Prosper President, Computer Meme, Cybernoia

[tcpip]

Went to my first Prosper Australia executive meeting last Wednesday; the President of some ten years Maurie Fabrikant stood down and, with some surprise, I found myself President of the 102 year old organisation. On that topic (yes, I know I've mentioned it before), this Wednesday I'm speaking about said issues at 6.30pm at the Hume Global Learning Centre, 1093 Pascoe Vale Rd at a forum entitled "Please Explain Mr. Brumby"; please come along. One of the speakers at the gathering is Matthew Guy, a local Liberal Party candidate for the Upper House.

Spotted the "What's on Your Desktop" meme from a couple of el-jayers. These are the machines that are in regular use in my soho;

Gigabit desktop, Celeron 2.8 GHz, 256 meg RAM, 80 gig HDD, 120 gig HDD. Windows XP Home and Fedora Core 3.
HP Compaq NX 5000 laptop, Centrino 1.6 GHz, 512 meg RAM, 60 gig HDD. Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu 5.10
HP Compaq Evo N1000V laptop, Pentium 4, 1.4GHz, 40 Gig HDD, 512 meg RAM, Windows XP Professional, Ubuntu 6.06

Plus I have a Pentium II-MMX, 256 meg RAM, 20 Gig HDD with Windows 2000. There's also three other Windows 98 machines which see little use and three laptops in storage.

Networking-wise I have a

Cisco 2900XL 24 port Catalyst Switch a Cisco 4000 series router (thanks to laptop006) and a Billion 4 port switch/router/aDSL modem. Damn I like that Cisco router. Just perfect for my studies.

Oh, on topic for those of you using MS-Windows try this:

1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.

Gaming this week consisted of a brief game of my one-to-one Call of Cthulhu/Nephilim crossover and the first session of the Paranoia/Cyberpunk crossover ("Cybernoia"). The latter seems to be working quite well with a greater sense of narrative development and seriousness than the standard Paranoia game, and with greater "setting realism" than the standard Cyberpunk game. The two systems merge well too. I've started writing the "combined rules" out which I will distribute as a PDF - it just works too well for the gaming public not to have a copy.

Comments

bush?

[tatjna.livejournal.com]

Well gosh.

Re: bush?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You don't seem so surprised ;-)

[v3nu5.livejournal.com]

Just did that crazy notepad thing! :o!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's scary that they can't even get notepad to work right... What hope is there the rest of the OS?

[greylock.livejournal.com]

What's up with the notepad thing?

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Aha! What a strange bug.
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/06/14/631016.aspx

[pache.livejournal.com]

my emulator's currently blown up so i did a quick net search to check what'd happen - according to what I found that little quirk of notepad will actually work with any combination of 4 letters, 3 letters, 3 letters, 5 letters... hence the site reckons it wasn't aimed specifically at bush, although i'd suggest it might just be the coders covering their backsides for when it got found out =)

and congratulations Mr. President =)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's right, it's a character encoding issue; "This app will break" is another favourite version.

I just find it scary that it's notepad. I mean, you really can't get too much simpler.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

and congratulations Mr. President =)

Somehow I didn't parse this, heh..

Yeah, very happy with being handed the reigns on this ol' warhorse. Now the question is which targets to charge (no windmills!).

I mean how do you convince people that there is such a thing as a good tax?

[uke.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your new position!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It was quite a surprise.

Now the challenge is living up to the expectations the committee obviously has in me.

[mystic-one.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the new position :) *applauds*

Tried that notepad thing.... had me laughing to see the result. Very neat little 'bug' but yea.... doesn't leave you much hope does it.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thank you kindly... Applause is good ;-)

I wonder if there's a quirky similar bug in some of the basic *nix editors like gedit, vi, emacs or kate.. Hmm...

[darkstardeity.livejournal.com]

Conga-rats

Rats of the Congo

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

(Congolese giant pouched rat)

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Congratulations.

And I can't get that bug to work. (Win98/SE). Possibly it's something new they did that causes the breaks.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

And yes, you're right. It doesn't work in Win98.. It's only for those more recent versions of notepad which are unicode-capable.

[raven2000.livejournal.com]

i'm currently working to get the router (it too is a 4-port, dsl) here connected or rather our two wireless connections to meet with it.

your photo makes me hot.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

i'm currently working to get the router (it too is a 4-port, dsl) here connected or rather our two wireless connections to meet with it.

Usually I 'borrow' one of the several unsecured wireless access points in range of our flat.

your photo makes me hot.

Heh. Yours are pretty warming to the senses as well ;-)

[raven2000.livejournal.com]

if you ever need an intern let me know mr. president.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

We actually do have interns (or rather, scholarships) at Prosper. Each year some lucky students per year get a bit of funding to help them along their studies which are invariably within the objectives of the organisation.

This year we have an economist, a community development student and an environmental scientist.

[baconsoup.livejournal.com]

did the notepad things. interesting

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The reasons are thoroughly explained in the thread.

I wonder about Microsoft at times. Notepad really should be something they can get to work properly.

Tell us, did Mr Brumby Explain?

[omnot.livejournal.com]

How'd it go?

Oh, and I'm very much going to enjoy freaking out the ever so slightly paranoid with the Notepad thing. ;-)

Re: Tell us, did Mr Brumby Explain?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It was a small group and, despite our best efforts, the Brumby camp avoided invitations. The local Liberal candidate was good tho'. He seemed genuinely interested and asked sensible questions.