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

[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?

[extimelord.livejournal.com]

Convince them that there are some things worth paying taxes to have?

Canada's national health care tops my personal list, quickly followed by education.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

This is true. As can be expected from any collective payment system people want to receive as much as possible yet pay as little as possible.

I guess the point with land tax is that

a) land tax is a replacement for other taxes
b) the total tax bill is less (more money is invested in productivity and it's LVT is easy to administer)
c) at the end of the day there is only two things you can tax; the labour people do or the resources they use.

Thanks for the pointer, you've got my brain working.