Plantagenet Penguinista

...a replacement. I had a Mandriva 2008.0 server fail on Friday afternoon, but managed to fetch the HardlyNormal replacement machine, drop the SATA drive into it... & it failed to boot. However, I had Mandriva 2008.1 CDs handy, so I upgraded it, which en passant repaired the boot sequence. IMESHO, $200 is not that expensive for a replacement server. (-:

As I blasted northwards up the Kwinana Freeway from Canning Highway towards the CBD today, I discovered that the left (western-most) lane was closed — for waves! The Swan River was breaking right over the walls, cycleway, everything & drenching the lane completely. It even soaked the windscreen of the ’Cruiser I was driving along the fast lane, so poor unfortunates rowing their Kias or Hyundais along closer to the surf basically had to raise periscopes... Perth in general got whacked by the weather today, with things like trees broken across Risely Road south of Booragoon, roofs blown from car-yards on Stirling Highway (near my brilliant psychiatrist’s office in Claremont) & tiles from a pub in Freo. I also had a stunningly pretty banana-bender complaining about floods, very relaxing to listen to (nice voice, too) but she was using old memories, & I think recuperating from having organised a hens’ night. Silly chook! (-: G/D/R :-)

We’re going to live between two points in space-time, nominally ‘A’ & ‘B’. Partly due to English, we don’t know where or when ‘B’ will be. However, we might as well enjoy & make good use of the time in between as much as we reasonably can. It’s a very simple decision, & one seldom faced or made In Real Life™. Contra this come to mind some azaleas who seem to think manipulating people, lying to or about them, & getting upset with others — not due to right or wrong, but due to them disagreeing with said azaleas — is a fine way to be & will somehow produce positive results. A particular set of such azaleas, one of whom is on a disability pension & willingly clogs up the blue-outlined parking spaces (& farms out assets amongst relatives to improve compensation gains) yet often goes roo-shooting on a 4WD at night recently faced a conundrum in that their two youngest children (yes, like rabies...

A bus came through a few minutes early today, so I got to see it turn from Erinna Rd down Mirabooka Ave & had to see alternatives. Wound up walking (says Google Maps) 43km today, which should keep me fit’n’healthy, but which had me catching #344 after dark. I had a few minutes to wait, so I pulled out my bike headlamp, & (when the bus rounded the corner) held it in my hand so it lit up my (in hand) SmartRider card & the bus’s route number on the bus-stand sign. This spun the driver out completely, but he was very glad that he had no doubt at all (from about ½km away) about whether someone there needed him to stop. (-: Saw two excellent rental places during today’s expedition, which is a longer-term Good Thing. I have a frustrating problem Skyping a person in Queensland, & it’s their router’s fault, but the specified cure involves them dinking around with the IP config on their PC, & exploring the router’s admin interf...

Late last year, someone told me that they wanted a “normal” PC, so I grabbed a good cheapie Acer from HardlyNormal West Perth . It turns out that the asker had lied, again, which left me with a spare PC which had no particular purpose. It’s sat around for the intervening half-year or so, not doing much (some children have played games on it, it’s been idly used for browsing) but it ran Ubuntu fairly well after I’d brain-washed it into being useful (adios, XP Home) . To my surprise, HardlyNormal rang me last week, chasing the lying asker, but actually seeking the PC sitting across the room from me. Apparently, the ads had mentioned a different spec to what shipped, so they were giving out free replacements — with 8x the RAM, 8x the hard disk, 2x the CPUs (& those running 3.6x faster) — tough decision: not! So yesterday, I dragged el anciento Acero PCo in to West Perth & swapped it for an hp Pavilion a6430a — which runs a newer vers...

...introduced me to a new (to me) bit of cycling nomenclature: the “service.” I thought to give it a go, at least once, to see what happened. What happened was that the bike was totally revitalised: I hadn’t noticed how badly it had been deteriorating after only a few months, but they fixed a few spokes on the back wheel & re-trued it — an obvious improvement — but also went through cleaning & oiling & the like, which yielded an amazing improvement in outright performance. Gentle slopes which on Thursday had been marginally laborious act like they’re flat now, & I startled a couple of young ’uns as I overtook them & sped up a hill I routinely walked up in Landsdale .