Yes I the jumping jellybean am moving again to
Emergency
Life is full of changes and yesterday my other half was at work and then had to go to hospital. Naturally he takes the bus. Naturally he goes to a hospital miles away from where he was when there’s one pretty much on his doorstep. You’d have to know him to understand. Actually maybe not.. I don’t feel like understanding that one even if I do.He did let me know so I went down to emergency. After calming down that is. I do love the bastard who refuses to take the ambulance or even the taxi or go to the nearest hospital or even tell me what bus he’s on. Parking was easy fortunately and I got there only seconds after he did. He was better than I expected but then I’m really skilled at expecting the worst. He was at work he said and couldn’t remember how to do the simplest of files he’d done for months. He also had a headache and while all nice and conscious was saying some out-of-place words at times. He’d collapsed a few days previously so it wasn’t entirely a shock.
After waiting a while, after the initial consulting and clerical stuff, you get to see emergency in action. I’d not been in hospital much never mind emergency. Not shall we say the kind of place I like to picnic. The place was pretty busy by my standards but it might have been a Sunday stroll to the staff for all I knew. We were in the sitting room mostly with non urgent cases (and a fantastic wait). There were beds everywhere in cubicles and along the hall of course moaning and puking and all that fun stuff. I lost count of the ambulances outside and it seemed like they were actually queued. They even started shoving beds in the waiting room for a while. My overall impression was of a kind of calm almost controlled chaos. There is no doubt it’s the nurses that keep things in order, not doctors.
Would you believe there is a snack bar there. Did good trade there too. After 5 hours which seemed like 5 mins or 5 centuries because time really wasn’t working for me, he’s in to see a Dr. The boy had already come from school which in his case is almost on top of the hospital and so I chatted to him about games to keep him a bit distracted and suddenly there are doctors and nurses everywhere talking and treating patients in the waiting room.
I’m called in with the boy and to the Dr’s credit not an eyelid batted over the gay thing which is a little unlike other responses I’ve had. This woman’s probably seen everything. He’s concussed without complications. I have to watch him for this and that and he has to do this and not do that, and we go home.
It’s a real pleasure leaving an emergency dept. and with a diagnosis that isn’t too awful.
WordPress.com Irritation
It would appear this wordpress.com site doesn’t allow you to edit the template. That is not very flexible and to be honest I’m thinking of hosting this myself but we’ll see. If so that is yet another change in location :-/
Linux Revisited
Well I’ve been using Linux for a bit longer now so here are the developments;
I was wrong on account of the USB memory stick working. It worked the once but has not worked again. Since it works in neither Windows nor Linux it’s probably a more serious problem.
As it happens the switch to Linux has been far less painless than the switch to 64 bit computing. I did get the flash plugin working under 64 bit but not the java plugin. Several applications would not work under 64 bit. So I decided to attempt a reinstall of 32 bit Ubuntu despite my initial problems. As it turned out my initial problems installing the 32 bit version were due to using a cheap blank DVD to burn onto. This time my burn was fully verified. And what do you know, it worked!
I’ve learnt how to install some things without the easy internet based manager and some basics about command lines. Even managed to compile, install and run from a source file (ie raw code).
I really haven’t used Windows much since. Linux has also proven faster and more stable. I have also found DVD burning far better in Linux. I do occasionally play games on Windows is about all. One guy on a mailing list referred to his Windows partition as Wintendo. Quick someone register it and make some money. There are Linux games and ways to run Windows based games on Linux but the fact is Windows games are better simply because more developers are making them for Windows (and consoles) using proprietary systems like DirectX. Apart from games it’s hard to justify use of Windows.
Linux now has the rather nice flexibility of being able to deal with completely fresh users to the power geeks that it was originally so popular with. Community support is generally better too which is where most of us turn to when we have problems.
DullMen
Want to be more interesting than your mates? Looking for a boyfriend without hidden surprises? Or maybe you’re getting in touch with your inner yawn.
