Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in (I'm not here right now, please email a message)'s LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 5th, 2009
11:32 pm	I created a new tequila drink. It is a mix of excitement and fear instilled in innocent people. I am now hopelessly addicted to Texts From Last Night. Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Transcendental Meditation is apparently tired of not being sufficiently widely regarded as a cult of vicious nutters, so they're trying legal threats against critics. Please spread the link. NotN: Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone; Microsoft extends XP downgrade option to 2101; Minister praises high standard of science journalism; Sarah Palin gives maverickilicious resignation speech. This week has been spent pretty much entirely on cleaning the house (it is now much nicer) and sweating. It's much cooler outside, but British houses are built to keep the heat in. Older teen and younger teen have been assigned chores; younger teen refused hers with shrieks of outraged entitlement but changed her mind after her intarweb was switched off for two days. Hypothesis: Skinner boxes are worth a try. Tuesday I met secretlondon for lunch and grabbed some obsolescent tech off her, an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 6050, the subject of a pile of Ubuntu bugs filed by her. And a shitty ADSL2 wifi modem which apparently crashes all the time. Tuesday evening, a date with nyecamden, pub then visiting me! Thursday we took Freda to the dentist. We were previously waiting a few months for her to turn two so they could fix her teeth (baby teeth do sometimes need work), as they wouldn't anaesthetise any child under two except in an emergency; now she's two, they've changed the age limit to three. This is NHS arse-covering, not law per se, so we could go private, except that my anus fails to produce gold ingots on a frequent and reliable schedule. Of course, if the teeth rot in her head and endanger her life, that'll be an emergency and they can do it. We are less than entirely pleased and the dentist is calling around the hospitals seeing what they can wrangle. Kubuntu 9.10 alpha 2 Just Works on the N410c with a wifi PC card, which is most pleasing. (Yet to try compiling the driver for the W200.) Needed 300MB of updates straight away. Install "firefox-3.5" if you don't want Firefox 3.0. The video driver is somewhat imperfect (pixel crap left in various places). The machine I'm using right now is the Toshiba, because it has a battery. It too ran 9.10a2 just fine. I installed netbook-remix on it and it's mostly just perfect. Good speakers too (for a laptop). Needs an xorg.conf because the Trident drivers are too shit to autodetect properly. (This is fixable, but someone needs to bother.) Wireless antenna in the screen, must try some mini-PCI cards in the wifi slot. (The Karmic netbook remix "CD ISO" is 833MB. Concept fail.) (Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
2:05 am	Notes to self. The 2009 Lyttle Lytton Contest. Found on Uncyclopedia: Objectivism-Oriented Programming. Or, y'know, I could just get the working hard disk from the other N410c. Fucksake. Now using Kubuntu 7.10, not booted in 526 days. You can't get updates for 7.10 any more. When Freda's finished watching telly, I'll download a 9.10 ISO. ( Assorted leftovers from Usenet in 2006. ) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
4:43 pm	Organ donor. NotN: Michael Jackson dies, apparently. redcountess is staying another three weeks in Australia, to sort out her mum's house. I'm missing her. Click-click, click-click, click-click: the sound my laptop hard disk started making on Thursday evening. As did all three 2.5" disks I had on hand to try as replacements. Bother. I'm stealing time on Freda's telly laptop while I can. Grabbing more surplus tech from secretlondon on Tuesday: her Scrapheap Challenge Celeron 1200 lappie that currently serves as a wifi point stand. Friday evening, a *pint* with pndc at the Blue Posts. The younger teenager's boyfriend turned up to stay over (on the couch, enforced by sword-wielding mother); a pleasant young emo brat who makes coffee before I get up in the mornings, God bless him. I didn't make Vagabonds last night, making it as far as morwen's birthday soirée and being overcome with crushing lethargy. Lots of train nerdery and amusing bad YouTube, and nice barbecue. I have put up my photos from May's Vagabonds, though! (Need to finish tagging them.) Freda is discovering the power of language! Now thoroughly au fait with "mum" and "bum," last night she successfully strung them together into "mum bum!" and pointed at said bum of mum. "Lamb" for her singing lullaby lamb (the robot companion that says "I LOVE YOU" as the child hits it), "blue!" for anything blue or a car, "pree" for "please" and "yay!" whenever she kicks a ball and it hits a stair (learnt from watching Timmy Time). Today is not cold, but rainy. Oppressively humid. The aging tabby is snoozing on my lap and thankfully not farting. Now playing Another Setting by Durutti Column, which is just the thing. It's a rainy spring day in Perth. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
