Plantagenet Penguinista

...I had a seizure on Wednesday afternoon, plus some of the people in between have been accurately pointing out details in the methods which a self-declared (really: an un-declared one) enemy has been using to take problems caused directly & solely by them, & contrive to have them blamed on me. It was encouraging to see people whom I hardly even recognise gathering to check that I have recovered (the CT & Xray scans seem to be fine), & to have near-complete strangers volunteer their friendship (which was a tad distracting for a few voluptuous (blonde, as it happens) European lasses). It is also encouraging to note that I have far more direct connections with the meta-victims of the lying, deceitful enemy, so I can (amongst other things) provide them with a more complete (& self-consistent) description of events, & also answer their direct questions for details which are essentially impossible to invent in such detail &amp completeness. Finally, I have discov...

Some of y’all may wonder what disability is really all about. Some obviously disabled people need to cripple around in special wheelchairs, others just seem to wear the tag, no more. I know a bloke, call him the Complete Far-gone Aerosol (CFA) who is on Disability Pension, wears the blue sticker on his cars, uses said sticker to boot others out of the wheelchair-on-blue parking bays, the whole deal. He also goes “roo” (wallaby) shooting, with rifles, using 4WDs, of an evening. CFA is evidently not disabled, just enjoys claiming that he is. In Real Life™, CFA enjoys the insurance payout for an industrial accident, but is not practically disabled in the slightest. CFA is also quite willing to lie, to destroy social arrangements which others live by, & at the same time facetiously claim underpriviledge & that the world owes him a living. I have also watched (heard) CFA’s (illegimate) wife willingly lie to support his lies, & watch losers they...

Customer requires a special-case redirect for the first use of a browser (each day) on a workstation. So much stuff almost does this, & in the closed-source world, it would be: <GAME OVER> <PLAYER ONE> Happily, adding one feature to Squirm will make this all possible, so customer will get functionality, plus also a little fame, & the rest of the world will get functionality as well, no extra charge. As a sub-bonus, it’s an Aussie program, so we’re supporting local industry. Hooraw! (-: would be nice if I could really work, do this kind of stuff full-throttle :-)

Problem: workplace is perennially unable to maintain a hot-drink mug that I can use. Solution: spend a small amount of cash roughly equivalent to 20 seconds of my working time acquiring a mug from Crazy Clarks en route to work. Benefit: problem solved, would have spent more time looking for (& failing to find) a mug than I did acquiring a new one ( micro -economics), workmates quietly amused. Problem: I acquired an extra can-opener in the course of replacing a damaged (DOA) one. Solution: donate the opener to said office, which now has can manipulation facilities. Benefit: more storage space for me. Loss: the opener cost $1.99 a week ago, would have fetched $3.49 if returnable stand-alone but needed a receipt I don’t have. Comment: being disconnected from the Liar/Gross (LG) has many benefits (a pleasant Thai girl had me list them out), but has not yet overcome the physical/financial damage done by LG, so $1.50 makes a significant difference to basic items like what I eat ( ...

Picture yourself whizzing by the Canning Bridge fuel station on your bicycle. You are forced to cycle past a sign bidding you “Cycle Instead.” Quod eratz demonstrandum ? (-:

Bind your card to channel 4, ESSID of ENABLEnet, no encryption, then go & sit across the plaza from the city-side entrance to the Alexander State Library, with your laptop. Run DHCP on your wireless interface (e.g. dhclient eth1 ). The nearest power socket is in the nook on the south-ish side of PICA, which is about 3m outside wireless range for this hp/Compaq nx9040 (I think because of environment shape rather than actual distance), so a fully-charged battery is a great place to start. Fire up a web browser, click on OK, the world is now yours. I can ssh (so of course scp ) including to weird ports, which allows me to upload photos to my webserver (at about 2MB/s) without any setup. I was able (once) to briefly connect from on the other side of the train tracks (near the Blood Bank) but this is not reliable. Was able to chat with friends in the USA & Thailand. Can’t complain about the price.

