It was rainy. The sun popped up to say hello. I was driving. I needed coffee. Sunday in Caulfield is pretty quiet. Caulfield is a jewish ghetto. You’d think there would be a decent cafe latte the first day of the week. No way. Macdonald’s was on the wrong side of the street. I did a right, drop the daughter at Helenslea Drive, did a U and ordered a large latte at Maccas’s. Wrong move. Should have ordered small. Proceeded to Clayton where my son plays with the Greek soccer team. He’s no greek, but a great midfielder Then headed back to Caulfield, picked up Hannah and went back home. That was 4 days ago.... today I asked my daughter what we did on Sunday. She couldn’t recall. “I stayed home” – why?? Then it all came flowing back. There was no guilt. There was the usual defensive “How do I know??!!! That was AGES ago!” You can figure she’s a teennager. You can’t imagine how close she came to be physically maimed for life.
Anyway, this blog is for a friend whom I know is reading because she’s a blog reader and she needs regular sex. But hey... who am I to comment. A good blog is hard to find.
So how did it all flow for my daughter? How did she suddenly remember what she did last Sunday? I must say it was a stroke of brilliance. I told her to start using her brain to take pictures. Picture it and all will be revealed.
Tesla, one of my most admired inventors of the 20th century could imagine his inventions. My heart bleeds for Tesla because he actually invented the radio but didn’t get round to the patent office fast enough (probably didn’t have the dough) and that Marconi dared to lay claim to the fame. If there’s one person you’ve not discovered in your life and should know more, may I recommend Tesla. He is googlable.
So what has it got to do with the blog-reading friend? Same-o same-o. Picture it. Imagine yourself. Do a walter mitty.... all will be revealed. The best things happen to people who see it in their minds. I am sure, for my daughter, she is re-living Sunday in Caulflield and how on the following Wednesday evening, a flying frying pan - launched by a parent, missed her head by 2 centimetres.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Two Laps Talking
Two Laps Talking
Scenario: One old laptop and One middle aged laptop.
Old Laptop has got lots of information. But hasn’t got all the things that can bring all that information into the next generation. I.e. it has no CD burner, no modem, no usb port, its printer port lost its teeth somewhere in the early 2000s and its only portable disk is floppy.
So I bought a null modem to connect old laptop to middle aged laptop. Duh... too hard, and the pins are missing in the printer port.
Then an inner light told me...what is this little window here. It’s an infrared! How it’s like suddenly discovering the old laptop has psychic powers. The middle aged laptop also has an infrared. It’s working fine and waiting to receive...it’s waiting, still waiting...
Old laptop can’t fire up its psychic powers. Too much cigarettes and alcohol... Then I realised I never initiated the darn thing in the first place. It’s like waiting for years and years to reach puberty only to be denied it because parents never thought there is something called teenage years, so you go through life wearing kids clothes to the dying day. And then, ah ha... on your deathbed you discover you had those hormones... a little too late now...
Hope springs eternal... (or something like that)
I couldn’t activate it because it never had the infrared icon or whatever it needed on its control panel. So I googled through and discovered there is something called a windows driver for infrared devices...it’s at microsoft.com... and the file is something called Win95ir... downloaded it onto a floppy and fed it to the old lap.
Now it has the works...an infrared icon, a monitor, nice lights and a dialogue box telling me it can’t establish connection even when middle aged lap is waiting and shining its light!
to be continued
Update: 12 October 2005
Unfortunately I’ve pushed and shoved and now Old Lap is in the intensive care unit. I’ve messed with the registry and I can’t restore Windows because the OEM CD I was given didn’t have a setup.exe file! I’ve been ripped off but too late. The company that sold me the laptop folded about 2 years ago!
Forget IR technology. Let me take a stroll down DOS and see what can be done.
to be continued
update 20 october
taking a stroll down DOS is not as easy as I thought it would be: so much to learn, so much to do. Here are some useful websites for future reference
bootdisk.com
digressed; lots of interesting DOS games
dos commands
lots of MSDos software
dos drivers for reading and editing NTFS files
list of MSDos commands
dos links – not comprehensive but they’ll lead you somewhere
Scenario: One old laptop and One middle aged laptop.
Old Laptop has got lots of information. But hasn’t got all the things that can bring all that information into the next generation. I.e. it has no CD burner, no modem, no usb port, its printer port lost its teeth somewhere in the early 2000s and its only portable disk is floppy.
