At LiveJournal.com right now, the site reports

LiveJournal is currently down due to migration to a new server facility. The window of planned downtime is from 8 AM to NOON PST (4PM to 8PM UTC) on Tuesday, November 18, 2008.

For more information, bookmark our status site. Thanks for your patience during this time.

(The status site, meantime, is claiming Scheduled Maintenance: Feb 4, 05:00 - 07:00 UTC/GMT, though 07:00 GMT has come and gone.)

One of the functions of the 'Net has been to demonstrate that the typical British journalist doesn't know English any better than does the typical American journalist.

[Up-Date (18:43PST): The word ancestor has been replaced with descendant.]

Some time within the next two weeks, I am going to shift this domain at its 'blog from one host to another. The move should be transparent to visitors. There is some chances that a comment might be lost, if it is made between the cloning of the underlying dB and the up-dating of DNS tables, though I will take measures to try to avoid such loss.

After a hugger-mugger of up-dates to my Linux installation, I found myself unable to access the Windows NTFS partition on my computer while running Linux.

I had been using the NTFS-3G driver to support such access. NTFS-3G, in turn, uses the fuse file-system API to support such access. Red Hat doesn't support fuse with their kernels, and I don't want to manually rebuild support for it, nor to wait on someone else to do so, whenever Red Hat releases a new kernel, so I support fuse by way of dkms. Thus, to access the Windows NTFS partition, I was using packages

• dkms-x.x.x.x-x.noarch.rpm
• fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm
• dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm
• fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm

Anyway, when I would try to mount the Windows NTFS partition, I would get a message that /lib/modules/2.6.18-xx.el5/extra/fuse.ko did not exist. There was actually a directory entry for it, but that entry was a redirection to a non-existent file.

As it turned-out, something had gone wrong with my up-dating from RHEL 5.2 to RHEL 5.3, and not only did I not have the most recent versions of the kernels installed, but there was a version mis-match between the kernel to which I was booting and the associated -devel[opment] package. dkms was thus unable to automatically rebuild the fuse file-system interface.

I installed the most recent versions of the kernel and their associated -devel packages, rebooted the system, uninstalled and then reïnstalled fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm, and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm. (I doubt that I needed to uninstall and reïnstall fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, but I didn't and don't want to bother puzzling that out.) I was then again able to access the Windows NTFS partition.

The night that Vons was screwing-up the delivery of food that the Woman of Interest had ordered on my behalf, I went to Ramesses, at 3882 4th Avenue in Hillcrest. I figured that I could get a whalloping amount of protein in a highly palatable form.

They gave me too much food. Really, they are very concerned to please their customers, so when I told them not to bother with the salad (I cannot readily digest lettuce), they gave me more rice. And they'd just dealt with an unanticipated surge of customers, so that Said (one of the proprietors and one of the chefs) needed time to get more rice cooked; to compensate for that delay (which really didn't bother me), he gave me some free lentil soup (which was excellent) and then a piece of some sweet baked good. They amount of food that I would have got without the extra rice, the soup, and the dessert would have been quite filling. When Carmen (the other proprietor, and Said's wife) offered me a second glass of ice tea, I had to turn it down, simply because there wasn't going to be room for it.

My understanding is that Ramesses is developing a growing local following. Well, they deserve it. And if they stay in business then I can keep eating there.

I eat at Ramesses fairly often. I always order the same thing. I suspect that there are other dishes that I would really like. but I so enjoy the dish that I first ordered there that I don't want to pass it up to try one of the other offerings.

My lack of posts here have been an artefact of my illness. I managed to comment here-and-there to various journals and 'blogs, but putting together an entry to my own 'blog has seemed too much. I'm considerably better now, though I'm still coughing and somewhat congested.

One of the aspects of my being ill has been that I don't have a clear sense of the timing of events over much of the last few weeks, even though I felt fairly lucid during most of that time.

On the worst day, whenever that was, I awoke as weak as a kitten — I had to lay down and rest after the effort of simply finding two matching socks in my laundry — but had to go out and get something for food energy. I managed to get to CVS/pharmacy (a half-block from my home) and got orange juice. After I drank it, I was very cold. I wasn't thinking clearly enough to reälize that I was cold because, on the one hand, I had just put about a pint of cold fluid in my body, and, on the other hand, was too low in energy to generate off-setting body heat. I just climbed under my bed-covers and passed-out. When I awoke, I was over-heated, and thought I'm like an old mouse, who has lost his ability to regulate his body temperature. But I was otherwise feeling much better; the carbohydrates and vitamins in the orange juice had been put to good use.

