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August 26, 2004

Cat(s)

Some time since I linked to a cat picture

August 23, 2004

Gay Marriage and Honesty

If it does nothing else, the McGreevey marriage highlights the chief absurdity of the arguments of those opposed to gay marriage: gay men can, in point of fact, get married - provided we marry women, duped or otherwise. The porousness of the sacred institution is remarkable: gay people are a threat to marriage, but gay people are encouraged to marry - indeed, we have married, under duress, for centuries, and the religious right would like us to continue to do so today - as long as our marriages are a sham. As long as we're willing to lie to ourselves, our wives, our communities, our children, and, for someone like McGreevey, our constituents. A closeted gay man like McGreevey can even marry twice and have both his marriages regarded as legitimate. Even as an openly gay man, McGreevey can remain married to his wife and smoke all the pole he likes on the side. There ain't no law agin' it, Senator Santorum. But how does this state of affairs protect marriage from the homos, I wonder? If an openly gay man can get married as long as his marriage makes a mockery of what is the defining characteristic of modern marriage - romantic love - or if he marries simply because he despairs of finding a same-sex partner, what harm could possibly be done by opening marriage to the gay men who don't want to make a mockery of marriage or who can find a same-sex partner?

--Dan Savage

says it all - really! Thanks to Cafe au lait for highlighting this! from the Guardian, article readable here

August 05, 2004

Hardware, software and computer suppliers (oh and errors, lots of those!)

A few months back at a meeting of the South Cheshire Linux Group someone said - I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard crashes sometimes - anyone want it?
It came with a case and a floppy (wow!) and I have a daughter needing a new computer for University so I said yes.


  • Needed a socket A so I bought one at CCL, booted - nothing, hmmm
  • Looked at the PSU and decided a new power supply wouldn't do any harm and bought one at Servicesure in Knutsford - still nothing, maybe it is the motherboard
  • Bought a motherboard in Novatech sale but it came with a DOA tag inside the box - so back it went
  • bought an ASUS motherboard and new memory from Microdirect, it then didn't have an on board graphics so I bought that card from Sapphire
  • still nothing
  • further inspection revealed a fried CPU (my stupidity at an early stage) so I bought a new one locally - Tim's megastore, at least they fitted it for me!
  • Ah it boots!
  • Installed mandrake 9.2 and it complained about being unable to install various packages, the spare disk it was using was tiny so I bought a new one back at CCL and a DVD player
  • Still an iffy install but I managed to scrape though by installing a minimum of packages
  • Wanted the NVIDIA graphics and therefore the kernel source, 9.2 hard to find so I thought we'll upgrade - BAD MOVE - it crashed when upgrading the kernel! Rebooted and had to 'install' 10.0 on top of 9.2 but did it and got a system with an interesting idea of what it thought was installed and a mangled rpm database
  • tried copying the kernel src rpm off cd onto hard drive - wouldn't install, tried another copy off USB dongle- same problem, looks as if the copied rpm on the hard drive is different to the one on the cd/USB dongle
  • light begins to dawn, disconnect floppy drive, problem goes away, but still got a trashed rpm database and a DVD I can't boot off!
  • how much does a floppy drive cost? It will probably end up with it being the cable...
  • Just need to finish the installation - when I get get everyone running Crack Attack off it!

So I have this slightly dodgy PC Chips motherboard.....

August 02, 2004

Summer Walks

The summer walks now have a page on this site with my photographs