Thursday 14/04 AM
The root canal went off better than some fillings that I have had. The worst discomfort was probably trying to breathe past the rubber sheet they put in your mouth to keep saliva away from the open tooth. Yesterday was stage one; filing out the root canals and filling them with an antibiotic filler. In a month I go back for the actual fill and then there are two more visits to prep for and finally fit the cap. Once the tooth is dead it has a tendency to crumble and fitting the cap helps prevent this.

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Alas, we were the only ones to turn up at Retro Betty's last night.

Poss was fasting and Rob got home late, and then they couldn't pry me away from my new tablet...

Dragon?
From dragonhame via Poss:

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Mithril Dragon

In the war between good and evil, Mithril Dragons take the side of the noble and good.
When it comes to the powers of Chaos vs. those of Law and Order, your inner dragon walks a fine line between Law and Chaos.
As far as magical tendancies, Magical spells come as natural to the Mithril Dragon as breathe from it's body.
During combat situations, a true Mithril Dragon prefers to defeat opponents by the use of spells and other tactics.
Dragon Description:

Mithril Dragons build and dwell in castles of crystal, high in the mountainous regions. A Mithril Dragon is honest and gentle.

Mithril Dragons are armored with highly reflective scales. To see one in bright sunshine has the effect of looking at a multi-ton, 150 ft. long disco ball.

They tend to smile frequently but rarely laugh aloud. Mithril's dislike violence. A Mithril Dragon is very selective when choosing close friends, but is generally admired by all. A Mithril Dragon leads a very quiet and unobtrusive life.Never judgmental, the great Mithril Dragon's feelings run deep and true. Mithril Dragons mate for life.

This Dragons favorite elements are: Mithril, Earth, and Courage

Hello Steveg, this is Fran.

Remember me?

Edited by author 24-04-2005 10:57
Old Friends and stupid cameras
Hi Fran, of course I remember you! How are you? How is the family? Are you still in Melbourne? *grin*.

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I purchased a digital camera on the weekend. Specifically a Konica Minolta dImage Z3. This is a nice little compact unit with 12X optical zoom and anti shake. As far as I can tell it all works fine except that I can't make it talk to Linux. 8-(. This is strange as the Z3 is specifically listed as working correctly. It goes into a state of "Initialising USB" and doesn't come out. Neither is it visible on the USB chain. *sigh*, technology, *feh*.

Remote update 8-(
I'm off the air at the moment. Westnet has stuffed my DNS service. I spent most of the Monday public holiday trying to find a problem that wasn't in my computer at all. 8-( 8-( 8-(.

Edited by author 10-05-2005 09:03
Sort of still here
Well ... Westnet fixed my DNS problem fairly promptly. Their customer service is good - in fact rather better than my previous ISP. However the weirdo nature of the problem and the approx 12 hour action / re-action cycle did stretch out the elapsed time for the solution. Then I updated my Gentoo configuration which involved a considerable number of hours compilation. Then I found that Evolution was broken. Reallllly broken. Won't start and won't even leave an error message broken. Something in the yards long toolchain that supports Evolution is broken and hiding it.
At this point I gave up and went away. We're doing audit updates for one major customer at work while migrating to (and configuring) a new CM tool and by the time I get home anything more cerebral than vacuous game playing is not on the menu. So if you have sent me e-mail since before Anzac day I haven't seen it. Sorry.

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I got the Z3 to talk to the computer. One of the USB drivers that is supposed to load automagically wasn't. I'll post some photo's soon. Actually there is one of mine over on Lympago. That is about a third of the image area so the quality seems pretty good.

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I'm building a tail box for the trike on the weekends because it isn't anything even vaugely to do with computers. The structure is about three quarters done and I will soon need to start applying varnish while I can still get inside. The structure is 3-ply braced with 13mm aluminium right angle extrusion. I originally started the project using roofing bolts back before Christmas. Now I am using liquid nails and pop-rivets. The tail box will hold the 12V power system and the mounts for the solar panel. It is large enough that I can carry a suit bag without having to crunch it up. And it is a moderately secure container that I can leave on the bike ... unlike the pannier.

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In case you are wondering I am about 75% of the way through recompiling the tool chain. I wish Gentoo would use a Configuration Management system rather than a crude (from a CM PoV) Version Management system. Still given that I continually see commercial systems that fall short of the mark ... mumble ... mumble ... *sob*.