Later that day or some time on the next (I really don't remember), worried about me, the Woman of Interest placed an order for home delivery with Vons while I was asleep. This was probably a good idea, but in the event Vons quite dropped-the-ball. They originally gave her a two-hour window for expected delivery; at the end of that window, she got a call telling her that it would be another 20 minutes. She told them to telephone her if there were any problem. After instead about two more hours, figuring that local restaurants would soon close for the night, I went out. On my way, I let the Vons delivery man thorough a pedestrian gate to the apartment complex. When I got home, there was no food at my door; just a Sorry we missed you note. And, no, the delivery man hadn't called the Woman of Interest; as I noted to her, he didn't want to have to admit that the ostensible 20 minutes had been more like 120 minutes. (FWIW, I live less than half-a-mile from the nearest Vons store. As the Woman of Interest notes, they probably don't run the delivery service out of the nearest store, but it is none-the-less absurd that they cannot perform the equivalent of a half-mile delivery within two or even three hours.)

I don't know whether the flu that I had has resurged, or I contracted another while still weakened by the first. (Some years ago, I spent about half-a-year sick, a fair part of that with pneumonia, because I caught one flu after another, each before I'd fully recovered from the previous.) In any case, I'm back to being quite ill.

Before I came home and took various medications, I'd eaten a fairly large meal, and for whatever reason the food stayed in my stomach for hours. A problem with that was that the medication stayed there with it, instead of being absorbed by my digestive system.

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, and appears to be celebrating that release with, well, server dysfunction. The mailing lists are buzzing with anger over the slowness of the automatic up-dating routines. This morning, I spent several hours on a high-speed connection trying to down-load a disc image (and finally gave up). A few days ago I was being denied access to any downloads as if I had no active subscription. Their bugzilla tells me that my password has expired, but the link that they sent me to up-date it results in some sort of proxy error.

Barring some remarkable act of contrition on the part of Red Hat, I won't be buying any more subscriptions from them. I'll switch to something such as CentOS.

This morning, I tried a Jack Black® Pure Performance Shave Brush. Its bristles are synthetic (the badger lives to see another day) and anti-microbial, but designed to perform like a silver tip badger brush (which is generally held to be the best sort).

I have a Burma Shave™ boar-bristle brush that I got before I learned that boars were killed for the bristles, and an Art of Shaving® basic badger-bristle brush given to me as a gift before the giver learned that badgers were killed for the bristles. Jointly, these could last quite a few years. But I was quite interested to try a synthetic brush, partly so that I would know whether they were good gifts, and partly so that I could write and speak about them from experience.

The thing that I always read about most synthetics is that that they don't hold water as well as do natural bristle brushes. Well, I've not yet done a head-to-head comparison with anything but the boar-bristle brush, but the Black® brush definitely holds considerably more water than does a Burma Shave™ boar-bristle brush. (So much so, in fact, that I ended-up with far more dilute lather than I wanted. That's a problem that I can easily address, by just shaking out the brush before I put it in the soap.)

The Black® brush also feels much nicer against my skin than does the boar-bristle brush, and certainly nicer than did the boar-bristle brush when it was new. And the boar-bristle brush smelled like a musky animal when it was new, whereäs the Black® brush naturally didn't. (Jack Black in fact gave it some sort of pleasant scent which I presume will wash away with use.)

I will probably, at some future point, try the genuine badger brush that I was given. The badger whence the bristles came isn't going to get any more killed; and, while I wouldn't thus have tested the Black® brush against a high-end badger brush, I would at least have tested it against a badger brush of some sort.

---

While I am on the subject of shave brushes, I would like to mention the Burt's Bees® Natural Bristle Shaving Brush, found in their Bay Rum Men's Shaving Kit and sometimes sold separately. A little research confimed my suspicion that the bristles are boar bristles.

Burt's Bees proclaims

our goal is to help create a world where people have the information and tools they need to make the highest ethical choices

Now, reasonable people might argue over whether it's ethical to kill animals for shaving products, but one doesn't have the information needed to make the highest ethical choices if one isn't being told that these natural bristles were harvested from killed boars; plainly a significant share of Burt's Bees' customers would have concluded that the use of such bristles were unethical. And we may safely presume that the boars were killed (though there is a ranch in Spain that would happily sell them bristles sheared from boars who are not killed), because Burt's Bees, which makes a point of telling us that it doesn't engage in animal testing hasn't made a point of telling us that these bristles were sheared from live boars.

Possibly Burt's Bees just didn't know any better (much as I didn't know any better). I notice that the Bay Rum Men's Shaving Kit is presently listed as currently out of stock, and I can't find the brush itself listed separately at their site (though I can find it sold by Red Rain, a company that claims to offer the concientious consumer earth friendly, cruelty free products and services). But Burt's Bees has grossly failed its customers, either willfully or inadvertantly, and owes to them an explanation and an apology.

I still have a cough and some congestion, but I am otherwise feeling about as well as I did before I got flu.