A Man and his Penguin

When I went into the house in mid-afternoon, I found my father talking on the phone to my sister. This happens with regularity, so I didn’t think anything of it, and I started to make coffee.

From listening in to this side of the conversation, I began to realise that something was very, very wrong; he was talking about my sister being alone at Christmas and about "you feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you" and "I know how devastating it is". At first I thought that my sister had maybe lost her job, but toward the end of the call I had a more accurate idea.

When my father hung up, I asked him what it was about. He told me. My sister and my brother-in-law had separated, just days after their last visit here.

It was such a shock, and it still is. We said we wouldn’t tell my mother until she gets home from work, but she called a little while ago and my father is still on the phone to her; so he must be telling Mum right now. I can only imagine how Susan and Mark are feeling right now. I have no idea what brought this on, but there were a couple of things noticed during their last visit that seemed a little odd.

I don’t want to talk about it, really; I don’t even want to think about it lest it make me cry. So I’ll switch onto a different subject.

There was a VERY recent documentary on Fox 8 this afternoon about the Spice Girls; it was made earlier this month. An almost complete history of the Spice Girls, with a definitive answer on Geri’s departure.

I say "almost complete history" because it curiously skips out two noteworthy parts of their history; the 1999 tour ("Christmas In Spiceworld") and the 3rd album! To be precise, they do mention their third album; Victoria says "It was still a hugely successful album", which I guess is an official acknowledgement that some people don’t regard it as such :-)  They also mentioned that this album had "American producers" and that Mel C’s parts were recorded separately to the others; which we already knew. But other than that, nada.

It certainly looks like Forever is a sore toe that they don’t want to discuss. It was a very controversial album that severely set back the careers of Rodney and Fred Jerkins; the album wasn’t universally disliked, but the sales numbers speak for themselves. I would have loved a B*Witched-style admission (that Forever was well-disliked and that it wasn’t a very good album). But I mostly would have liked an official explanation of why they released just one single from Forever, pulled Tell Me Why off the release schedule, and went into virtual splitsville for six and a half years.

I found it funny that, once again, the Girls implied that the album was recorded much earlier than it actually was. But was Christmas In Spiceworld another sore toe, and if so, why? What happened? Was there tension because Mel C had completely changed her personality? Is that the real reason why she was so adamant about not reuniting with the Girls?

I wish I’d recorded the doco. I might have a look and see if it will be on again so I can record it.

I’ll also let y’all in on a secret. Keep your eyes peeled for an advertisement in the paper on Boxing Day. We’re going to do something that will make all our stores as busy as Myer, in the area of browngoods especially.

An article that I read in Linux Format by Mike Saunders about writing an IRC bot in Perl. I had a bit of a read and thought "Hey, that looks easy". Only toward the end of the article did I realise the implications: Rather than have ssh open for incoming access on servers to perform remote administration, why not have an IRC bot on an existing channel that only responds to one user, and have the bot able to perform the limited tasks under remote direction?

If necessary, there could be a command for the bot that tells it to open SSH access for when more strenuous administration is necessary. The advantage is that the only remotely openable ports will be the actual services (Apache, Samba, Postfix etc). The bot will have connected to an IRC server, so not only will the administrator not have to know the IP address of the computer, but there would not be an extra service running on an incoming port!

I’m currently embracing and extending the original code (learning a bit about Perl in the process). The idea is that I will turn my computer on before going to work, and then from work on days when the boss isn’t there, I will be able to log into the IRC channel and give my bot commands.

I currently have 5 commands:

• uptime - posts my uptime
• ls - asks me what directory I want to list, and then when I reply it will give a list of that directory
• remember - asks me what I want it to remember, and then when I reply it will concatenate it to the list.
• df - How much disk space is free on all mounted filesystems
• remind me - posts back a list of the remembered items

I have plans to also implement:

• wget - downloads a file I specify to my home directory
• cat - prints 5 lines at a time, of a file I specify.
• apt-get - Downloads and installs a package
• execute - Runs a shell command that I specify
• head - Prints the first 5 lines of a file
• tail - Prints the last 5 lines of a file

I’m quite pleased with this; it’s a little kludgy, but it works!