So I bought a null modem to connect old laptop to middle aged laptop. Duh... too hard, and the pins are missing in the printer port.
Then an inner light told me...what is this little window here. It’s an infrared! How it’s like suddenly discovering the old laptop has psychic powers. The middle aged laptop also has an infrared. It’s working fine and waiting to receive...it’s waiting, still waiting...
Old laptop can’t fire up its psychic powers. Too much cigarettes and alcohol... Then I realised I never initiated the darn thing in the first place. It’s like waiting for years and years to reach puberty only to be denied it because parents never thought there is something called teenage years, so you go through life wearing kids clothes to the dying day. And then, ah ha... on your deathbed you discover you had those hormones... a little too late now...
Hope springs eternal... (or something like that)
I couldn’t activate it because it never had the infrared icon or whatever it needed on its control panel. So I googled through and discovered there is something called a windows driver for infrared devices...it’s at microsoft.com... and the file is something called Win95ir... downloaded it onto a floppy and fed it to the old lap.
Now it has the works...an infrared icon, a monitor, nice lights and a dialogue box telling me it can’t establish connection even when middle aged lap is waiting and shining its light!
to be continued
Update: 12 October 2005
Unfortunately I’ve pushed and shoved and now Old Lap is in the intensive care unit. I’ve messed with the registry and I can’t restore Windows because the OEM CD I was given didn’t have a setup.exe file! I’ve been ripped off but too late. The company that sold me the laptop folded about 2 years ago!
Forget IR technology. Let me take a stroll down DOS and see what can be done.
to be continued
update 20 october
taking a stroll down DOS is not as easy as I thought it would be: so much to learn, so much to do. Here are some useful websites for future reference
bootdisk.com
digressed; lots of interesting DOS games
dos commands
lots of MSDos software
dos drivers for reading and editing NTFS files
list of MSDos commands
dos links – not comprehensive but they’ll lead you somewhere
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Listening to Advice
Listening to Advice...hmmm
If you are the cautious type, you’d read all kinds of advice...the do’s and don’ts... but then you come to a major standstill.... It sounds too difficult, don’t do it. I put off networking my computer because it looked too hard...naming IPs, SSID, and CIDs... etc ad naseum etc...
I couldn’t stand it anymore I needed to print, I couldnt get my teenager off the internet, so I took the plunge
.......................
Using XP, just go the printer task and browse for printer. I am on a wireless networking system, with printer attached to the desktop. I work off my lap.
Hey presto... a printed page. Now I need to buy ink.
If you are the cautious type, you’d read all kinds of advice...the do’s and don’ts... but then you come to a major standstill.... It sounds too difficult, don’t do it. I put off networking my computer because it looked too hard...naming IPs, SSID, and CIDs... etc ad naseum etc...
I couldn’t stand it anymore I needed to print, I couldnt get my teenager off the internet, so I took the plunge
.......................
Using XP, just go the printer task and browse for printer. I am on a wireless networking system, with printer attached to the desktop. I work off my lap.
Hey presto... a printed page. Now I need to buy ink.
Cleaning Up
Cleaning Up
About 7 years ago I bought my first laptop. A Twinhead Slimnote 9 with active matrix screen.... that means if you stood upside down, you still see clearly. It was state of the art, had an infrared port, TV out jack, printer port, a fast speed 8x CD rom drive, 32mb Ram and 1.5g harddrive, pcmcia card with fast speed modem and a lot of other dooheekies. And it was relatively lightweight 5.6kg. I worked with it, rather well until it started burning a hole in my lap, and then I upgraded to another Twinhead (what can I say... it’s a barebones system and the service guy is only a phone call away) Efio 12KT.
Then came the inevitable.
I put it off until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everyday my daughter says the same prayer before she goes to bed: “when are you going to give me that old laptop”. Today I decided to go through the documents, and transfer them to my new laptop.
Uh oh...
New laptop (henceforth New) has no floppy drive, no parallel ports, no serial ports, one modem, one wireless ethernet and couple of RJ45s... and a few more USB2 and a spunky DVD burner.
Old laptop (henceforth Old) has no USB, there is a PCMCIA card slot with no card modem.
