Plantagenet Penguinista

Finds the modem, connects (with the correct numbers, so not just the modem talking to itself), gets PPP comes up (CHAP succeeds, or PAP does if I use that instead) handed 10.11.12.13 & 10.11.12.14 as DNS, pause 2 secs, “Modem hangup.” EVERY TIME What The Flock?

Freedom of choice is massively important to your child. That doesn’t imply that you should go insane & let them wander around totally uncontrolled. That does mean that as they understand that their opinions & actions are truly important (will change planned actions) to you (& so to others), they deduce that they themselves are important, so what they say & do becomes important to them, they mysteriously become responsible & considerate. To mention that this cues them up well for their teenage years & beyond would be the understatement of the century. You avoid all manner of potential trauma, such as conditioning them into Passive Aggression or Narcissism , or allowing them to slip into Karpman’s Drama Triangle habits. Quite aside from the outright material costs which will inevitably be incurred in dealing with the physical aspects of such traumatic outcomes, you will raise a child with genuine self-worth rather than hyper-inflated egotism (which often camou

If you like seeing your 10yo boy totally fascinated, hand him a headset plugged into a copy of Audacity & stand clear. (-: Depending on personality, that’s likely to work well for similarly-aged girls too, but the technological aspects of the experience seem to absolutely fascinate boys... & it is a gender thing, doubters are urged to watch families in shopping centres: the boys will be playing with a gadget, the girls will be on the other side of the shop chatting with someone they’d never seen before. While in the topic of shopping centres, if you’ve ever wondered why young children fuss so much while shopping, mentally place your face an arm’s-length above the floor & picture what the child can see. Underneaths of shelves hardly counts. You begin to understand why they like sitting in (or swinging from) the trolleys so much more. (-:

The modem sticks (different labels, identical USB IDs) would not work in Karmic Koala Kubuntu, work flawlessly under Lucid Lynx... in the sense of connecting & walking into PPP negotiation... but the modem hangs up after 2 seconds. No DNS acquired, or even an IP address. No errors from pppd at all, just the hangup. I’m typing this in from a Mobile Internet connection via a Huawei stick on Virgin (physical carrier is Optus), which has worked flawlessly from the first instant (works all the way from here (Albany) thru to Williams (almost Crossman River), then from just before Yule Du Roadhouse & all thru Perth... oh, & in Cuthbert, Elleker, Denmark, Kalgan...) What the faulk...? Any constructive ideas most welcome. Comment here or email myself @ cyberknights·com·au .

“The study [...] shows that cooperation is contagious. This comes from behavioural researchers, & in our eyes gives scientific proof that enlightened altruism, such as is found is open source projects, is real & pays off.” — that’s a good comment on the article ( linked here ) made at The Inquirer .

Plug hp Deskjet F2480 printer/scanner in, it prints out an alignment sheet, feed it to the scanner, hit the Black Copy button & it makes a copy if it — & in the process recalibrates the print-heads a little. But it won’t print anything. The print job takes about as long to fail to print as it would do to succeed in printing, with no action at all in the printer, & no errors thrown either. D’oh? It turns out that the nearest PPD file (for the Deskjet F2200 series) is not near enough. The PC is feeding the entire document (rasterised) down the USB cable, to the printer, which simply, silently throws it away. Using the name of the F2200 PPD file & altering it to be an F2400 PPD file, I search to discover the ferpectly correct PPD file tucked away in a package archive for some random Linux distribution... which happily includes the ability on-site to display the contents of the package & download individual files from it. Done. Fire up web browser, aim it at http://127.

If I don’t recognise that I have/am a problem, so refuse to “own” it, I can’t change it — it will go on, interminably. This is why I always welcome (constructive) criticism, no matter how painful it may seem at the time. The number of people who’ve been recorded as entering remission from a particular common kind of Personality Disorder without first admitting that all of there problems are the result of their own choices & their own actions: zero . That makes it evident that there’s a hard practical outcome available from at least some feelingy/opiniony things. Sooner or later, it becomes evident that you cannot actually change other people (without constant, outright, physical compulsion — a process I have less than no interest in), only they can change themselves. They may feign change (to please you, to duck unpleasant expression, to weasel something out of you which would otherwise remain unavailable to them), but they will not really change (as a leopard can’t change his s

I needed a new black cartridge for my printer, which was going to cost $26. Ink refill systems have produced... debatable results. 3 rd -party hp #60 cartridges (Calidad etc) aren’t available. So I soldiered into Hardly Normal yesterday (one of the few times I’ve had actual money over the last weeks) & bought a printer/scanner (with 2 cartridges) for $29. Even if they’re half-full cartridges (they should say so; IOW if they are worth in principle $13 each), that’s still a printer/scanner for $3. In one hand, I have two small black boxes with a scattering of electronics & some ink. In the other I have a large black box with two identical small boxes, a sheet of glass, much mechanical stuff, no significant difference in price. Is that a sane thing...?

In order to get ADSL here, I need to have a Telstra-based land-line, because all of the other ISPs have to work through GiganTor’s DSLAMs. Having Verizon start a retail business in Aus would teach T all about monopolies, as they have 40 million customers in the USA alone... It seems that GiganTor ain’t letting them use ADSL2 mode on the same DSLAM, either, as the previous owners of this house had BigPong ADSL2, but crew like TPG will only quote on ADSL1 speeds. When I hit my mother-out-law’s house in December 2007, T had trapped a Zambian student staying there with a $17/month ADSL plan... 256/64kb with a massive 200MB a month quota. When he’d blown the quota (pretty much inevitable) & been billed for the excess & complained, he was told (words to the effect of) “if you had a real plan, you wouldn’t be billed for the excess so readily” so they upsold him to a $75 512/128 plan with a handful of gigabytes a month in quota. I switched that to a basic AmNet ADSL2 plan with 10GB qu