Plantagenet Penguinista

I recently uncovered a couple of Personality Disorders (which, unfortunately, are not yet safe to explain in detail). You could summarise them in vaguely slangish terms as “Control Freak.” One of them (possibly both of them) results in fear of intimacy (yes, genuine intimacy, not mere sex). I have watched another person with the same Disorders drive their spouse to suicide, trash the lives of at least 3 other people (driving one of those to prepare for suicide twice), basically because they dread intimacy, so are more than willing to lie about stuff to protect themselves against the possibility of experiencing real intimacy. Another probable symptom is frequently speaking ambiguously or cryptically, which breeds insecurity in their victims. Chronically being late or forgetting things is a slightly more subtle way of asserting control. Ironically, another prevalent symptom is acting the victim — utterly failing to recognise their own responsibility, so blaming others fo...

From the Apache logs: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE63-3/100.21.110; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 This was using the web browser between Burswood & Vic Park stations. The phone was included with a Virgin contract, is full QWERTY keyboard, good (for a plastic brick) sound including MP3, fairly good colour video. Their broadband USB thingy works fairly well in my laptop. I did a little wvdial setup akin to Pia’s, which was klunky & slow on Day One, but fine afterwards (including Sunday afternoon). The ping times suck, as you might expect (≈500ms) but the actual throughput (including on sites highly unlikely to be cached for the general public by Virgin) seems to be fine. Their 5GB a month is a fairly reasonable quota ($34 on top of a phone plan) even for most ADSL these days, & they clamp it to ≈128kb rather than charging you for excess traffic.

A little boy went up to his father & asked: “Dad, where did my intelligence come from?” He replied, “Well, son, you must have got it from your Mum, ’coz I still have mine.” A doctor examining a woman who had been rushed to Emergency at hospital, took the husband aside & said, “I don’t like the looks of your wife at all.” “Me neither, doc,” he said, “But she’s a great cook & really good with the kids.” An elderly man seeks a wizard to ask him if he can remove a curse he’s been living with for the last 40 years. The wizard responds, “Maybe; but you’ll have to tell me the exact words that were used to put the curse on you.” The old man replies with no hesitation, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” [the laugh of those who have suffered time with a passive-aggressive personality disordered (PAPD) spouse will have a thoughtful tone to it, ditto the next one] Moe: ...

Want to grow your own food with out using nasty chemicals & pesticides? Want to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle? Want to meet & connect with people interested in creating a sustainable future? Heard about permaculture & want to know more? What is Permaculture? Permaculture is a worldview which opens people up to the vision of a sustainable future. In this introduction you will learn about intelligent organic gardening & design principles as well as issues surrounding sustainable behaviour! Permaculture is much more than just growing your own food, it is about skill sharing, using resources wisely & connecting with your community. It incorporates everyone, & encourages diversity, whilst empowering individuals into self sufficiency & resilience. This info session runs this weekend (25/26 April) at CityFarm Perth, adjacent the Claisebrook train station in East Perth , or 11/12 July, running from 10AM to 4PM in either session. Cost is $80 for concession, $1...

If you live in or about Perth & have a definite use for a free PC, a number of them will become available this week. All will have CRT (not flat/LCD) screens; Available processors vary, from about 600MHz up to about 2GHz; Available RAM varies from 128MB to 512MB, mostly DDR2 (retails for $15/24/35 for ½/1/2GB) Available hard drives (all IDE, 160GB for $85) vary from a few to a few tens of GB, will arrive with a clean KUbuntu 9.04 installation; All will have keyboard & mouse; Email me <leon at cyberknights spot com spot au> if interested.

There is a supermarket & coffee shop in South Perth, at the corner of Angelo & Coode Streets named “Scutti, a taste of Europe.” I was pleased, after wandering in there one day while waiting for a bus, to find good-quality hot chocolate on the shelves, at slightly better than Woolworths/Coles/IGA prices. Vittoria Dark Chocochino . I was even more pleased, while examining it, to be told by the supermarket staff that this was used by the coffee shop. Making some up is simple, as the container has a spinnable shut/shake/open setting, so one simply shakes enough into a mug, adds hot water, then white stuff. When I use Harvey Fresh whipping cream, the result is a pleasantly “American” creamy chocolate taste. Yum! Use & recommend! (-:

The word in question is WAIT. I needed to update OpenOffice Writer on two MS-Windows 2000 Pro machines today, from 2.2 to 3.0.1 in order to take advantage of a particular corrected feature which makes 3-fold brochures possible (almost easy) when printed out on an ordinary A4 printer. Because MS-Windows software has intermingled sort-of dependencies, I first needed to update a virus scanner version, then (on one machine) Java, then OpenOffice. While I was there, I updated (on one machine) or added (another machine) The GIMP. The virus scanner update failed on one machine. The machines are same make, model & specifications. The error message (at least there was one) was singularly useless. Running an MS-Windows workstation on-line, sans virus scanner, is essentially software suicide. So I hunted around to find another suitable virus scanner. 20 minutes after finding it, all done. Then I updated Java, which would not start until after the scanner update. Then I updated/installed The ...

Today, a woman working on an MS-Windows XP workstation in an adjoining room was sent an MS-Word 2007 document. LookOut was sore confused about what to do with it, & her MS-Word 2003 application refused to deal with it. So she forwarded the email to me. It went out through a Perth-based ISP, in through a different Perth-based ISP, arrived on my server in Melville. I fetched it back through those ISPs again to East Perth. Saving the .docx file from KMail on my Mandriva 2009.0 Linux-based laptop, then opening it with OpenOffice Writer 3.0.1 worked, so I SaveAs’d it as an MS-Word 2003 .doc file, then exported it as a PDF, & sent those back... where they wound up on a virtual host in Malaga. She fetched the email back to East Perth, was then able to read & edit the document. So... a document assembled in Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows could not be read using Microsoft Word under Microsoft Windows, but could be read under a non-Microsoft application under a non-Micro...