Calamity Rat, Political Swill, Work Matters

[tcpip]

A few days ago we noticed that Calamity the rat had acquired quite a sizable tumour. So we book the local awesome vet to have his operation and he comes out fine, albeit a bit dopey. He's had a nibble at his stitches, but with the application of a sock over the affected area he should be fine. One last check at midnight before I go to bed and ... he's slipped out of the sock, and chewed out all his stiches - revealing a gaping wound and a little too much of his stomach muscles to the world. (On a tangent, it is interesting seeing such things how much skin is just a bag for a second layer of muscle, then internal organs). So we rush the "little nutter" (hat-tip to mickmercer for such a description of rats) to the emergency vet, who dope up the rat (again), staple up the incision, coat in film and send him on his way.

With the upcoming debate on the Australian Senate, I have written an article for the Isocracy Network which argues that all politicians are unrepresentative swill. On a similar note, a presentation I gave at the Melbourne Atheist Society last year has made its way to YouTube (part one, follow for others, original text).

Have recently completed two large work projects; an introductory training manual for Linux and HPC computing (16,000 plus words), and a review of the company website (xhtml and css standards compliance, accessibility compliance, design and features, content, and Flesch readibility. Currently working on a marketing plan (as we don't have a dedicated marketing person). Also have the misfortune of having to review MS-Windows HPC as a software package apparently requires it; I lean to proposals that it will be better for everyone's state of mind to port the code instead. Finally, more kudos to VPAC's summer students who did an excellent review of their work last week on porting parts of the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit to be used on Graphics Processing Units. The advantage of medical imaging in medical sciences (brain surgey was cited!) from hours and days to minutes will be enormous.

Comments

[jadine.livejournal.com]

Hope Calamity is doing well!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I'll pass on your regards :)

He's doing really well, actually. Since getting his guts all stapled into place he's been very happy, bouncing around, bruxing and generally being quite playful. I suspect he's very glad the fairly heavy tumour tissue is gone. He hasn't been eating much yet, but that's fairly normal for anyone who's had an operation.

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Best wishes to Calamity!

I fear that our pollies are only too representative. Why on earth did we vote for them?

One of the problems of a 'representative' democracy is that the elected rep is not required to listen to the electors until near the next election, when getting re-elected becomes a priority. Delegation would be a better system. A delegate is supposed to do what the voters say.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Best wishes to Calamity!

He's doing fine; fortunately he hasn't managed to chew his way through the surgical staples - and nor does he seem to want to, which is good. We've been keeping him in a special emergency cage until they can be removed and hopefully his skin will knit by that time. But he'll have a damn big scar!

One of the problems of a 'representative' democracy is that the elected rep is not required to listen to the electors until near the next election, when getting re-elected becomes a priority.

Very good point. Joseph Toscano, a local anarchist who actually does make the distinction between state and government, often comments on this and like yourself, supports delegation rather than representation - a key element being the inclusion of automatic recall.

[serehfa.livejournal.com]

Glad he's ok. The Linux beginners manual sounds interesting. I don't suppose you can sneak a copy over this way? :) Also what is VPAC?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

VPAC is the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing. Basically, it's a corporation owned by the Universities to provide high-performance computing facilities and application development.

The manual will be up on the vpac website in the very near future. Some early versions can be found at http://vpac.org/tutorials