Quote from the windows helldesk droids today at work, in response to my complaint about the "preferred browser" registry entry being locked:

"Firefox should not have been installed onto your citrix session. Unfortunately for various reasons we do not support any other browser other than IE within the citrix environment."

Well, thanks for nothing fellows. Massive brain atrophy is clearly involved here...like with the guy at the supermarket yesterday, who needed about 2-3 seconds per item to scan and bag; I was wondering whether his brain had actually died from lack of oxygen between his very...slow...and.....slower.....breaths.

In other painful news, my luck currently sucks somewhat: somebody cheated me on ebay (for the first time ever), took my $50 and vanished; one of my xmas presents seems to have been lost by the Austrian or the Australian postal services and another xmas present seems to have been lost by the American or the Australian post.

The first week of the teaching semester is over, without major gotchas. 2x2 hours of lecturing on Tuesday left me somewhat stunned (and with a throat getting sore) as usual. The weather sucks, rain and/or storms almost every day in the last week or so. My recent switch to wired ethernet at home still produces some TV/FM antenna trouble (unshielded TP), my hiking boots are about to give in (the foam/rubber sole is desintegrating) just before the Killarney comp, my car is about to die as well and I should do a lot of things I've got absolutely no impetus for.

On the positive side I've managed to shed almost three kilos which gets me back closer to the preferred weight level that I left sometime around the trip to .at last September.

This recent advisory suggests that one updates his sudo installation. With the subsequent result of being trapped in a mess of obscure, badly documented env_something options, a suggestion of env_check which doesn't work and no way of passing environment variables to the sudo'd process. Great.

Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again: Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY" or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*

The original list is there and deals with the US Army, but Debian seems to be going there rather quickly. Damn politics. So, while there are no 213 things yet, it likely won't take long. Sigh.

• Not allowed to post about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
• Not allowed to post about a posting about Ubuntu on d-d-a.
• Especially if the post doesn't mention Ubuntu at all and is somewhat sarcastic.
• Must not imply the listmasters are sarcasm-impaired as they don't like this.
• I must not expect democratic behaviour in the Project.
• Not allowed to post anything containing non-politically-correct words (like "lesbian") on d-d-a.
• Debian does not have a Cabal.
• Not allowed to request an update on the stalled GFDL argument with the FSF. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
• I am not authorized to question authorities.
• Especially not debian-admin.
• Not allowed to call an RC bug an RC bug, if it happens to affect the scum architectures.

Additions welcome.

Just got the word yesterday that my paper for the ARES 2006 conference in Vienna in late April was accepted, and it looks like the bosses will properly pay my registration and airfare. Great!

Less wonderful news is that tomorrow the teaching semester starts again, with me having both my main lectures tomorrow. Ah well. At least I had a good weekend with a fair bit of flying, a short XC flight on Sunday (short due to my own stupid tactical mistake) and a tally of 122.7 hours of airtime. I managed to reach the 120 hours on the very last day of 2005, and roughly kept up my average of 1 hour a week since then.

This planet is going down the drain big-time, and 2006 does not really show any hope of change for the better. Where's that plague that takes out all the politicians in one big die-off? We need that NOW, dear geneticists! Or maybe there's a genetic predisposition towards public office and cronyism, with a prenatal test so that these bastards can be aborted before even taking their first lying breath? Ah, sweet fantasies...

An example of why I'm pessimistic: on one hand, voting machines in Wisconsin will now have to be open-source by law, but on the other hand merely annoying somebody online without disclosing your full identity can land you for two years in prison in Bush's kingdom. Sweet. It's good I'm not living there as I'm vocal about them all being fuckwits. That of course includes Mr. Howard and his cronies.

...like this one: "Three sharks suspected in fatal attack" (I wonder who's going to read the suspects their rights when apprehended...). The story is that of a woman who got dismembered by sharks just outside of Brisbane on this weekend. It's not sure if Darwin was at work here or whether it was just plain bad luck, but I'm sure the konspiracy kooks will find it most interesting that the place of the accident is called "Amity Point". Anywat, there goes the perfect record of the shark safety program (and most of my interest in going for a dip in the ocean).

I did mention the need for a diy zapper for rfid chips some time ago, and the CCC people deliver: it seems to be super-trivial to make single-use cameras into zappers: the flash capacitor is massive enough to drive a simple coil which blows the chip permanently.