The personal memoirs of Randi Mooney
Inspired by the signature of an email* I recently received, I have made this piece of oddly coloured whimsy.
*The signature in question is:
I cannot...
lift around 80 times my own body weight.
Therefore I would not make a very good...
ant.
We all have times of crisis in our lives - it’s all part of this messy business of being human. Whenever I’m struggling, there’s one person in particular that I turn to. I ask myself, what would He do?
‘Jacko’ — the central character in the BBC TV series Brush Strokes — has been a powerful guiding force in my life from the time when I first gazed upon his benevolent, beaming face. Perhaps he can help you and your loved ones too.
By linking to the Terms and Conditions of Google’s Picasa photo-purchasing client with this automatic hamster hyperlink, I am violating those Terms and Conditions. Odd eh? Supposedly I may only link to the home page, and only using the terms ‘Picasa.com’ or ‘www.Picasa.com’. I wonder if they would be angry if I linked to them with the less embellished ‘www.picasa.com’?
This weekend Doug and I did the Raw Dyfi Enduro, a 55km endurance mountain biking event in the Dyfi Forest, just north of beautiful Machynlleth. As ever, it was a very well-organised event, with heaps of enthusiasm put into the whole affair by the people from Summit Cycles and locals alike. There was a lot of climbing, but some great downhills, and the conditions weren’t too sloshy. Yes, they were very sloshy indeed, but this was Wales and the whole affair could easily have been much, much soggier. I would also like to express my thanks (somewhat cryptically for anyone who hasn’t done the event) to the drummers.
The fun of the weekend was dampened only by Telford. To be fair, it’s not Telford’s fault that we were diverted around our intended battered fish destination of Welshpool and overshot a chippie in Shrewsbury due to bladder constraints, but it is Telford’s fault that it’s a bloody ugly place. It consists of roundabouts punctuated by oddly-shaped office blocks or unhappily-clad residential towers, with little option for residents but to rely heavily on their cars for even the most minor tasks — the chippie we eventually found was styled as a ‘drive-in’.
It took us an hour of bombing around Telford to find our fishy treat, and it was worth it in the end (just about), although my tongue is still burnt from my mushy peas.
12:20pm:
Some photos from the event: I’m in the first photo, number 135, looking daft in my yellow helmy.
This evening I re-encountered a problem I came across a while back. It all happened when I was trying to get some comprehensively-named choons by Liberation Jumpsuit from my Gentoo box onto my Powerbook via Netatalk.
Despite having 10 tracks in the folder on the Gentoo box, the finder in OSX displayed the folder as empty. This is because AFP versions below 3 support a maximum filename length of 32 characters, and Netatalk 1.6.4 on my Gentoo box implements one of these older versions. The implementation in OSX has no such problems, so an OSX to OSX AFP connection should have no problems.
I gather from various postings on the web that there is a hack option to enable long filename support which breaks the protocol but works fine with OSX. I’ve yet to find it though.
My mother has reached new levels of computer literacy, and has broken through the Ebay threshold. Witness her teapot. I am proud, yet also scared.
eWeek is reporting in it’s typically dull way that the new BIOS from Phoenix is able to check ‘Outlook’ without having booted the computer’s operating system - how this will work they do not say, for example do they mean it will connect only to an MS Exchange server or have they built a generic email client into the laptop’s firmware? Thanks to phoenix it is now possible to run a bloatware operating system on top of a bloatware BIOS.
Regardless of how they implement this feature, it is a perfect illustration of Zawinski’s Law in action: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” - Jamie Zawinski
Compare: Godwin’s Law.
My new experiment is semi-live: it’s a portal / review site for the many DVD-rental-by-post companies that seem to have suddenly appeared in the last twelve minutes. It’s all done in super-semantic CSS2, which means it’ll probably look naff in Internet Exploder… I haven’t checked it yet. Opening IE makes me feel queasy, and I try to avoid it.
Coke’s horrible new bottled tap water experiment, Dasani, seems to have a mysterious ingredient… Why not go to www.dasani.com and rollover the lady in the downloads section?
I hope Coke’s horrible project and website bomb majestically.