Treat those trollies right!

Especially if you live in my neighbourhood.

This story probably starts on the night of the 4/5 August 1916 when my grandfather was killed at Poziers, one of 260 odd of the 26th Bn killed that night. An event that was to warrant less than a page in the unit's war diary!

This family event led to a lot of reading about WW1, John Harris's 'Covenant with Death' was the first to describe the futility of it all, then 'Good Bye to All That' by Robert Graves, and later Sassoon and Owen caught my attention.

A visit to France and a trip to the grave of my grandfather at Serre Rd Nr 2 cemetery shattered me. Had to walk some miles from the rail station to the grave, it went past the Newfoundland memorial. I could not cope with the enormity of the deaths that the war caused.

Suddenly John McCrae's poem took on a whole new meaning;

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

So now that it is approaching another 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, I do my bit for the local Returned Servicemens Club and sell poppies for a donation at the local shops.

And it was there I met Carlos, mid fifties I guess, a short stocky bloke and as tough as nails. He could wheel 20 shopping trollies over the asphalt and into the shopping centre doors with a finesse that would make even ballet dancers jealous.

That would have been the end of the story had not that night my wife wanted cat meat, so went for a walk to the local shops, it's a 5K round trip and takes me about an hour. On the way back I meet Carlos some distance from the shops collecting recalcitrant trolleys, so I stopped for a bit of a yarn.

Got his lifes history and then he wandered into the topic of "The shocking way some people treat trollies". He was almost emotional about it.

Now most people who wish to sybolically shoot someone would, with a gutteral click, give a flick of the hand with thumb erect and the index finger pointing at the victim. Not Carlos, he adopted a crouched position and symbolically held a machine gun, and judging by the noise he made, it was a symbolic M60!

So as I said at the start if you are around my way, treat your trollies with respect!

Lost weeks?

Finally returned to the computer. Now on Ubuntu Breezy. It's good and will probably keep it till the next wonder. Linux distros have literally leapt ahead in the last year. Even LiveCDs are brilliant.

Been using it for 5 days and offer the following;
a. Installed onto the AMD XP 2600 with 500MBytes RAM real easy
b. The Adept system is real cool, after years of build from source, this is easy
c. Had problems with Acrobat 7.0, but Google showed others with the same problem
d. Solution for Acrobat found at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-77202.html
e. Restarting after shutdown is a pain, there is a /tmp/X0-lock file to be removed
(1 Either do this manually or
(2 reboot in recovery mode - Maybe another trip to Google
f. The install is a marvel, it picked up my four other systems for grub.

A trip to Perth and Albany in West Australia. Two Grandsons live in that part of the world. Ari with his Mum in Torbay near Albany.




The other grandson lives with his Dad in Perth.





Another trip to Sydney for a bike show. I will try to add a few more notes later.

Linux - More Experiments

Was given a Knoppix-4.0 dvd to play with, that was awesome! Thought I'd try a couple of more up to date distros.

My PC had a primary master, secondary master drive with a slaved CDROM. Took the secondary master and made it as a slave to the primary, now there's 2x80 GByte hdd drives there, and put a 20 GByte hdd in as the secondary master.

Had to use a recovery disk (RIP) to fix lilo and the /etc/fstab file in the working distro which is still Mandrake-10.1.

Then started playing with two distros that came off the english "Linux Format" magazine. One was Debian sarge and the other was Fedora Core 4. Interestingly enough, even though both seemed to have different installers, both formated the hdd as an extened partition with an 18 GByte partition and a nearly 1 GByte swap.

The Debian distro gave me a bit of heartburn trying to get X to work, it was a bit like playing with Red Hat six or seven years ago! Anyway, after sorting that out it turned out to be fine. FC4 went on without any hassles and both distros used Gnome. After an exhaustive 30 second analyses of both distros, all I can say is I like both, but have a bit of a learning curve to crawl up before selecting *the right one* for me.