Friends Bearing Vegetables

I've been visited by a number of people of late while sitting at home on sick leave. Curiously, they've often come bearing vegetables... What are they trying to tell me? I've received pumpkin, spinach and silverbeat. Weird.

Seven Days of Sick Leave

Some random stuff.

I bought a hand blender thing from KMart yesterday. What does this do to my masculinity???

I just bought six domain names. As you do.

I now own eight. I think this makes me a nerd :-)

evildoom_bunny's mom has started using her room in North Ringwood to store stuff. She hasn't even officially moved house yet! Ok, so, she's here about twenty nine nights out of every month, but still! It's technically her room... I suppose this, along with evildoom_bunny getting mail here, means she's moved in. I should start asking for rent :-)

I subscribed to 3CR yesterday. Now I feel all warm and fuzzy. Probably time I started actually listening to the station...

Meet the New Budgy

stillbeing the recently bereaved mother of Pippin the Budgy, has acquired a new baby budgy called Beaker.

I never realised how funny immature (as in, five week old) budgies are - Beaker can't even fly as such! He just hides under things, walks, climbs and flaps occasionally.

stillbeing had him perched on her finger. He (er, with think it's a he, you can't tell till they mature a bit more) decided it was time to try and fly again. So he lept from her finger, landed on the arm of the chair, and leapt again onto the floor, all the time flapping vigorously. It was more like partially controlled falling than actual flying, and as such it cracked me up...

On the subject of Human Companion Species, I spotted a hug grey bunny rabbit on the front lawn of a house just up the road from my place yesterday, whilst walking to the tram. It wasn't interested in my offer of grass from near the fence. It was still there when I came past again some hours later - I assume it lives in that house and had just escaped his hutch, but I have no idea. stillbeing wanted me to call the rabbit rescue people (yes, they exist!) but I was happy to let it find it's own way home.

Nerdy Stuff

Used the last day of my sick leave (although strictly speaking I could take up till next Wednesday off...) doing Nerdy Stuff.

First of all, I fished out a four-port KVM switch, which I bought at least 18 months ago, out of the box where I'd dumped it when I couldn't get it to work. Last time, all the machines I plugged it into complained that they didn't have a keyboard or a mouse... This time... It worked perfectly. Go figure.

So now I have only one monitor on my desk instead of the two I had before. I can switch between one of the four computers on my desk at easy.

All together now.... Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd!!!! :-)

Why the heck would anyone have four computers on his desk? Ok, I will tell you. One is an aging second hand IBM PC, which I use most of the time. It's the Main Machine. One is an ancient Macintosh which I only stopped using for my email about six months ago, which I have still for what are I guess only sentimental reasons now. Another is a server (of sorts), an old PIII I picked up from work which I plugged three large hard drives into I back stuff onto it, and play my MP3 collection from it through my stereo. And the last one is a dual processor PIII sever I spent MONTHS fiddling with to get it to work, in the end I just gave up and bought the IBM. Now I'm trying to turn it into a linux box. It cool look, at least, it's in a clear perspex case.

I also have evildoom_bunny's old PC lying around. It's in a server case, one day I'm going turn it into my backup machince, since its fast than the one I'm using and has space for more drives. And another PC is lying around which was a present to evildoom_bunny, but we don't have a desk to put it on. Maybe when we move.

Clear as mud?

I also have most of the parts for a power Mac lying about. Today I actually sat down with them - having had most of them for more than two years now - to see if they'd fit together. They do, but I need a couple of spacers for it all to work...

I ALSO have a HUGE pile of crappy old computer equipment taking up space - including something like SIX CD-ROM drives. Time for a trip to freecycle me thinks.