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...

...also very delicious, again. Thank you, Café 7. Also watched a guy setting up & warming up to play Sax or Flute with some accompanying music there, swapped instrument, compressed-format & MIDI tales. Could almost feel my digestion improving with each reedily-warm note. Met a new Café waitress, a young lass with a name spelt the proper Gaelic way. Being new, she was nervous about getting everything right, but was patient & careful so that everything did work out right. (-: She seemed familiar with the music & it turns out that she sings as well (as does her Mum). This place is getting awesomely attractive, building as a collection of very small things rather than a single, failure-prone do-or-die effort. It starts with the obviously good food, works out through features like the music, artwork & (during the day) DVDs like Madagascar, & celebrates a finale on an amazingly helpful & cheerful (but not intrusive) team spirit.

I wandered out for a quiet walk at 09:00 this morning, packing an umbrella because I’d been told that Rottnest (~50km away) was seeing 102km/h winds. I wondered how long that would take to migrate to Perth. The wind outside was a moderate breeze. We didn’t get those gales, but around 10:00 to 11:00 we took a reasonable amount of rain — thank you, mine host, for that warning — plus some excellent, rumbling big-drums effects & now I see that this afternoon we’re seeing 115km/h winds in the hills, & patchy thunderstorms everywhere else. It feels comfortable to “know” an area well enough to have a rough idea of how these things will work out, without having to much think about it. This weather doesn’t look too good for the ~5km (walking or cycling) trip to a decent, good-value rest-err-wrong for tea, but we’ll see what happens at the time.

Bumped into a lady (late 30’s) on a train last night who was (against the TransPerth rules ) assembling a nice non-hot curry & munching it with some rice bikkies. Conversation landed on the curry & the ingredients for the bikkies. It turns out that she’d recently given up smoking, but was unable to stay that way. Why? Because her husband has a variant on CJD , a nasty degenerative disease which essentially wastes away your brain cells en masse. That sort of shook things into perspective very suddenly. My own problems are manifold & intrusive (featuring aspects like malice , & rash (but AFAICT non-malicious ) mistakes apparently made through fear) but really don’t compare with the certainty of having your loved one’s mind vanish, cell by cell, until they die a confused zombie. On the lighter side, I was able to make the day of a lass running a perfume stand (which was driving her troppo but funded her ECU studies of forensics ) by the simple exped...

This week, helped 4 different Mums struggle with unwieldy prams (& even less wieldy kinder), prompted a definite raise in morale for at least 8 people (made the day of at least one of them, a “fat” (hah!) wonder whose name is not Sarah), relieved Australian Geographic of a pair of projecting clocks for just over $20 ea (line price ~$90 ea), unexpectedly arrived with a cup of coffee for a Chinese-Malay princess, provided a full set of bedding for a Sudanese family... Sure there was something else... oh, yes, spotted a pair of dolphins playing under Canning Bridge... & ate at Cafe 7 again, twice — delicious as always. (-: Perth is an excellent place, naysayers can go looking for a train in Hobart :-) Could really, really do with a few more people explaining “why” for certain issues, though. Life would be great if it weren’t for a few gaping pieces of damage remaining, undermining all else.

When one has been walking kilometers every day, & cycling tens of km every day, one has one’s muscles tuned for walking or cycling, not running; After lugging a flying fox up a hill again 8 times, one needs to keep lugging the ’fox back every so often lest one’s muscles seize up; Fit 5-yo or 9-yo boys can soldier straight through/over stuff again & again which one must then struggle past, & one’s adult companions are sufficiently daunted by that they detour; Suddenly-absent Thandis leave a massive social hole about equivalent to a missing hut-full of mere mortals, & deflate most of the joy of physically conquering obstacles; Riding on a 4WD will get you up the hill faster — at a certain encased-mud cost through the brook crossing. (-:

Still not aware of any particular significance. Ran into a few less usual names as well (e.g. Ukranian: “Nat” becomes Natalka, looks quite pretty, not at all hard-line Russki style), & a Jessie who was literally “Jessie” rather than an abbreviation for Jessica or whatever.