zen.org Communal Weblog

I got a letter today saying I’m still needed to appear as an expert witness at a trial in the High Court in Dublin. It turns out the settlement everyone was working on actually fell through. The punchline: I’m soon going to California for a week of meetings related to some new work (woo hoo!), and shortly after my return our family is going right back to America on vacation to play tennis with Elana’s parents and our niece and nephew.

The trial landed smack dab in the middle of those two trips, when I’ll actually be here in Ireland. Talk about lucky timing. For both sides, really. 🙂

I loved this page – some are truly poetic… It reminded me of when I was a TEFL teacher and asked a Spanish boy if he had any pets:
SB: “I don’t have any pets now, but when I get home my parents will get me a dog.”
me: “What sort of dog will it be?”
(We had been talking about different breeds of dog. Spanish boy surreptitiously leafs through illegal dictionary concealed on his lap, and confidently announces to the class:)
SB: “My dog will be a little bastard!”

Exam Howlers

For what its worth, I’m on day 4 of attempt number 659 to kick the fags . So far so average: smoked half of two cigarettes last night. Well, could be worse. Somehow. I guess. What I love is that alt.support.stop-smoking is “there for me” and has become a crutch already.

I also love SilkQuit, a free Quit Counter, which tells me that at this very moment, i have not smoked for three days, 16 hours, 4 minutes and 43 seconds; I have not smoked 44 cigarettes; I have saved €13.76; and my “life saved” (bitty iffy about this one) is 3 hours, 40 minutes.

What can I buy for €13.76??

/. reports that Bill Gates thinks that `anyone who doesn’t support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as “communists”.’ United States Republican candidates often accuse Democrats of being liberal. There is an eerie relationship there I have not figured out yet.

Quick test post. Somehow I’d imagine all my posts will be logged under ‘accidental’, just the nature of the beast.

I saw the little pictogram pop up in the browser bar and scuttled off to my Kanji dictionary. It took a while to find as I thought it was a 12 stroke character, but it’s a 13-er – there seems to be a horizontal stroke missing from the square box on the right (it should be divided up into quarters according to the dict.).

Anyway, naturally enough, it’s the character representing ‘Zen’, which consists of the root element ‘god’ (the bit on the left), and a phonetic element ‘Sen/tan/dan’ (the bit on the right) which means ‘single’ when it appears on its own, gets pronounced ‘tan’ and is supposed to be a picture of ‘a single weapon with a forked end’.

Interesting, but will not help you get a cab when you step out of the arrivals hall in Tokyo…

From Geek Break Up Lines

11. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? R
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? R
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? F
Relationship failed.
10. Now that Half Life 2 is out, I need to refocus my priorities.
9. You have been unsubscribed from my dating list. Please click this link to confirm.
8. I need a lover who understands that 20 hours a day on the Internet is normal.
7. I don’t think we should date any more, but we can still be on each other’s buddy lists.
6. I’d like a true beauty so I don’t have to spend so much time photoshopping your ugly face out of our photos.
5. It’s like in X-Men number 135, where Cyclops and Jean Grey (as The Phoenix)…
4. Let’s face it. You love Intel, and I’m an AMD man. It’s not going to work out.
3. What do you mean your EULA says that once I’ve removed the shrink wrap I can’t return it?
2. After you e-mailed me your full-body shot, I realized I was looking
for someone more feminine
1. So long and thanks for all the fish.

A very cool project, even though I am still on my Christmas holidays: in late January, apparently, we will be setting up video conferencing between five Dublin schools http://www.global-leap.com/ and through this we will be running peer-to-peer teaching in things like web design, desk top publishing and programming. Sounds purdy cool.

Also, next September, about half the kiddies and all the staff get iBooks (except me ; I get a PowerBook next week ‘cos I’m special) and some Apple dudes are coming in over the summer to set up wireless access points in all of the classrooms and public areas.

My laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046, has a built-in wireless ethernet card. It’s only 802.11b, which is slower than most these days at 10Mbit/sec. It works fine, but I see E using her iBook at 54Mbit/sec and can’t believe how fast things appear on her screen. (Part of this is because her Web browser doesn’t go thru a proxy, while mine uses privoxy to weed out the crap, but it’s still noticably faster.)

I got a Netgear WG511 card, but it doesn’t work out-of-the-box with SuSE 9.2 and its 2.6.8 Linux kernel. I followed the steps with SuSE’s YaST2 program to configure the card so everything ended up being put into the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pci-0000:01:00.0. (Even though it’s showing up as eth1, not a wlan* device.) Trying to activate the card failed. A little Google-digging, and I found the answer: use a driver from www.prism54.org. No luck, the server seemed to be down for days.

The Web server over at prism54.org finally came back up, so I was able to download the newer driver for the card to make it actually work. Part of making the prism54 driver work includes setting up a firmware update, which was made available for easy download to be installed in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware as the file isl3890. I did also have to make one tweak so the ‘make modules‘ command would work.

The combination worked like a charm. Now it’s zooming away happy as can be. 🙂

One catch: like most other PCMCIA cards for this laptop, they suck the battery dry like a purist enjoying his pint during a heated conversation in a pub. On the road, the internal one has far less impact on the battery, but within proximity to a power source the WG511 card helps convince you there’s no need to upgrade the laptop just yet.

Besides, the next generation of the Lifebook is using Intel’s chip instead of Transmeta’s, which is a real shame. For the religious, the next step is the Actius MP30 from Sharp. With their ongoing work with Sharp, I wonder if Transmeta’s going to do a chip similar to the ARM so the successor to my Sharp C860 described recently could grow to use a Transmeta chip instead? The basics of its Code Morphing software seem to me to imply the ability to emulate any architecture, not just the x86. So why not shoot for a chip that’s buried inside an awful lot of stuff these days?

We want the first of the year to be something of a cleansing, in part freeing ourselves of the too-often stressful holiday season. We’re clearing out the living room now, the enslaved tree now stripped bare—making me think of the turkey we consumed.

Yeah, in theory we should leave it all in place until the 6th of January. The theory of the various Christian faiths. I just finished reading the illustrated version of “The DaVinci Code”, a great gift from my aunt. If you have any tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, that book will feed it in spades. It helped encourage my ongoing skepticism anyway.

Didn’t help to learn about the image of a red-suited santa being the result of advertising by a beverage company, not anything more creative and natural.

So ours will be the first tree going into the town’s recycling pile. And we can spend some time in our restored living room figuring out the year to come.