11:57 pm	Save it for later. Michael Moorcock is not a fan of Tolkien. NotN: ASCAP demands payment when your phone rings; Students to finish degrees by "any means necessary". Yesterday was nyecamden's birthday, so several of us went to Indian Veg in Angel. You fill your own plate, gather your own drinks and pay at the end. The walls are covered in vegetarian propaganda. It reminded me of eating at the Hare Krishnas in my dissolute student bum youth. We were particularly enamoured with the misplaced comma which said that "pink" was just the thing for the prostate. Nye got a smugness photo of me on one side and the luscious inspirewithhope on the other. Today I have been an inert amoebalike blob, modulo the considerable demands of a toddler. As ever. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
11:46 pm	Harsh '70s reality. The evolution of online journalism. The New York Times whines that it should get money for reference links in Wikipedia. Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment. Stupid Microsoft Tricks: when you open or even just right-click on a zip file on a remote network share in the Windows Explorer, you get this. Ah, yeah, thanks Windows, that's really helpful. (I understand what it's doing. It's still stupid.) NotN: Sceptics defeat homeopathy with homeopathic homeopathy. arkady's shoulder is still buggered (pulled muscle, should be better in a week; serious codeine prescribed), so today I did manly things: clothes washed, dishes washed, girlfriend escorted to doctor, shopping, dinner cooked, family fed, NotN written ... and of course I made sandcastles for Freda to destroy. This is important. Tomorrow I hope to attack the lounge at last. Then dinner with nyecamden and friends in the evening. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
9:39 pm	Happy man. There's a time to get the heck off Twitter. (Note blank expression and Apple logo.) NotN: Gordon Brown teases: "I could walk away from office tomorrow"; Police fend off massive summer solstice denial-of-service attack on Stonehenge. For Father's Day, arkady woke up with a buggered shoulder! So I got to make coffee for Mum instead of the other way around, with more than usual Freda-amusing duties. I'd been hoping to make the pub tonight, but ah well. Now in bed rather earlier than usual for Arkady's back. It's half-past nine and the sun is still up. It's been a thoroughly inactive weekend (modulo Freda-herding). Which has been lovely. But must get more done tomorrow. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 19th, 2009
11:57 pm	Born to be kissed. Two words to induce rage: homeopathic plutonium. Atomic universe-destroying rage: HOMEOPATHIC ANTIMATTER. FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU— High comedy from Microsoft. NotN: Digital Britain to push "culturally British" games; MPs' expenses run through experimental Cleanfeed filter. DWP: 20 minute wait, two-minute interview. I'm paid till August 24th, so still count as employed until then. My paperwork is all the right stuff should I need to put in a claim then. Stopped in at SpecSavers and they put new nosepads on my five-year-old glasses free. The strawberries fed on coffee grounds are a huge success! Very nice and taste like very healthy strawberries. I'm not sure if they're actually caffeinated. Certainly the slugs and snails left trails on the ground (and grounds) but no more than nibbled the leaves. (Coffee grounds are full of nitrogen but quite acidic; strawberries like acidic soil, many other plants don't. Experiment at your peril.) Linutop set up at last, replacing the ancient Thinkpad 560X I was using as a server. It has not much CPU (though quite enough to happily play full-screen video off the USB drive without a hiccup — 400MHz Geode), 512MB RAM and only 1GB disk. This means that you can't aptitude update; aptitude safe-upgrade without FILLING THE DISK. You need to remove OpenOffice.org first (because frankly, it's so fat you'd have to be on crack to run it at all). As a bedroom video player and household server, it's ideal. And it's SILENT. Utterly silent. I like it. I like it a lot. Many *pint*s to lproven! pndc: "Ah, iPhone OS 3.0 finally admits the thing is an Etch-a-sketch: you shake it to undo." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
11:59 pm	White wedding. The Sexist Presentation Bingo Card by damned_colonial. Second World tells First World to just bugger off thanks there's a good chap. "So well done, Microsoft! You've released a browser that deletes a system file it shouldn't even LOOK at! That's true creativity, that is. Who wouldn't think that a piece of software designed for looking at web pages might be deleting boot files even before it's told to load and run?" Please place all webmonkies who think trusted clients work in protective straightjacket custody. NotN: Fielding annoyed by "scientists" disagreeing with him; Microsoft Bob Hope and IE8 tighten their grip. Visited nyecamden for a date last night. He cooked steak (rare), with a salad and incredibly nice bread. It was RIDICULOUSLY good. And Cherry Garcia frozen yoghurt with strawberries for afters. OH MY GOD. Something that had never occurred to me: sliced strawberries in the steak salad. Very sweet, but just the thing in sparing quantities. This morning and early afternoon we went shopping. Got an office chair for him and a £70 LCD monitor with a scratch from CEX. Morgan has nice ones for a bit over a hundred, but CEX won this bout. (Morgan also has some nice cheap netbooks in stock, £150-200. Worth checking.) The monitor mostly just works on his Eee 701, just not very smoothly at all. I also got some solder, a tiny T5 Torx and a cable from Craplin. Came home dying of plant bukkake, tree spaff being sprayed directly into my eyes and up my nose. I have taken lots of every drug imaginable. I haven't yet snorted tabasco again, but I'm getting damn close. Madam has been sighted! Someone called saying they'd seen her down the road in the past few days. I also called out "MADAM!" this evening and Freda imitated me, calling "Ma'am!" