Monthly Archives: May 2014

spam

reminder

having facebook send me spam advertising your web page is NOT a way to get me to pay attention to you, except, probably, in the way that you don’t want, okay?

thanks. 😡

workshop

workshop workshop workshop

peter's flute

my friend peter brought me his flute. he had done several things to the flute that an average person, who isn’t a musical instrument repair technician, isn’t supposed to do to a flute… and then he figured he could “repad” it himself. so he bought a “repad kit” (yes, they are available, no i won’t link to one, because repadding your flute by yourself is, for the most part, one of the wrong things to do with a flute) from gemeinhardt. they come with pretty much everything you need to either repad your flute, or get into big trouble: a leak-light, a screw driver, a bunch of white shellac, fifteen random pads, a pad-slick, and poorly written instructions (which he didn’t give me). he, then, took the screw driver and proceded to…

lose a pivot screw.

they’re TINY — no more than an a half-centimetre long and a few millimetres in diameter — so it’s not particularly surprising that he lost it, but if he weren’t under the impression that one could repad a flute themselves, he wouldn’t have had this problem. compounding that was the fact that, another of the things you aren’t supposed to do with a flute, that he did, was dip it in a river… and then attempt to lubricate the lower stack with vegetable oil.

now, i can see how, particularly if one is camping or something like that, and one “accidentally” dips their flute in a river, that one might consider the possibility of lubricating it with vegetable oil a possibility… and i am also aware of the fact that, at first, it does, actually, lubricate the inner workings of your flute, but it very quickly hardens and then your flute won’t work at all… which is what happened to my friend peter.

these are all things that a qualified instrument repair technician can fix, fairly easily. they are NOT things that i would recommend doing to your flute. now, don’t get me wrong, i have worked on flutes which were in much worse shape than this, but he could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had brought the flute to me, first…

although i probably would have recommended that he refrain from dipping the flute in a river, all together… 😐

india, videos

oh, india… 8)

Video

The Clean Indian, the new anti-public urination activist group has taken the fight against public uriation in their own hands, quite literally. They have their own unique way of meting out justice to those who break the law and still remain anonymous. Armed with a giant water tanker, water hoses and sealing their identities with masks this group aims for a cleaner and more hygienic India.

The anonymous activist group has a simple solution to the problem, they roam around Mumbai with a water tanker rightfully named as ‘The pissing tanker’, and spray water on individuals who are indulging in the act of urinating in the public. They claim ‘The solution to public urination is public urination, by the pissing tanker’ and so attack the offenders with a giant water cannon, which indeed makes for a funny sight for onlookers. The need for a cleaner India sparked off this desperate yet quirky attempt to solve this problem with a water cannon.

The group which also has a twitter account, without a display picture of course, asks others to be aware of them as they will strike when least expected. Their motto is ‘You Stop. We Stop’ and fight public urination ‘one spray at a time’.

one of my greatest desires is to live in india for 6 months or more. i could “take a vacation” to india for 2 weeks or so, but i’m absolutely certain that it would not be enough… this is one of the main reasons why. if this were the united states, we would have “christian” and/or “civic” groups getting upset that people were urinating in public, there would be a public outcry, and more people would get arrested, fined, jailed or what-have-you, but in india?

in india, one guy with a tanker and a few friends, and… we all know that people are still urinating in public, but this is definitely enough to make most people think twice — at least — before whipping it out…

and the sign on the back of the truck is priceless… “YOU STOP WE STOP”

in the united states, on the other hand, very likely someone who responded like this would be arrested and jailed for being a public nuisance when someone who got sprayed by them complained…

the battle of the computer

now that i’m getting used to it, i definitely like it, but…

now that i’m getting used to it, i definitely like it, but getting there was a real roller coaster ride, lemme tell ya’… 😐

my last post was sounding like it was the beginning of another one of those multi-day fiascos that i have come to tag as “the battle of the computer”… and it was touch and go for a while, although more with my mental state than anything else.

my post at kubuntu forums has the bare bones, but what i actually did was as a direct result of what i have learned from previous, desperate visits to kubuntu forums. basically i did it all from the terminal login until i was absolutely certain that it was going to work with a GUI, and then i made triple sure that everything was as it should be before i started to diagnose the real problem (which was that my email client had disappeared).

with the result that i got my email back, i didn’t lose anything, i didn’t have to rebuild my address book, even my sigrot made it to the new version, i actually got a new version of kubuntu (Trusty Tahr, 14.04), and it didn’t take a week, or even three days, like it has in the past.

now that everything has calmed down to the dull roar i interpret as “normal”, i’m going to go take a shower and test out the new showerhead, and shut down the computers for a while… because it’s too hot for them anyway.

blood pressure, malfunctioning computers, the battle of the computer

blood pressure through the roof… 8/

1 Comment

i installed the daily security updates, and it removed my ability to send and receive email. 😡

it’s getting towards time for me to re-evaluate my dependence on computers.

ETA: so i decided that it was time to upgrade distributions, because precise is coming up against its EOL in a year or so. i upgraded to trusty, and things got distinctly WORSE: i am now looking at a “system loading” screen that has had a “progress” meter (which is just an animated graphic that has 5 dots that go from one colour to a different colour, and back, one dot at a time, to show you that “something’s happening”) for about half an hour with no change…

i posted once at kubuntu forums but there has been no response yet… 😐

i wonder how long it’s gonna take this time? 😡 if it’s anything like the last couple of times, it could take as much as a week to get things back to “normal” again… 😐