...for keeping life worth living, despite the outright worst that some ingrates have done. There are many others worth a gesture, but Su is far & away the most effective (-: & cute, too, an advantage which I myself have not the slightest hope of ever exhibiting :-) & is able to overlook annoyances & provokation from others a little, more than enough to keep herself usefully encouraging & to maintain an evil sense of humour plus 3 special children. Thank you, Su & the many others. Topical PostScript, WA’s LCA2010 bid is about to get off to a flying start. Thank you, our fearless [ well... a bit fearful, ’coz the guy’s got brainz & ’coz Trent has bid Patrick’s sanity an honourable farewell ] leader. (-:

After dealing with ridiculous amounts of money a few days ago, & working all morning, I ran into a situation where unexpected expenses took $170 out of my hands, but large bank fees etc reduced my available funds to $5.92, plus 70c cash-in-hand. I needed 30c more to buy containment for an item I needed to move about 12km, but could not find it. A nice lady discounted the item from $1 to 50c, while another nice lady drew 50c out of her purse anyway, so stuff got done, but the contrast between megabucks, maybe $400 in earnings, & a deficit of 30c was quite striking. Micro-social-economics also showed a surprise: one I dialogue with abandoned a forum so abusers could get bored & wander off, but in the process dropped a few psych keystones which I think will allow me to deal effectively with an abuser of my own. Not, unfortunately the big one, but this, like the fleeing dialoguer, is a Deutschlander but who has had a negative effect of the same order or magnitude as the big one...

...when the recipient is only able to bring themselves to type occasional mis-spelled squeals of delight (plus one jumble which I interpret as being “Presents!”) in response. (-:             The above is a woefully inadequate sampling. Fremantle, Melville by Leon Brooks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License .

The Deadly Treadly had done in some rear spokes, so I took it to Bike Force Myaree for repair. This turned out to be not a few spokes & a re-trueing, but a new wheel, new hub, many new spokes, a straightened derailleur & a handful of other things which again demonstrated a committment to doing a proper job. The end result is that the bike feels brand new, & is once again a joy to pilot. (-:

...on a shiny new Canon a470 on special ex Hardly Normal. I upgraded my laptop a distro version , had a handful of small problems en route , all sorted & saddled now. Updating websites via Konqueror is splendidly easy & safe ( media://dev/sde1 versus fish://host.name/path/to/directory , drag, drop, rename, whatever). I am also getting rave reviews for individual shots, & one viewer in Chicago (a city-dweller who likes sunrises & sunsets) is highly pleased to chase a favourite (virtually life-saving) obsession by remote control. WestOz has plenty of amazing sun activity to share, of course, at midwinter temperatures which flabbergast folks from the northern USA, ’coz they’re as warm as their own midsummer days, once translated to Fahrenheit . Said viewer also enjoys shots of things like a Qualup Bell plant in flower (thank you, King’s Park ).

At the moment, Perth is having trouble supplying cheap bed-frames for financially disadvantaged people to use in their homes (which are expensive enough already). The place I’m staying at (-: thanks, Eddie :-) has a full woodworking tool-set, & is located near a small industrial area, from which I can obtain pallets & packing crates which would otherwise be discarded. As a charitable enterprise, a work project, & a component of the green revolution, I’m investigating the possibility of splitting apart these assemblies & building furniture from it, starting with bed-frames. The first few runs are of course going to look rough, but I hope to learn enough about woodworking to efficiently sand, plane &/or stain it to look better (& splinter less) as well. The idea is to produce easily-accessible plans so that any bunch of randoms across Australia (conceptually, any industrialised country) could spend a few tens or hundreds of dollars on tools, & join ...

...make sure that the package sources are also updated. Why? ‘Coz when the plug-pack charging your laptop fails, so you have to borrow the server as a workstation, you can install things like a Flash plugin, else certain features of a(nother) ’blog system you use simply don’t work. Mind you, I guess stuff like working security updates would be good, too. WRT the other ’blog, after carefully explaining (up until mid June) to 10 other Australian women that they had better options than marrying me, I now have 7 newbies from all over the world (including Oz) who’ve selected me themselves (3 of them so far are making rampant sex a required part of the deal, all are quite pretty, a non-overlapping 3 are absolutely stunning), & have also had women from 7 different countries (including 2 of the above) explain that a certain liar in Tasmania can’t do what they’ve done. A well-qualified Oz insurance consultant notes that they might very well have don...

...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 .

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).