One thing

Yesterday, my parents and I were back at the AVL cancer hospital.

I'm not going to say much about it, but there is this one thing.

Does anyone else find it unnervingly funny that dozens of people are frantically smoking cigarettes in front of the cancer hospital's entrances?

MY ASS

PowerBook:~ thomholwerda$ sudo lsof | grep ExplainingBBLeadership.pdf
Password:
Finder 94 thomholwerda txt REG 14,2 82162 2482912 /Users/thomholwerda/.Trash/ExplainingBBLeadership.pdf

What I dont understand is why the goddamn "File in use" error dialog doesn't tell me WHAT process is using it.

"The world's most advanced operating system" MY ASS.

Page fault

I think my 6-7 year-old x86 finally kicked the bucket. A few years ago, I was able to extend his life thanks to the ide=nodma boot parameter, which somehow allowed the faulty IDE controller to still install Linux, albeit grudgingly. Windows never complained, it just ran and chugged along fine.

Until a few days ago. I started getting blue screens (page faults in non-paged area, to be precise) completely at random, not linked to any specific action or application. I didn't add any new drivers or applications to the system - in fact, I am very strict about what goes and doesn't go on my Windows installations. I install a selective set of applications, applications I've been using for ages, that I require for OSNews, but mostly for Focus Shift; my scanner only works properly on Windows, and Paint.NET only runs on Windows reliably.

I did a thorough RAM check (I let it run 23 times), but it didn't find anything. The drive in the machine is brand new. Those are the two key elements that can cause page faults in the non-paged area. Just to be certain, I'm running memtest86 right now. My guess, however, is that the IDE controller finally decided to end it FOR REALSIES this time, seeing the ide=nodma trick doesn't work anymore either.

So, I'm kind of in trouble now. I already lost an OSNews story and a Focus Shift comic to the page fault errors, and I'm not keen on continuing to run through this minefield. I guess this means postponing Focus Shift (again) for a while until I come up with a solution.

I love that machine like a member of the family, for god's sake. I have spent an insane amount of money on the thing in total, and I hate to see it go down like this.

Global warming

And it's been like this all week. I hug global warming!

Surgery, II

You'd think that, at one point, someone has gone through enough crap. That at some point, nature or god or luck or whatever says, hey, look, let's give these people a break for a while. Let's, like, not fcuk them for THREE DAYS.

Well, turns out that's not the case.

Millions of brainless gutter sluts get breast implants every day, without a single complication, without a single problem. Yet, the one person that actually kind of really needs those implants gets screwed over. My mother's left breast implant got infected. During emergency surgery, it was removed, and it was concluded that the infection was too strong to put anything else back in. This effectively means we're back to square one.

They say that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. In that case, my mom must be made of diamond right about now. SUCK ON THAT, DE BEERS.