English Over The Sleeve

It’s 0240 hrs local time, and I’ve just realised that I hate my younger bro. You see, he has introduced me to this game (in French), and I can’t stop!

Grrrrrrr!

Another great poem by that arch-imperialist, Rudyard Kipling.

Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?: ”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind–
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

Go here.

Not sure exactly what category to put this in. Ah well.

My most used key on my keyboard is F12 - because when I press F12, a terminal drops down from the top of the screen. I’m sure that there are many ways of doing this - the way I use is to install yakuake, a KDE Quake-like terminal prog.

I have no doubt that the same thing exists for your flavour of desktop. If you’re running KDE, just copy and paste this into konsole - I’m pretty sure that its the last time you’ll use it, too.

sudo apt-get install yakuake

If you’re running a Debian-based system, chances are you use apt (apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, kynaptic, Adept, whatever…)

If so, keep an eye out for officially unofficial repos, like the one for amarok 1.4.4 in kubuntu
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-144 edgy main

That line is what needs to be inserted into /etc/apt/sources.list, and I suggest using the command line and nano to do so. (Note that nano is probably already installed on your system).

I was feeling down after England was beaten by the All Blacks last wekend. Well, it turns out that the XV of the pink (another Franglais joke, sorry) played rather well, considering. Only 21 points difference.

No joke. France was beaten 47-3 by NZ yesterday, which is even worse than their lammering 45-6 in 2004 (for which they were not looking for revenge, said Jacques Brunel, an Asst. Coach in blue.)

That’s 44 points difference.

In case you were wondering, NZ will be fielding it’s number one team in Paris next weeek… That would tend to imply that this team was not the best they could bring on.

N.B. England was also beaten by Argentina on Saturday.

A rather nice young man was recruited on my camp as a counselor. This was his first experience of children in a professional environment, and his favourite author was Rousseau. I know that, because, like Rousseau, he believed that ‘l’homme nait bon et c’est la societé qui engendre le mal en lui.’ In English, that becomes: Man is good when born, but society creates badness in him.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph, whatever its philosophical justification, is crap in the real world.

But my guy didn’t know this. In his cosy little environment, safely away from the horrors of real life, this meant that children are basically good, kind, naive and short adults.

The funny thing is that it took him all of 6 hours to come to the conclusion that Rousseau was talking about subjects of which he had no knowledge. He came to have a little chat with me, and said, and I quote “Children are evil! How can you stand it?”

Of course, children, in general, are not particularily evil, any more than they are particularily good. But whatever else is true, they don’t know when to stop - especially when dealing with their own age group. So they can and do give the impression of total mind-defying cruelty, aka teasing. Which is where society comes in, to show them the limits, and which is where m’ learned friend M. Rousseau was so incredibly wrong…

As for my guy, he ended up taking a more balanced, pragmatic view of the young; and to be honest, I think he learnt a lot about ivory towers.

So I haven’t blogged for the last week or so.

Okay.

But there was a reason. I was on camp. Soon to come, some of the highlights - as soon as I’ve thought of a way to disguise them, that is… Interestingly, the kids I had on camp are not technically inept, and the wiki we created was on the same server, so they could easily find this blog.

Si c’est le cas, les jeunes d’AvSc sont priés de laisser un petit commentaire…

In other news, I’ve just completed an upgrade to Edgy Eft. It works*. Now for Beryl.

*It works, but to get it to start, you need to add the boot option noapic to the boot command - in grub, press e, choose the right line, press e, add the option to the end of the line, press enter, press b.