Dullmen are for you. Who said dull couldn’t be interesting?
Elderly Lady Doesn’t Spend Money Watering her Lawn
This is ridiculous. In Australia we have laws against watering lawns at certain times because we’re a nation that needs to be more water conserving. I’m not fully supportive of the laws but at least they have their reasons. Not only that police here you’re lucky to see once a blue moon.
This old lady gets this for NOT watering her lawn? Enforcing a law on what? Pretty lawns? I think the Officer is an idiot and has generated some wonderful police publicity.
Linux
Well I took the plunge again and tried to install Linux on my PC. I am by no means a Linux guru of any kind but for those that really know nothing about it, Linux is a free operating system. It’s been around quite some time and is known for it’s stability, speed and security. Despite this it never became terribly popular because it was quite a cow to install and use and had few games and other popular applications. In short, it was the geeks’ operating system. Microsoft’s Windows held the market for operating systems very well for good reason.
Things are changing, however. For one thing the games market is shifting rapidly from MS Windows PC games to the consoles. How permanent this is is anyone’s guess but it does mean the lack of games in Linux is less significant when compared to Windows than it once was. As well the open source community has changed. It’s got a lot of projects, some of which are quite mature and useful and the elitism I saw before has been tempered to more reasonable levels.
At the same time innovation in Windows desktop environments has pretty much died. New features and applications are few and often serve Microsoft more than it’s customers. Windows Vista was at best a minor improvement over Windows XP, and after all that time too. Microsoft’s newer features like tabbed browsing and Aero are essentially copied from other places. Perhaps the company is focused elsewhere, after all consoles, mobile phones and general web browsing is as much used as a desktop these days. The market itself is clearly changing.
So I looked up the various distributions Linux has and selected Ubuntu. My attempt to run the regular version failed rather miserably, however the 64 bit version has installed with no fuss with a dual boot situation so I can still I use Windows XP when I wish.
So far I’m fairly impressed. Browsing, music, videos were all working fine. Sound, mouse, keyboard, hard drive, graphics it all works. My USB which for whatever reason didn’t like most USB devices suddenly accepts a USB memory stick it never accepted before, which certainly doesn’t impress me on Windows. I can even use my Windows partition within Linux. The GUI apparently called Gnome is very clean and simple (possibly too simple) with all the features I’ve ever used on Windows. Screensavers, backgrounds, hardware info, themes etc are all here.
It uses the excellent Firefox browser I am used to and has OpenOffice, a free Office suite which i have briefly dabbed with before and knew it was good. It is this that I am using to draft my blog entry you are reading. It has a nice little weather application very unobtrusive. All in all a good set of included applications.
It’s not to say it’s all problem free. Getting the better resolutions I usually use required me to use a console command to access the Nvidia settings manger. Not a very big deal but not really intuitive. After all the GUI has a built in resolution changer. Also the search on my Windows partition for a file just went on and on so I assume failed. In some ways installing new programs is easier because many programs are available with what is essentially a program browser with combined installer/uninstaller which takes it right off the internet and installs it for you. However, for those not on that browser, installation via command lines knowing about things like dependencies will take me some practice.
I have also discovered, much like other 64 bit operating systems (eg Vista’s and XP’s) there are issues. The browser works fine but flash and java does not, for example. I can install the 32 bit version of Firefox and this solves it and of course the 32 bit Ubuntu doesn’t have that problem but it does give me an idea of what Windows XP 64-bit and other 64 bit operating system users have to deal with.
I’ve only used it for a day or so now. No doubt there’s more to learn which I will endeavour to inform you on.
Budgeting Cents
Well the Fates have intervened and my SO (I only add the B when I’m feeling really pissed off) now has gainful employment.
Given our relative poverty this is quite gainful indeed. As a result we’ve decided to do a budget. You know, that old fashioned thing with numbers and incomes and the really long expenses list.
