MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

Skiving (sp?) off from my exam and writing stuff to you instead.

1.  This morning I found the energy rating site for air conditioners.  Yes, as Alan Pears says, air conditioners might be cheap for the consumer, but they mean the government, and ultimately, the tax payer, has to pay up to $6000 to provide the electricity infrastructure to run it.

I struggle with air conditioners.  I hate the heat as much as the next northern european descendant, but I know it's only hot enough for me to want air conditioning for about 10 days a year.  In my house, when I get my act together, I'll get ceiling fans and/or an evaporative cooler.

Also, if you only have electricity connected to your home, they are the most efficient way to heat it.  Efficient reverse cycle air conditioners produce about the same amount of greenhouse gas for heating as gas heaters, yes even in nasty brown coal burning Victoria.  The problem is that when we have them, we use air conditioners for coolingin summer, which is when we have a problem with electricity demand.

I like the idea that if you have air conditioning you should install PV panels to power them.  It's a good match, producing maximum electricity when you most want cooling.  I guess if you can't do that, you should pay the premium for 100% accredited greenpower

2.  It's really nice having a laptop.  I'm lying on the couch to do/avoid my exam.  Unfortunately, I'm also right next to the new tent.

When I was newly pregnant with Rose and feeling sick, I spent quite a lot of time in company with my other new tent (which I'd link to but Flickr is down).  I said at the time that the smell of new canvas and fresh enamel paint would probably have a bad association for me for the rest of my life. 

It's happened before.  When I was queasy with Sneetch, I spent 3 days at work drawing the most amazing 3D image using an inadequate drawing package.  It's a fabulous drawing, but I can only look at it for about 10seconds before I start feeling queasy.  Bleurgh!

I was right about the tent smell.  Although it's a funny bad association.  There's the queasy feeling, which is bad, but is right next to the sense of achievement I have in designing and participating in making something that looks and is so fabulous.

3.  Been thinking about Steven Covey's Circle of Influence, and Circle of Concern.  One of my growths through being a parent, and a single person and stuff was realising how much of my energy and arguments were about me worrying about stuff in my circle of concern, instead of my circle of influence. 

After a comment I made yesterday, and some conversations my friends have managed to avoid having with me lately, its probably been a good time to revisit it.  Actually, I think Hornblower had some influence there too.  Anyway, its all about taking responsibility for the stuff I have direct control over, and letting other people work out for themselves that they need to do stuff too.

Hmmm, does Douglas Adams count as a guru too?  I use his concept of SEP a lot. Not so much the invisibility field, but dividing problems into mine and Somebody Else's.  OTOH, I might come off a bit flippant when I do that at work.

4. We're off to the zoo this arvo  I wonder how Rose will manage with her Daddy on stage and her not allowed to be with him?  Maybe we'll spend the whole time looking at the Hippos or something.

Last January, I finally got around to reinstalling the wiki software I had before my web server crashed and burnt. Of course, by then there was an update and I installed the newer version.

I got it to look beautiful. I spent a lot of time, adding one thing at a time and making sure that I could see the wiki and there were no errors. Except that it appears I didn't check that it actually worked. It happily goes into the edit page, and I can type stuff in there, but then, when I try to save my words, the old words are back again, in the edit page.

I searched the mailing list for other people who had this problem with no luck. I thought I had some funny permission problem going on, so I asked some people who ought to know, and finally got vonstrassburg to have a look at it. He threw his hands in the air at disgust with the code of the wiki software I chose and suggested I get some different software.

More recently, I've been trying to work out if I can reduce my internet costs and thought I could go onto a plan with a dynamic IP, get rid of the webserver and go with damned_colonial's suggestion of using dreamhost to do what I want, without having to support a linux box I don't have time for.

Alas, my kids are downloading about 30GB a month, so the plan I'm on is about right so the "get rid of electricity consuming, fragile hard disk, linux box that I'm not sure of" option would just cost me more per month.


For $US8 per month, I can find the time to sort out these problems. I thought.

Tonight was another linux frustration evening. I tried to install mediawiki. It has a config page to set it up. That worked. Except I need php5 and the "yum install" options I tried wouldn't work.

So I tried to install an earlier version of mediawiki. The helpful config page worked fine. Until it decided it needed a later version of mysql. And of course, the yum install AND yum upgrade options for mysql didn't work either.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for listening, while collecting the links to explain my problem, I solved it.

I've just installed an even older version of mediawiki. One that doesn't need the latest php OR mysql.

And it looks like it works. Hooray!

I was at work and quickly flipping through a magazine on lighting and architectural trends to check that there wasn't anything I was interested in, when I found this:

( is this cool!!? )

At 7.11pm Daffydd posted to the lochac list: We be two benighted travellers in Wellington, having lost our host's address/phone no. etc.

At 7.23pm Their host posted to the lochac list: Replied to off-list. Thanks to all four callers.!!!!!!!

So that's why they have internet cafe's at airports!

I was sent an email today from bicycle victoria. It included a link to an interactive bicycle map of Victoria

The interactive maps allow you to:

• find information on all bicycle networks right across the entire state,
  
• view the maps at any scale you choose including Melways images in Melbourne,
  
• print maps in colour and black and white with a title block and legend,
  
• view the map backgrounds in colour and in black and white to accentuate the bicycle routes which are in colour,
  
• measure the distance of any trips planned or taken,
  
• search the maps using road names, suburbs and/or municipality names.

I just went to check it out 'cos it sounds really cool, but I get an error because I'm not using internet explorer - how stupid!

Last week T put water in the iron and all the power in the house turned off - twice.

My webserver was a casualty and this evening I finally had the time to try and fix it. Hah!

That hard disk seems to be so crashed I can't mount it under either Knoppix or linux rescue on my Fedora install CD.

Now I'm trying fsck and e2fsck directly on the drive, without mounting it - but they both seem to freeze. It's time to take a deep breath and go to bed, but I seem to keep saying, "I'll just try... and then I'll go to bed". When I run e2fsck on my main linux partition, it says, "recovering journal" and does the hard disk grind for a while, and then stops. I'll trick myself to bed by leaving it like that overnight and taking another look in the morning.

Tomorrow, I'll contemplate taking the disk out of the computer/buying a new hard disk, reinstalling Fedora and then seeing what I can do with this seemingly fucked hard disk. OTOH, if I can't read it with Knoppix, why should I be able to read it with a new install of Fedora?

And no, I haven't had a backup routine.