Steveg does still exist folks. I've SEEN him.

SURE he does.

Ahhh Well
Yes, I am still here. I did spend a fair bit of time disconnected (over a month). And my amount of online activity has been minimal all round. Lessee now ...

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I have completed the tail box for the trike. It works tolerably well but I can see a lot of improvements for Mk 2. I need to put up a page about it and the Solar power system that goes with it.

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Work is still there. I spend my time doing far too many data fixups and not enough process improvment. 8-(

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My hip is still sore. On and off. The insurance company is having me vetted in a couple of weeks.

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The root canal work was completed and an enourmous amount of money passed on to pay for the crown. So now I'm "as flash as a rat with a gold tooth" ... or something.

Edited by author 25-07-2005 11:37
He does, seeeee! That's him down there.

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Card fun.
Since I have started full time work again I have been missing having my Palm III available to synchronize to Outlook. However somwhere at WA Police my Windows installation disks went missing. Last week I bit the bullet and purchased a new Palm Tungsten E2. Nice colour screen, 32 MB of internal storage (up from 2MB on the III), a slot for SD cards, and the capability to play mp3s.
Unfortunately the mp3 player software is Real Player. To install you have to have a Windows machine with an internet connection and it requires the Real Player to be installed on your desktop. Along the way it also wants to collect your life history. 8-(
In the end I gave Real the flick after it kept failing to connect to its home site in a stable manner. So ... I went looking for an open source player. The choice appears to be TCPMP or TCPMP. Luckily TCPMP works. At least all the important bits do. It is still at version 0.66 and needs some more work in the interface and play lists. But it plays!
Part of the advantage of using an SD card is that is what my digital camera uses and viewing images on the E2 is a lot nicer than viewing them on the camera.
So anyway I came to load up some songs onto the card and I find I cant do it through pilot-link (the open source *nix tool set). No prob. I'll just grab the 12in1 card reader and mount the card as a USB storage device. Nope. No way. Lots of SCSI errors and no connect. Sooooo.... I load the card into the camera and use it as the interface to my Linux system. Ugly, possibly even desperate, but working.

Edited by author 28-07-2005 08:47
More card fun
Now the camera is not the slickest or fastest device to be using as an USB - SD Card interface. Somewhere along the line I managed to trash the filesystem while trying to shut down a transfer before the camera batteries expired. D'oh.
The answer (after I had downloaded the toolset) was to run fsck.vfat. The inner secret is to use the -w switch that immediately updates the card when a problem is fixed.
I now need to get a file manager program for the E2 so that I can manipulate and rename files and directories on the SD Card. Then there is the 1GB card (with only 256MB I'm starting to get habituated to the song set). And the external keyboard. And ... commercial software. Ahhh Ahhh ahhhhhrrrrr ....

Edited by author 05-09-2005 20:52
Spring
And spring is the season for birthdays for Stevegses. 8-)
We and some friends went off to the Good Fortune restaurant for Peking Duck on Saturday. Food was enjoyed in convivial company and a good time was had.
Friday night at gaming I couldn't put a foot wrong and ended up winning all three games (two Ticket to Ride: Europe and Gargon). Mind you I'm not saying it was easy but I got more than my fair share of lucky breaks.
Sunday was setting up the new computer. An AMD Sempron 2800+ on an ASUS K8V-X motherboard with a Gigabyte of Memory and a couple of 120 Gigabyte Western Digital SATA drives. No bleeding edge here. I'm loading Gentoo my "favourite" Linux distribution.
Today Maureen produced a candlelit dinner of Lamb Shanks with a birthday muffin to celebrate.
Mmmm lucky Stevegses. 8-)

Stupid Gentoo
Saturday I rebooted Eldred to bring in a new kernel and when I tried to log in Gnome utterly failed to start the window manager. *Sigh* go back and reboot with the old kernel. Oops, it doesnt work with that one either. Hmmmm.
Now I know this version of Gnome works because I've compiled it from the same source on William my new box and it works there. So I recompiled the obvious things and even tried trashing the user preferences (in the test login). Still nothing.
After about five hours I got seriously annoyed and copied the portage "world" file to one side. I then stripped it back to a few choice core applications and ran emerge --depclean to clear everything out. After that it was time to build everything anew. Yesterday evening I was able to boot back into Gnome finally. So ... what weekend 8-(

sorry missed the birthday. things are strange. hope the hip's all mended, and you're all bouncy abouts.

-C