So how is the transfer between OLD and NEW ever going to happen? I thought about it, I bought a huge bunch of gadgets, none of which worked...what I thought was a serial port on NEW turned out to be a VGA out. So, as a resort I am now saving old files onto the reliable floppy... and eventually will burn these floppies onto CD via my desktop (henceforth Desk) which fortunately does have a floppy AND a CD burner.
But gosh isn’t it interesting.... looking at the old files. By old, I mean 7 years ago, in the last century – it’s like take a stroll through your attic. All those subscriptions and hey...wait a minute, I’ve posted notes to myself that I’ve hung things on the internet through my websites (and these are free websites) and they don’t exist anymore! I’ve been ripped off.... where are my documents?
You know how they say that data is no more than on and off electrical pulses... like 1 is on and 0 is off (or is it vice versa). Do deleted data just die or do they reinvent themselves as something else? I would like to think that they are just floating around, happily somewhere in the universe ... creating another lifeform perhaps... there could even be another universe, “peopled” by deleted data... a brave new world of bits and bytes – my deleted folder on Boy Mechanic would surely prove useful.
About 7 years ago I bought my first laptop. A Twinhead Slimnote 9 with active matrix screen.... that means if you stood upside down, you still see clearly. It was state of the art, had an infrared port, TV out jack, printer port, a fast speed 8x CD rom drive, 32mb Ram and 1.5g harddrive, pcmcia card with fast speed modem and a lot of other dooheekies. And it was relatively lightweight 5.6kg. I worked with it, rather well until it started burning a hole in my lap, and then I upgraded to another Twinhead (what can I say... it’s a barebones system and the service guy is only a phone call away) Efio 12KT.
Then came the inevitable.
I put it off until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Everyday my daughter says the same prayer before she goes to bed: “when are you going to give me that old laptop”. Today I decided to go through the documents, and transfer them to my new laptop.
Uh oh...
New laptop (henceforth New) has no floppy drive, no parallel ports, no serial ports, one modem, one wireless ethernet and couple of RJ45s... and a few more USB2 and a spunky DVD burner.
Old laptop (henceforth Old) has no USB, there is a PCMCIA card slot with no card modem.
So how is the transfer between OLD and NEW ever going to happen? I thought about it, I bought a huge bunch of gadgets, none of which worked...what I thought was a serial port on NEW turned out to be a VGA out. So, as a resort I am now saving old files onto the reliable floppy... and eventually will burn these floppies onto CD via my desktop (henceforth Desk) which fortunately does have a floppy AND a CD burner.
But gosh isn’t it interesting.... looking at the old files. By old, I mean 7 years ago, in the last century – it’s like take a stroll through your attic. All those subscriptions and hey...wait a minute, I’ve posted notes to myself that I’ve hung things on the internet through my websites (and these are free websites) and they don’t exist anymore! I’ve been ripped off.... where are my documents?
You know how they say that data is no more than on and off electrical pulses... like 1 is on and 0 is off (or is it vice versa). Do deleted data just die or do they reinvent themselves as something else? I would like to think that they are just floating around, happily somewhere in the universe ... creating another lifeform perhaps... there could even be another universe, “peopled” by deleted data... a brave new world of bits and bytes – my deleted folder on Boy Mechanic would surely prove useful.
Sunday spring
what does it mean when a bird strolls into your living room
sunday 2 october 2005
it’s sunday... afternoon. spring. most people are out in the garden. I stay indoors beccause I have hayfever. I used Telfast... ya right...
A kind of Mynah strolls into the living room. “Look...a bird” exclaimed my son. He rarely exclaims, so this must be special. “No big deal...it’s only a Mynah bird – wait for something Major” Funny. I’m pissed
Bird strolls out. I continue my cleaning. Day ends. Debussy does a rather special cake walk on MPBS.
end of blog
sunday 2 october 2005
it’s sunday... afternoon. spring. most people are out in the garden. I stay indoors beccause I have hayfever. I used Telfast... ya right...
A kind of Mynah strolls into the living room. “Look...a bird” exclaimed my son. He rarely exclaims, so this must be special. “No big deal...it’s only a Mynah bird – wait for something Major” Funny. I’m pissed
Bird strolls out. I continue my cleaning. Day ends. Debussy does a rather special cake walk on MPBS.
end of blog
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
From now on it's pure thoughts
Get the feeling that everyone is doing everything right and you're the only one getting it wrong? I get that feeling everytime I stare down my compost heap. Last month's roast dinner stares back at me.
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