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 15th, 2009
10:59 pm	Shooting stars never stop. The Royal British Legion tells Nick Griffin to just fuck off. A deeply frightening site. NotN: Fear of Microsoft Bob Hope grips Google. A shockingly busy day today, in which we called about the older teenager's schooling or lack thereof, Freda's feet and Freda's teeth and I applied for the dole (though it's unlikely to take effect for a couple more months). The DWP site stretches new goatses of uselessness. IE 7 is actually worse to use than IE 6, too. Then out for necessary shopping in the thunder and lightning hailstorm. Freda hates the space bubble on her push chair and insisted on holding an umbrella up herself. Madam the cat is missing. We are exceedingly worried. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
6:05 pm	Ricochet days. FUD about Ogg Theora appears endemic, particularly from Google (of all people). Here's the full technical rebuttal. Best tech news story ever. Backward compatibility is generally good. But some is just a bit more backward than others. NotN: New mobile phone directory launches; Human anatomy remains mystery to MPs; Iranian election: Mission accomplished. Down the Pembury with arkady to meet up with maxcelcat and woosang. Woosang got a good pic of me. Freda held out for longer than expected and we had three rather nice pints of Bear Ass. James Ray's Gangwar are really rather good. James Ray is an old Andrew Eldritch crony; Gangwar are what Sisters of Mercy would have sounded like had Eldritch not disappeared up his own nose. I'm amazed I'd pretty much never heard of them in Australia. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 12th, 2009
7:09 pm	This used to be the future. Rocknerd: The discreet charm of the Grateful Dead.. NotN: English acquires its millionth word: "bollocks". The toddler demands I dance. OH DEAR GOD I MUST DANCE AGAIN. I sit down. "um, um" and she pulls on my hand. DEAR LORD LET ME STOP DANCING ONE DAY. Pushes me to stand over there and dance. Now I have to pick up her rag doll and make it dance on the purple plastic stool. DANCE DANCE DANCE UNTIL YOU DROP THEN KEEP DANCING. FOREVER. My theory is that two-year-old girls are young gay men in discos. My evidence is that Freda loves Bear Force 1 and Abba and started dancing to the new Pet Shop Boys album (Yes — I highly recommend it) literally seconds after it started playing. DANCE DANCE DANCE MONKEYDAD DANCE. DANCE. Out for a walk again with nyecamden to the pond near Whipps Cross and back. Lovely day out. Today's technical questions: 1. Does Ubuntu Netbook Remix come with any good 3G usage counters? If not, what's a good simple one to add? 2. arkady is trying to use her Wacom tablet with Gimp 2.6.6 on Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC. Drawing is unusably laggy. Are there ways to fix this other than "use Photoshop"? (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
5:38 pm	After the rain. "We strongly suggest you do NOT discuss this with others, especially patients." O rly. Texas Christians: solving the really important problems. Rocknerd: It's not downloading, it's games. Here's the numbers. NotN: Microsoft discontinues MS Money. redcountess is back online! She got the Huawei E160E from Optus ($149 including 2GB data — this appears a reasonable price), called tech support for the settings and it Just Worked with Ubuntu 9.04. Thanks to mjg59 for the initial tipoff. Of course, unlocking it for general use when she gets back to the UK will be another matter ... how are dodgy high street phone unlockers with 3G dongles? arkady and I are trying to be more productive at home. I've been fielding pimp calls at a most gratifying rate. One day the washing will dry. The caffeinated strawberry plants are getting HUGE. Must remember to eat the strawberries (give 'em another month). nyecamden should be hijacking me tomorrow afternoon, at which point we wander the streets aimlessly like dissolute youth. Saturday 2pmish, Arkady and I meet up with maxcelcat at the Pembury — anyone else likely to be about? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