We could have done one earlier I suppose and I could have even done one in the more extreme poverty of the past but one doesn’t focus on counting pennies when one is suicidal. Besides my real income and expenses were nowhere near predictable enough to write down and there would have been unfillable gaps.
From my perspective a budget is really a tool. It doesn’t actually change your income or expenses it just alerts you. Let’s you know if you’re living beyond your means and which expenses are out of hand. That sort of thing. The hardest thing is to stick to a budget. Even being fairly rich doesn’t make that easy because everyone loves to spend money without concerning yourself about the howmuch and whatfors of it.
So we wrote one up, it’s interesting how much has changed from my old marriage to now through all that no money land and fundamental change. My style here is to segregate money physically in plastic pockets. There are other ways of course and ours will likely change soon.
Bills take a chunk of course though for a family it’s not as severe as I expected. The internet is in here with the usual gas and electricity, it being really a luxury. There’s no insurance in our budget. You’d be amazed how much it would all total to if we had it. It’s just beyond our means at this time, so we are at risk I suppose.
We have a little of our own money to do with as we please which I think is important for all people doing a budget and we’re saving some money now which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time with the hope it may move us forward.
The budget also easily balances, we are used to living light so the burst of income makes it easy. We shall see how it goes now but it is comforting to me that something is in place to assist us in our needs.
Glasgow Attack
So the second incident in the UK has occurred which is certainly more dramatic though possibly less threatening than the sitting car bombs. It’s not clear to me if this was a fire from an explosive gone wrong or the original intent.
Probably this is linked with the sitting car bombs in some way. We are all lucky this second attack was also mostly ineffective. There’s a few things that strike me here.
The UK emergency services and people have dealt with terrorism extensively before, thanks to the whole IRA rubbish, and reacted well. Apparently people were aggressive in preventing it which is a very good thing for any future events.
Apparently they were Asian, if they are also muslim it makes sense because people of ME decent are more watched and many Asian nations have large muslim populations. This is why racial profiling is not a particularly effective idea. One can’t always discount home grown islam as well.
This is a good reminder of why these people have to be opposed and why efforts to weaken terrorism have to go ahead through economics, war and espionage. Why young soldiers from far away countries are sucking up the desert dust hoping to evade the next IED as they and their command figure out how to win a war that is very different to what they were prepared and trained for. It is hopefully also a reminder that this is bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan.
These sorts of attacks are easy and in the style of terrorist tactics and probably are going to happen many more times in the future. I wonder if the action motivates other planning terrorists or the failure discourages them.
Rural Aboriginal Crisis
For years upon heaped years indigenous Australians in remote rural communities have been neck deep in widespread serious problems to quote one of the authors;
“Breakdown of families, alcoholism, drug-taking, pornography, unemployment, overcrowding, lack of discipline, children not going to school — everywhere we went, they were the running themes”
These problems are all related of course and build on each other. Nor are they restricted to such communities but are far more public and widespread there. It took ABC lateline TV program (a curious mix of conservative and leftist ideologies that report on rural issues) to jolt an official government report into it. That too would have been ignored had it not been for the eager media and the child abuse in the report to corner the election sensitive Federal government into action.
It’s sad isn’t it? Everyone has minimised attention to this issue. You can’t absolve or fully blame Howard and the Liberals. It’s been on in Labour times too and before we blame the state, it’s not just in the NT where the report was centred that this happens. The police and other authorities have failed to deliver on criminal prevention and services. Australians have ignored it too. Even many Indigenous people.
So now PM Howard has acted. The action decided is quite authoritarian which is good in terms of getting things done which is definitely plus. Of course it is less good in terms of dependency and freedom. It remains to be seen what is actually done of course and how much real improvement results. On the whole I support the actions, they are late and easily debatable but we need immediate improvement not hand wringing, before we can move these places on into functional free communities.
That second step is going to be much more difficult.
