WhiteRabbit's Braindump

A colleague passed on to me this very interesting article about feudal Tibet, that is, Tibet before the Communist invasion in the 50's:

The Tibet Myth

In short, Feudal Tibet was ruled pretty much like Feudal Europe: most people were serf with no rights, monks and lords (apparently usually the same people) would concentrate most of the wealth and power, ruling through violence and torture. Communism stopped all the slavery, abusive taxes, sexual abuse, and brought technologisation, roads, water and better crops (and its host of totalitarian-related problems -- we're not saying Tibet is ideal here now, we're just saying that it was not quite like movies like "7 years in Tibet" or "Kundun" make it out to be).

Well no actually, we're moving out. In. Erm, I'm confused. We finally got the keys to our new flat today, so we'll be moving in soon! Hopefully, this will translate for you readers in faster access times, as I hope to get a faster ISP (Nerim is very good, but expensive if you want it fast, and besides we're currently stuck too far to get a high bandwidth connexion).

Right, so while I'm at it, here's my rant about letting agencies:

• Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Hey, this is France right?
• They asked us for either rent receipts or statement of where we currently live. What do they do with that? Does that mean that if I must live on the street for a while, I can never rent again?
• Last 3 pay slips. Ok, fair enough I suppose (although the statement from the employer really ought to be enough). Then the lady checked to see if I'd been sick, because then they'd need statements from the NHS as well. WTF?
  Oh well, enough for now. We've got a new burrow!

So, I've been looking for a calendar application for some time now. Basically, I sort of like Outlook, but I need something that'll be available from the Internet so I can consult my calendar from anywhere, and ideally Narelle should also be able to use it so she can stuff my schedule silly with going out at night.

I finally managed to get EGroupware running, and first impression is pretty good (I'd tried it a long time ago but gave up on it as it was too darn slow on that P100 I used to have: it's all PHP, you know). Installation, on the other hand, is a bummer: you're asked for a database username and password, a header configuration username and password, an administrator username and password, and you generally don't really know what the roles are supposed to be. Oh well.

So, after playing a little with it, it seems to do all I need (and way way waaaaay more) while being reasonnably easy to use. There'd just be a command line missing :-) I'll introduce Narelle to it soon and we'll see if we can carry on as happy grouped rabbits.

I got tired of trying to set up the sound card that's built in my motherboard (an Intel D945 I believe; Intel pretends it's supported under Linux, but after spending more than 10 hours trying to get it to work, I got a little tired of it). So I went out and bought a 14 euro board, plugged it in and suddenly everything works: no drivers to install, no configuration, nothing. Now that's plug and play!

Okay, I don't think my situation is that bad: I'm 30, an engineer (computer one, writing software for planes -- not a car mechanic or a phone technician; nevermind, that'll have to be the subject of a rant against the English language some day), have been working full time ever since I gratuated. You'd think people would be pretty happy to rent a flat to me, right? Our Scottish landlords certainly seemd to.

Well, get this: some old French jerk-off (for lack of a more offensive word) turned me down for a rental because I wouldn't get my parents as guarantee. What am I, fucking 12?!

Congratulation mister, you're one of the people who make France such a lovely country to live in. When the revolution comes we'll chop your head off.