9:52 pm	Antics. Forget eggs, someone needs to do this to Nick Griffin. A large black one by preference. NotN: Cabinet reshuffle puts Lords up front; Kim Jong-nam happy to stay well out of North Korean succession. Australians: what pay-as-you-go 3G dongles work with Linux as bought from the provider there? Specifically on Ubuntu Netbook 9.04, which is what redcountess has. I don't mean "try this, it might work" but ones you know do work. Pointers most welcomed. Freda went for a hearing test today and is apparently fine. Just a slow talker like her dad. We've discovered the low-bandwidth way to entertain her: play music on Windows Media Player with visualisations. She watches it like it's telly and tries to dance along to it, waving her arms to imitate the visualisations! No doubt sending subtle indoctrination to her brain. arkady has been making silver doll rings and sold the tanzanite straight off that post! More buyers most welcome ... (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
11:23 pm	Russian radio. apiphile live on stage. I fling my legs in the air for her POUNDING BRAIN. NotN: Downloading keeping "billions" inside the UK; Y2012 problem: Mayan calendar runs out. The Zen Touch hard disk is a Hitachi 1.8" with the interface of a 2.5" that is unlike anything else on Earth and is all but unobtainable at sane prices, but CompactFlash adapters are another matter. Not that that's a financially sane option either, but hack value! Is restoring this thing to rather more shock-proof function worth twenty quid? Possibly! In any case, the precise correct CF adapter is seven quid and would certainly be of use elsewhere. Now to find seven quid. (Tech these days is built for obsolescence and disposability. Fixing and then using something discarded by two other people in turn feels like beating the system. The trick being absolutely minimal expense, and that on things that will be useful elsewhere later.) (Of course, you end up with boxes of worthless rubbish that might come in handy.) Today has been a quiet day of sleeping, tapping on computers and playing bad '80s pop music. arkady is making silver rings for dolls. p.s.: "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by Aretha Franklin, with backing from Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, as featured in the Whoopi Goldberg movie of the same name, is absolutely immaculately horrendously bad, wrong and shit and a comprehensive musical summary of everything wrong with mainstream '80s pop culture. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
8:49 pm	Hello cruel world. The Astounding World of the Future! NotN: David Carradine dies, but not in wanking accident. Yesterday I discovered why nyecamden didn't want to take the Creative Zen jogging: I dropped it and the hard drive is now going "click-click, click-click, click-click." Anyone got a working 1.8" hard disk spare? Or leads on a 1.8" PATA-CompactFlash adapter? Lovely date with Nye last night. Continuing with the theme of walking through greenery, we went through the backstreets of Bloomsbury, through Regent's Park and to the top of Primrose Hill. Then to Chalk Farm and dinner at Marine Ices. Italian food as good as they do in Perth or Melbourne. I've given up on Chrome for now — Firefox 3.5 beta is much more responsive. I may try again when the Leengux version works. Today we have run out of money for the month. So I've been tidying and organising the bedroom. Much tech sorted and trashed. Currently taking a break while my back protests. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
11:19 pm	Pride's paranoia. Mijn Schatje is a plagiarist. NotN: Our boy Murray shows Johnny Foreigner "what-for" at French Open; Green landslide in Euro elections. redcountess was successfully packed onto a plane last night. Freda ran into her room this morning, puzzled that she wasn't there. Aww! Today arkady and I committed democracy. Choices: proven thieves and liars, neo-Nazis, palaeo-Nazis and gibbering nutters. So. Which nutters did you pick? I ended up picking the Greens, because their digital rights position is superlative ... even though they seem deeply suspicious of any technology or medicine more complicated or considered than banging rocks together. (If running a political party, make sure you appeal to voters smart enough to unfold paper.) nyecamden came over this afternoon and we went for a walk in Epping Forest. I've lived in Walthamstow for six years and never been in Epping Forest. It was lovely. I actually enjoyed the journey itself. From Wood Street station to Higham Park. Tomorrow we might hit Hampstead Heath. I am writing this in Google Chrome on Windows XP on a Pentium III 1.2 GHz with 768MB memory. When I have lots of tabs open and switch tabs, it takes several seconds for the page content to be displayed. Is this normal? Do other Chrome users see this? (I can't put a proper operating system on this machine — Liz uses it for IE for her surveys — but this is getting very annoying.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
11:33 pm	Another night. The complete archive of International Times. Flush out the dangerous lunatics in your life with P=NP! NotN: BT throttles entire Internet worldwide. I have finally demolished the laundry mountain. Quite a lot of it's been put away too. redcountess wrote lists beforehand and actually has her suitcase packed, ready to depart tomorrow evening. At that point I have to give up this lovely netbook and go back to the Compaq with the dead battery. O noez! I suppose I'd better finally replace the broken power socket ... Several CVs sent out today and two more pimp calls. Here's to something resembling action quickly. So. What's on this weekend? And in the lead-up to it? There's time with nyecamden in there somewhere ... (Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