Three things that caught my attention on FSDaily:

• Murrine will shortly have support for semi-transparent widgets. Windows Vista Aero had one thing over Compiz, and that was that Compiz could only change the transparency of a whole window, whereas Aero could have individual semi-transparent widgets, and semi-transparent window backgrounds with opaque widgets. Now, the Murrine theme engine for GTK will, in conjunction with a compositing window manager (like Compiz, Kwin4 and xfwm4) be able to do the same tricks. The code for this has not been released yet, but it looks great and only took a few lines of code in Murrine itself, with no modifications to Compiz! And have no fear - Vista’s programs become completely opaque without Aero turned on, and GTK programs will do the same thing when you’re not using a compositing window manager. And transparency-blurring and "reflections" will also work as you’d expect. Clever, clever man.
• Don’t Fear The Pirates - I can’t sum up this article, but it’s excellent.
• Gnome-Do - this is a program based on Quiksilver for Mac OS X, which in turn is based on Katapult for KDE. Basically, you press Super-Spacebar, start typing something, and Gnome-Do searches for it. Gnome-Do searches your Evolution contacts, Tomboy notes, Pidgin buddies, Firefox bookmarks, files and applications. Let’s hope there are lots more plugins written for it!

In part 1, I told you some anecdotes about how Conia and Teac went the extra mile to keep us and our customers happy; and how Panasonic behaved quite shamefully.

In part 2 (which wasn’t actually called "A Tale Of Two Suppliers"), I said that Conia (who have now changed hands) became a bad supplier, and Nobel is a good supplier.

Now here’s part 3.

During winter, Fujitsu offers cashbacks to try and get people to buy their inverter air conditioners. They’re not the only air-conditioning manufacturer to offer cashbacks nowadays, but they started it. Anyway, a customer bought an air conditioner toward the end of the August; just snuck in by 5 days. The air-con was on backorder at that particular time so I couldn’t fill in the serial number of the outdoor unit, and the customer went away on work business for a while too.

On the 26th of September, there was still 5 days left to send in the forms. The customer came back and together we filled them out, and I personally sent the form off.

A month ago, I got a phone call from my customer; she hadn’t recieved the cashback yet. Fujitsu can’t find the form. I find my copy and fax it through, and was given a reassurance that they will get right onto it and mail out the prepaid Visa card.

This morning, my customer calls; they have not received their cashback, and Fujitsu reckon that they received the forms 2 days late. Idiots. I call Fujitsu, and speak to a very tight-arsed person called Pheobe. She refuses to budge - "She’s not entitled to the cashback because she didn’t follow the terms and conditions" BULLSHIT!

I got very angry on the phone. Tanja thinks it’s funny when I get angry on the phone, because normally I keep everything bottled up and under wraps. Finally I had to write a letter to somebody at Fujitsu to force their hand. I ended it with:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who wouldn’t like to see the customer to go to the Consumer Commission with complaints. I would like to continue selling Fujitsu air conditioners, but whether I and my colleagues continue to sell these units is dependent on your actions in this matter.

I stopped short of calling him a snivelling little meat-head with a staff full of disembodied pricks.

By contrast, back when we were waiting on the "45 white" dishwashers, Dave from Nobel offered to upgrade them to stainless steel for free, since he had those in stock. We already get ridiculously good pricing from Nobel, so it would’ve probably hurt his back pocket to offer to do that, but he does always go the extra mile for us. And I really appreciate that.

Debbie from Vax also doesn’t mind dropping off a handful of Vax bags if we are in desperate need for them and don’t want to order $500 worth of the things. She always drops them off same day! And once she actually called one of my customers to advise him on how to use one particular part of his machine, after he had asked me. I really appreciate that. Things like this give me a lot of confidence in selling from a particular supplier.

Suppliers who are good will get a lot of business from me personally, and endorsement from this blog. Suppliers who are shithouse will get slagged off. Note: If you treat my customer in an unfitting manner, you’d better be prepared for a firestorm!

Last night, I woke up at 4am with a splitting headache. So bad, it felt worse with my eyes closed than with them open.

Eventually after a Panadol, I managed to get back to sleep, but the headache persisted to today. Even today I was feeling under the weather. I compounded it by watching a DVD documentary about the people of New York at the time of September 2001, and also became quite sad as well as ill!

Today did improve though. I bought the webcam that I mentioned before, but have since had trouble with Kopete getting people to look at it. Two people haven’t had any luck looking at my cam, which might be a Kopete problem. I might have to install AMSN.

The other thing is, tonight I got asked out! Someone asked me out! Completely out of the blue - I’d chatted to them years ago and they’d never seemed interested. But today I noticed from their handle that they were feeling stressed, and I sympathised, and then suddenly I got asked out. Next Wednesday though; still this could be good, as I think we’re very similar people.

It just goes to show me: Hugh is there for me when I need him most. I do feel privileged to have such a great god.

Today I decided to go out and buy a cheap webcam, so I can do amateur pornography video chat to my friends. Cheap being the operative word, because I don’t want to buy something expensive and then find that it doesn’t work with Linux!

The shop I went to had two in my price range: A Dick Smith’s el-cheapo webcam for $30, and a Logitech Quickcam Go for $35. Naturally, I’d heard about how Logitech cameras work well with Linux, so I chose the Go (surprisingly, I only got charged $30 for it anyway!)

