the parries

the first time, you almost faint. the shock! I remember my first time. I remember wanting to vomit, but at the same time being too fascinated by these little creatures to go hurl my gut up all over them.

they were lost, out of their depth, their entire world! grasping and fishing for the thinnest strand of hope, a life-rope, and I knew, that instant, when the first one found his way, I knew just how he felt. suddenly his life seemed purposeful, with meaning. we shared a common bond. I still washed him and all his family down the sink, though.

I mean, there must have been generations up there, grannies and grandads and uncles and whole cities with cultures and traffic systems and cinemas and holy shit, itchy! After a few years, head-lice becomes a part of life, something you just have to deal with every once in a while living here. a good metal bean-comb is your friend.

I'm sensitive now, I learned. the very first intruder is detected immediately. I know the difference between an itch and an itch. your scalp doesn't movethe hairs about, it doesn't bite. apparently most adults aren't so sensitive, the wee buggers get a good egg-laying session in before the dull folks spot them, which is why parries are one of the most successful species on the planet, the Egyptian Pharoes had them. so there ya go.

Anyway, I got him! a big un too! and sadly have to add yetanother name to my list of "folks you must comb after they leave". och well, it's good for the hair you know, all that combing. I used to wonder if it was the parries themselves leaving some kind of residue; a hair treatment; mine always seemed to be in tip-top shape afterwards, a sort of conditioner, and I wondered for a time if it might not be such a bad trade-off, you know, great looking hair for a an itchy scalp and the large risk of infecting anyone and everyone you hug, or even swish past with that very same dilemma.

But I think it's the combing, and a week doesn't go past still when some lustful human remarks upon my hair, it's texture, or length or sheen, so even without the parries, it's in tip-top form. and doesn't itch. no, I never gave you them, wasn't me, been clean for months, I swear!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

smiley totem pole

my smileys, all standing on each other's heads..

  :lol:
  :ken:
  :D
  :eek:
  :geek:
  :roll:
  :erm:
  :cool:
  :blank:
  :idea:
  :ehh:
  :aargh:

do not be alarmed, this is only a test!

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

snow

I don't know where to start.

Yesterday, the installation of my new heating system was completed1.

Today, it snowed. I guess I'm just lucky.2

Winter's arrived, and along with the snow, everything's falling into place. despite having my floorboards up, an unsettling business, it's all working out perfectly. It always does, sure, but currently I'm getting to watch, getting to live it, which is a helluva lot more fun that just hoping it or believing in it.

While I've no truck with regular astrology3, I'd wager that the planets are up to something right now, all that huge pulling power, at just those right angles. fascinating thing, the human brain, it's chemistry.

it's curious how we accept that the moon pulls all the oceans around this big planet of ours with its HUGE magnetism4, and yet pay little or no attention to the effect all this might have on the delicately balanced chains of metal particles in our brains. Mind you, I believe a few Scandanavian countries do have "moon-madness" laws, so There's hope yet. Planets next, eh!

Next for me is more php, I'm in the mood for it just now, could be cosmic activity, so everything has had an update this week. check the devblog for lots more details, links, and less obvious gags.

And if you're an astrology student, mail me for my birth details, you can correlate the ratio of devblogs-to-blogs for me, and map it against my astrological transitions with some kind of statistical analysis tool, okay?

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

chmox

I didn't know there was a chm reader for Mac OS X. I do now.

.chm files are "Compressed Help Manuals" or something like that, and are a very common way to distribute documents, particularly on the windows platform, where they originated (as far as I know).

it's a compressed html archive, and I have to admit I quite like the format, chmox will be well used. and one less reason to keep a peecee.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

Linux

They say that pets look like their owners, but it occurred to me tonight that it's probably just because folk buy animals that look like themselves. it's like that with lots of things, but probably not computers. Most folks are just stuck with a peecee, windoze. it's afterwards that they start to look like us, or was it the other way around?

Anyway, my replacement hard drive arrived the other day, in a factory-sealed bag, and 20GB bigger than it was when I sent it away. clever stuff. I'd like to say that I was too damned busy to setup the old Linux box the very moment it arrived, or even the next day, but the more I think about it, the more I think I just plain wasn't looking forward to the experience.

Linux. I remember the first time I tried to install it on that old peecee. hours melted into days. It seemed a repeatedly impossible task, getting all the right drivers, getting them working, configuring every-bloody-thing and back again, "trying everything". That was a long time ago. I remember also getting there in the end, and having everything compiled and installed and working, and that was why I went back and did it all again. It worked. And it kept on working, twenty-four-seven, and never failed, until its hard drive blew, which wasn't the penguin's fault at all.

This time around, armed with a decent back-up of my /usr/local directory, and all that /etc, etc, business, I was up and running in about an hour. Pretty good. There's Linux distributions these days that install just like windows does (or rather, should). And it just works.

Sure, The Apache Web Server works on other platforms, but on Linux it rocks-da-wires! The mac might be the only machine that can really "do it all", at least for me, but my old mac works much better if it doesn't have to. When it's acting simultaneously as server and client, it seems to suffer from strange personality issues. More ram would help, I guess. Linux still lacks a real personality.

But if you develop websites, or just need a Fast, Reliable ftp server/file server/firewall/samba server/internet gateway/web server/backup server/etc/etc/etc for your network, and do it all for zero pounds sterling, you must face your fears and take a nibble, then a great big bite out of this huge free pie that is Linux.

It grows on you. First you start with one lightening fast dev server, the next thing you know it's handling your samba shares, windows networking, then an ftp server, and before you know it, it's doing everything. And cheap-as-in-free. The T.C.O of my Linux server was under fifty bucks, cost of the puter, and that was over three years ago!

There's no keyboard on it, no mouse, no monitor now, it's just under the desk somewhere working, all the time. a sleek desktop pentium one 233MHz MMX, which I figure must be around one tenth the power of the average web server. It lives to serve. I've hammered it with multiple abs1 and watched it rip through every request, pops up my distro machine test page (with over a dozen separate live embedded machines in it) in just under a second. There's simply no other serving platform on the planet that even comes close to this kind of performance/value ratio. Maybe I'm just proud of that wee box.

Unlike other blogs (my own), I've no intention of winding my way cleverly around to explain how Linux is like me, the "just get it done, get it working" part of me, or something. How it is the missing element in my personality's trinity, the worker at back of all the crafted output, or anything like that, I'm just going to end with something cute, probably an advertising-like slogan, as soon as one pops into my head.

And until that point I'll just type about how when I'm moving files from A to B I like to use a peecee. how the copy routine still knocks stripes off the mac's dangerous copy policies. And how I know now that mc (midnight commander) is best of all. For some stuff, a fancy graphical user interface just gets in the way.

And I'm thinking that probably all the qualities I admire or desire in every operating systems I use will one day be emulated, and for free-as-in-beer, on a Linux Box. So I'm glad I can set the buggers up, took the time to get to know the penguin, and look forward to the day when I run my perfect Linux desktop.

Got it!

The Linux Desktop.. it just works

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org