Animal Updates, LUV and Pi2, VSL AGM

[tcpip]

There is a running myth that Australians have kangaroos hopping around their suburban streets. Largely, this isn't actually true. Except when it is. Our asylum home, a mere 6km from the city as the crow flies had this little bounder funneled down the Yarra river valley. It's not the first time in recent months the area has seen said bounding marsupials; one visited a primary school nearby at the end of last year. In other animal news there is the rather sad news that our rescue guinea pig, Zepar, shuttled off the mortal coil Tuesday night and was buried the following morning. I cannot say he was an overly friendly or clever pig, but at the very least he had several years of comfort interrupted by only the occasional terror of having his toenails trimmed.

Tuesday night was also the February main meeting of Linux Users Victoria which consisted on an excellent presentation by Andrew Robinson on the R programming language, and an amusingly clever video of Andrew Tridgell's LCA presentation on running Linux on drones. In what was a very techie Tuesday, the Raspberry Pi 2 was released and several of us made a bulk order. I now have two of said creature and am thinking of setting up a picture rotator or some home automation.

Saturday week is the annual general meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby. We'll be giving out awards for those who helped out during the state election, and will have guest speaker, Fiona Patten, MLC who will speak on what will surely be a contentious issue for the year, "Religious Exemption to Equal Opportunity Laws". It an interesting perspective that many so-called libertarians have that is to allow institutions to have the to attack the individual's right to fair treatment in the public activities (e.g.. employment, purchasing etc). The fact that religious institutions protest a sacred right to engage in such bigotry may be irrational and distasteful, but also a matter of some power.

Comments

[the_siobhan]

Well we don't have moose and wolves wandering the streets of Toronto, except once in a while we do.

[tcpip]

Something happens rarely and then becomes "in place x they have y".

Ahh, people. We just don't have strong enough comparatives in common language use.

[delphipsmith]

I love your animal/pet updates. Given that we have such a menagerie ourselves, it's nice to know that there's someone else out there that spends as much time and affection on their little friends as we do. (Ours mostly have double the usual number of legs, of course, but we still find them fascinating.)

Interestingly, the last snowfall gave us a chance to see a lot of mouse-trails up and down the driveway. I'm always amused when I see a trail meandering down the center and then it zips off sideways and plunges into the snowbank, leaving a tiny little round hole. I can't help but wonder about these tiny, frigid little passageways criss-crossing beneath the unbroken surface...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's a great mental image. I rather would like someone like David Petersen of Mouse Guard fame to do a story based on these frozen passages.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

The Raspberry Pi 2 is exciting in its own right, but it also intrigues me because the next generations of Pi and its competitors hold the promise to advance even further. The time of really affordable computing and fun is here.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It also, in the broader sense (e.g., Arduino) revitilisating the 80s hacker spirit of building computerised and connected gadgets at home. As you say, it's only going to get better.