Upon plugging it in, I did "dmesg" and was told this:

[  156.670421] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[  156.706767] ubuntu/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: USB SPCA5XX camera found.(SPCA561A)
[  156.715560] usbcore: registered new interface driver gspca
[  156.715566] ubuntu/media/gspcav1/gspca_core.c: gspca driver 01.00.12 registered

Linux had automatically recognised the camera and loaded the driver.

Kopete immediately brought up the camera’s picture. Skype doesn’t seem to be working with it, but then Skype is still in beta, and I don’t know if Kopete has a lock on the camera device.

Logitech Quickcam Go. Works out-of-the-box with Linux.

Shit.

On Myspace, a friend of mine posted a shoutout saying that they’d been to a party and had all these wild photos on their profile. I think I may have clicked on the link and then been asked to log into Myspace again. I’m not sure if I "logged in" on that form; because the link was actually a phishing ploy! A bit later I saw the comment again and thought "I don’t remember actually looking at that", so I clicked the link (again?) and idly noticed something unusual about the URL. When the page loaded, Firefox warned me that it was a phishing site.

Which makes me think that I didn’t click the link before. But to be doubly-careful, I changed my password on Myspace.

That’s really thrown me a curveball - I thought I would be smart enough to evade phishing attempts, but maybe I didn’t. I fell for the "lowest common denominator" attempt of social engineering too, which is doubly-shameful.

From now on I’ll have to be more careful, especially with very popular web apps.

I posted a comment on the Hairspray blog a few days ago. Queen Latifah reckoned that Edna Turnblad is "a man dressed up as a woman", so I posted a comment to the HS blog post where she says that, and I corrected her. Edna is a female character. John Travolta is a man who dresses up as a woman in order to play the character. That’s basically all I said in the comment.

And what do you know? My comment gets deleted! Seems that somebody doesn’t like anyone even claiming that one of the stars of Hairspray got something wrong. That’s a bit shithouse.

There’s been a dumb slagging match happening on the Ubuntu-Au mailing list, which started off being about whether Automatix was harmful, and quickly turned into flaming and counter-flaming.

I recieve the Ubuntu-Au mailing list digest, which comes to me every day or so - more often if there’s more posts.

If I hadn’t already been beaten to the punch in invoking Godwin’s Law, I would have replied:

Hitler. Now let’s end the thread.

lol.

Having said that, any program which purposely kills Nautilus is terrible, in my book. What if you had a copying operation happening? What if you had a copying operation happening between your computer and an OS X machine; the sudden loss of connection to Nautilus would probably freeze the Mac.

I was reading PC World today, and they had a feature on "environmentally-friendly" pieces of computer gear. One of the products they listed was the new iMac, because apparantly it’s got 30% less packing than before, and they managed to get rid of a hundred grams of lead from the machine itself.

How on earth is the iMac "environmentally friendly"? In the future if you want a faster processor, or you want a bigger internal hard disk, you can’t just open up the computer and add those things. No, you have to buy a WHOLE NEW COMPUTER. How the fuck is that good for the environment if you have to dispose of an entire computer? If you’re concerned about the environment, buy a PC, so you can actually upgrade the thing and not have to get rid of a perfectly good computer just to stay up with the times.

———

I just had a look at the Netplus Computers website (www.netplus.com.au) to look at my idea of building an ultimate Linux machine, and found that they’ve got the Asus EeePC listed as an item they are accepting preorders for! Interesting!

Tonight I went with Susan and Mark to play pool. A couple of their friends came too.

Before, I was depressed.

During, I was okay.

Afterwards, I was depressed. Still am.

I’ve asked Hugh to help me with my loneliness problem; I hate to say it, but I’ve asked many times before and it doesn’t seem to help. Call me selfish, but maybe he’s just too busy with other people to pay any attention to me. He wouldn’t be the only one.

In the post-Christmas sales, I’m going to buy a swag of computer parts and put together a mean Linux machine. Of course, this will require me to read up on how to put together a computer! This whole "I’m going to build a powerful computer" thing has come about because I don’t have a lady to spend my money and attention on, and also because I had to wait half an hour for Blacklight to transcode Wayne’s World 2 onto my Walkman

The pace at work has picked up. The 45 Whites (Nobel 45cm white dishwashers) have come into Perth, so they’re now in stock! I sold an air-con, cooktop, and chest freezer today. Unfortunately I also played a role in selling a Toshiba notebook with Windows Vista. That’s something else I should look into: How expensive it is to build laptops from parts (I heard that it’s possible, but I don’t know who would distribute the shells for it) and whether I could offer Linux machines to my customers that way.

But yeah, the main focus of this post is that I’m lonely, depressed, miserable, and I feel really let down by one person who did finally take her virus-infested computer offline the other day.