Plantagenet Penguinista

OK, the insurance stuff has been secured, set up so those who should not have access to it, cannot. Soon, I will probably soon not be on Disability Pension. That & being isolated from the root cause of the bulk of the problems in my life means that real work again is a definite possibility. So... What’s next? Suggestions, please. So far, I’ve been told that ♦ I should ramp up my computer business again; ♦ that I should get back into photography; ♦ that I should resume writing articles (but that market has changed, a lot); ♦ I should find a way to use the psych stuff I’ve learned (qualifications? been there, done that); ♦ what else? I am likely to me married later this year to someone I can actually trust. Trust across the board. Honesty incarnate, this girl. (-: Said super-woman is running an organic chemicals production line, has skills in a variety of areas such as interior design, is competent at a wide var...

What does this one-liner chunk of BASH script do...? lsof | \   grep '/dev/[hs]d[a-d]' | \   gawk '{ print "echo $[",$7,"/ 1024]",$9, \     "$[",$7,"/ 10 / $(fdisk -s",$9,") ]" }' | \   sh A hint: we are running an instance of bzip2 -d piped to an instance of dd . An unhint: the /10’ld be /10.24 if we weren’t limited to integer math in BASH...

I have two handicaps which wound up with me being labelled “weird, but harmless” by the (mostly Deutsch) staff at a backpackers I lived in for a while. I discovered this after a Deutsch friend of mine, a genuine philosopher, had a chat with one in a conversation laden with “icht bin” & the like. These handicaps are a high IQ (equalled by a very clever little English girl, the wife of a family I’m staying with who carries two PhDs in mathematics & runs some significant educational services, her #4 daughter (now 19yo) consciously decided to become a geek), & a visuo-spatial learning technique. Visuo-spatial treats everything as patterns & structures, so IT work is paradise for that mind-set, I was pleased to discover. This also means that I am more likely to see real recovery from my accident-induced disability. However this & the innate intelligence mean that I can easily see & understand things which others can’t. That sounds fine at face value, but o...

I’ve pretty much filled up the 110GB 2.5" PATA (IDE) hard-drive which arrived with my laptop, so I went in search of a replacement. DMA in Osborne Park had a 500GB drive on their website, but this turned out to be an administration blunder, as they have not sold PATA laptop drives for over 4 months. However, Mel, a truly helpful Thai girl who is reception/sales there confessed that other suppliers might have some. I looked. Legend , just down the street , had their main supplier (Hitachi) cease manufacture of PATA laptop drives, but managed to convince them to do another run of 1000...of which they have about 300 left, so at most a few months’ supply — all 160GB. Just around the corner on Hutton Street , Navada still have a handful of drives kicking around, & sold me a 250GB version from Western Digital. Now to upgrade. Neither my “real” laptop (hp/Compaq nx9040) nor my “spare” laptop (IBM ThinkPad 30) have space for 2 drives, so I plugged it...

King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, decided that the Round Table Knight, Sir Leo Bobby Jim, needed a lesson in morality. So... she asked Sir Leo an impossible question, ordering him to return in a year with the answer. If he was right, she would hold a feast, celebrating for him. If he was wrong, Arthur would order him beheaded. Sir Leo Bobby Jim rode all over the kingdom, asking every woman the question: “What do you really want?” Each woman gave him a different answer... to be clever... to be wealthy... to be beautiful... et cetera ... After the year, Sir Leo still had no real idea of what women really wanted. He rode back into Camelot, dreading Guinevere’s coming words. En route, he passed some beautiful dancers in the forest... but as he drew near, they vanished, fading into the mist. In their place stood an old woman. Sigh. Sir Leo decided to ask her his question anyway... When she turned to reply, he nearly screamed aloud: she was the ugliest creature he had ever seen. One eye looked ...