Alex has left home to go to college. He has started the first steps into his life as a free thinking independent adult. He called us the other day at 04:30 in the morning to tell us that he needed a chest x-ray. I had half a heart attack. The combination of timing and content of this phone call did not pave the way for good news. It turns out that everyone entering the good ol’ US of A needs to undergo this minor procedure. Even though he called at a time when we are usually incapacitated and unconscious, we were happy to hear from our son all the way out there in the big wide world. He told us, with unbridled enthusiasm, how he has some new electronic device to keep track of his busy schedule. Among its vast array of features, it has a world timer, Alex can refer to this amazing gizmo and tell what time it is in any part of the world. Apparently Alex doesn’t use that function.
Scooter.
I have had my first brush with the local law enforcement in the Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China. This is a country where the locals have a national pride in abiding by the law and conforming to social customs. Flouting the law will bring shame on an entire family, for generations in this life and the next. To have the police visit is a great embarrassment. My efforts to understand the road rules in Hong Kong was a perfunctionary glance at the free pamphlet on the correct way to negotiate a Chinese round-about. It is one of those things that I thought would be the same everywhere in the world but turns out to be significantly different – particularly in a city that has the problem of keeping the equivalent of the entire population of Queensland on an island that is about 15 kilometres wide. Most places in the world will let a motorist park on the side of the road. This seems fair enough. In the Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China a motorist can only park in a designated area. The side of the road is not, apparently, a designated area. The fine was not overly expensive but served as motivation to read the road rules more carefully.
Linux.
I have started a Linux experiment to see what all the fuss is about. The Linux people, whoever they are, say that Linux is the most amazing, fastest, most nutritious and least flammable operating system in the world and possibly the known universe. My opinion is that if, I say again “if” Linux is so good, then why are we not all using it? Linux is free and so if it is compared to Windows XP, the “value for money” side of the equation should be so good that it causes a division by zero error. I think that the use of Linux versus Windows can be compared to the rise, rule and fall of VHS. DVD not only delivers a better quality picture, it also does it so cheaply . When the DVD was invented it turned out that the little laser gizmo is far cheaper and better than the whole complicated system of tapes and mechanical wizardry used by the VHS system. A VCR is truly an amazing piece of hardware – the way that cold hard steel interacts with the delicate thin tape is astonishing. There is a hidden, unappreciated and gorgeous ballet of technology when the VCR carefully takes the thin tape from the VHS cassette and with gingerly precision, wraps it around the spinning head of the VCR that is truly a work of art. However, all that technology and all that hardware has a price and that price is way more than a DVD. The last VCR ever made was the most efficient, the best quality and was the closest to perfection of its kind but it could not compete with the low-cost efficiency of the DVD. So without another thought, society in general simply stopped using the trusty and faithful VCR. One day when the time came to replace the ageing family VCR, we, as a society of consumers all bought the new fangled DVD at one fifth the cost. VHS is now a part of our childhood memories, the remaining units, with their rubber belts dry and cracked, their overly complicated timers and their expensive front loading cassette mechanisms, can no longer be found on the shelves of our homes next to the Nintendo. There are some diligent and hardy units remaining that are like the veterans of a war barely remembered that serve their last years of useful existence as a clock. The point of all that is this: if Linux worked as well as a DVD player then we would all be using it.
The first big question for the big Linux experiment is which, out of hundreds of different versions, Linux will I use. My choice was limited to the several versions that come free with computer magazines. Fedora seems like a good enough place to start. It failed to start. Knoppix started to work, it displayed how busy it was with a huge list of files being started here and initialised there, and then it then simply lost interest and did not complete the install – all the writing stopped, the disc stopped spinning and the machine fell silent. It did not even clean up the mess it made on the way out. The next on the list was SUSE 11.0 – it booted as promised and installed with so little fuss that I can barely remember it happening. I have been using SUSE 11 for a few days now and have managed to make an internet connection. After a few days SUSE insisted on installing a few updates in the same manner as windows – and, in the same manner as windows SUSE did not work afterwards.
Cat.
His divine physical supremacy.Our wonderful new cat – his name is Taj and he has the ability to double his size
every two weeks. He is learning what it is like to live with another species, what the new species finds valuable and is learning a new language. Rachel Ruby says that I should not speak to the cat in Cantonese because she wants the cat to speak English. He can be seen here on YouTube watching a show about pandas on Animal Planet. – search for “Bengal cat panda” or copy and paste this - http://www.youtube.com/v/PJRSTHrGYUc&hl=en&fs=1
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