11:48 pm	Homework. Teach a kid to argue. I think this will be the only way to steer mine to arguing sanely. "Child prodigy" is another word for "much-loved pain in the arse." NotN: Church of Susan Boyle banned from Wikipedia. Today has been laundry and job-scouring. One recruiter call back. arkady and Freda had fun in Brighton with cavalorn and lucybond. lproven visited this evening, dropping off a dead TiBook to cannibalise for hinges for redcountess's machine and a Linutop 2 tiny tiny silent PC to use as a new household server (retiring the ancient 560X, which suffers a fan) and consuming several *pint*s. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
7:53 pm	Messages received. This is good value for taxes. "Things Arkady is only allowed to do for a living." I still have "Figaro" stuck in my head. NotN: Major Christian Party push for European Parliament; "Instant courts" to be established; The sound of "found": Bob Hope; MPs included in latest list of Britain’s endangered birds. Rollercoaster week and no mistake. As of Thursday, I have joined the Great Recession! Three months' payoff (so I can still technically put "to present" on my CV —must get it tarted up to usability today — email for a copy) and a whole bunch of things I suddenly don't have to think about any more. Getting whoring clothes (suit, white shirts, tie) in order, ready to hit the streets and shake dat ass. p.s.: FUCK!!! arkady and Freda are off to Brighton today and tomorrow to visit cavalorn and lucybond. redcountess is sorting clothes and I'm killing the laundry pile. Also took the pile of fungus-rotted toilet floor out to the bin at last. Friday Arkady and I attacked the kitchen and Saturday the lounge. naughtypixie dropped off a pile of surplus bookshelves (and an air purifier and a 19" swivelling LCD monitor) this afternoon, so we'll have a bit more house-rebuilding to do once we have Liz all organised for her month visiting Australia, flying out on Wednesday evening. The older teenager is particularly looking forward to more room in her cave when her mother's books can be put on shelves rather than in boxes. She is also delighting in her father's old gaming rig now being her new gaming rig, less so in it running Windows 7, which in the transition from beta to RC appears to have acquired Vista's remarkably lardy arse. Arkady has switched to the mirrors G4 from Timmie and Juliann and the 22" Cinema Display and is really rather enjoying it. This weather is exactly like my childhood in Perth. Too hot, sun too bright, suburbanites walking the streets in nearly nothing and flipflops. Too hot to move, too hot to think. Can hardly believe it's nearly eight already. It's just the time of year for a nice holiday, though (modulo the lack of ongoing income), so I welcome invitations to socialise. Drinks are on you, okay. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 25th, 2009
11:12 pm	The letter. NotN: Ghostbusters III in "preproduction"; Hospital worker in crucifix row. On Saturday morning I went to Homebase for breeze blocks to put the toilet bowl on. Homebase, true to its key marketing strength as the great big warehouse full of everything except what you actually want, no longer stocks breeze blocks. So I lugged five paving slabs home in a shopping trolley instead. arkady and I did manly things involving scraping the unspeakable slime off the concrete and removing various nails hammered directly into it (Arkady's cock is THIS BIG) and propped the bowl up on four slabs. The fifth is out the back to sit on and the cat has of course adopted it. Dried the floor thoroughly with a fan heater, the poor man's dehumidifier. We can dishwash and wash clothes without further leakage, so now it's the landlord's call what to do next. Vagabonds with nyecamden. I got a pile of photos even though reddragdiva.co.uk is still broken. Danced and drank and talked rubbish all night. Bumped into theevilchemist, who just happened to be in town, and vayshti, who I haven't see in thirteen years. Crikey, I needed that. Now using the netbook for a bit. I've always hated using GNOME, but the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface is actually very good and would be good on a desktop too. Setting the fonts smaller (8pt instead of 10pt) is a good idea too when the screen is only 600px high. The preferences dialogue in the file manager is too tall for the screen. I'm missing standalone PgUp/PgDn and Home keys. But this notebook is tiny, light, portable and I can type on it with ten fingers. Fantastic. (It does suffer the known MSI Wind U100 problem of yellow colour bleed on the screen. Apparently this is a warranty return if it's still in warranty. But I can live with this!) I live in the cloud and seem to have done for a while. The main barrier to switching computers is logging into sites again. The main thing I use actual computing power for is the browser, music playing and GIMP. aster13 beat the crap out of my back this afternoon. I am now bruised and battered and happily relaxed. I heartily recommend her for all your therapeutic back crap-beating needs. (Comment on this)