Well the only semi-decent paper in the country has decided to cut it’s staff by 30%. That’s 550 journalists and editorial staff who will no longer have a job. Needless to say this has two pretty significant problems.

Firstly, no one likes to see people loose jobs. Especially as unnessisarily as this.

Secondly, it’s going to make the quality of the paper decline further. Then where are people like myself going to turn for their news? The Oz?

So I urge you all to go to http://www.fairgofairfax.org.au/petition/ and sign the petition, then send a letter to the editor at letters@theage.com.au

(cross posted at Darkness At Noon)

I don’t know about you suckers, but I’m off to Vietnam for Christmas!

Woooot

Well, it looks like it’s time to update my “about me” section (which I’m sure I’ll get around to sometime next century) as I just got a promotion.

That’s right friends, I’ve moved up in the world, and am now officially “Communications and Publicity Officer” for the Health and Community Services Union.

I’ve been wrangling for the job for a while and my wonderful employer has finally given in.

Well I’m already getting sick of feeling sick every time I look at this blog (thanks to the pic of my knee). So I thought I’d give a comrade a plug:

Tonight I’ll be down at the Horse Bazaar - you should come along.

Because I don’t think the person that caused me to come off my bike even realised what they had done - they just drove off:

My Knee

The bike is at the mechanics now - not sure what the damage is but it didn’t look too bad.

Just a very quick follow up on restoring a back up of Thunderbird in Ubuntu which I mentioned in my last post.

I got it to work last night (although not perfectly as it would seem I hadn’t fully backed it up).

I was just trying to copy the .mozilla-thinderbird folder into my home/$username$ directory. The problem is that the folder bellow that one has a random string as it’s name. Naturally, when I reinstalled Thunderbird, it generated a new string and folder with this string name in it so it completely ignored by old files.

Solution? Just drill down one more level and copy those files over.

(… and thanks to MB for the pointer)

So big weekend on the Linux front for me.

I was running Ubuntu 8.04 but it was starting to get a bit clunky. I hadn’t reinstalled since 7.04 and with two major upgrades I got the impression that a few settings were starting to clash.

So I thought with the recent release of KDE4 it would be a good opportunity for me to try out Kubuntu. So I backed up my computer (which took most of the day) and installed Kubuntu on my Toshiba Tecra A8.

The installation was a breeze and with only a little bit of playing around my wireless was working fine. However, I just couldn’t get into it. For a start, there was a lack of standard packages. Firefox wasn’t the standard browser, there was no standard bittorrent program and so on. As someone who isn’t all that experienced with Linux and has little technical knowledge of it this was all a bit much for me.

Then there was the high level of customisation required of KDE. Many point to this as a strength, and I’m sure if you’re familiar with KDE it’s fantastic. But I didn’t know where to start.

After a few hours of trying to get it to work the way I wanted it to, I gave up and went back to Gnome. My computer is now working really well. I really like the new BitTorrent program that comes as standard except I’m perturbed by the lack of addons for it - there are none that I know of (please correct me if I’m wrong). Previously I have been using KTorrent which is excellent because it has an automatic port forwarder, RSS feeds, and a bandwidth scheduler so you can download in your off peak period and save all your peak bandwidth.

Finally, a call for advice. How do I restore all my old emails? I backed up the file .mozilla-thunderbird (or something like that). Everything I read said to just back that file up then copy it back into the /home directory to restore your emails. I tried this and nothing happened. Any advice for a bit of a noob?

This also means that I have to declare email bankruptcy, if you need something from me and have already emailed me, please email me again. I’ve lost all emails and all email addresses.

xkcd really is just the best.

I know, I know, post something already. Ive been busy, what can I say.

(From here)

… is the single funniest word you can write on someone’s forehead. That much is self evident.

This is probably funnier:

(thank you FailBlog)