somewhat arbitrarily random) conversation which kept about half a dozen other passengers amused. Her main (perceived) problem was staying awake on the train so she’d be able to stagger off to a Fremantle Cat to get home. She seemed to think men in general were evil but not this man, which was a pleasant...