I created a new tequila drink. It is a mix of excitement and fear instilled in innocent people.

[reddragdiva]

• I am now hopelessly addicted to Texts From Last Night.

• Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

• Transcendental Meditation is apparently tired of not being sufficiently widely regarded as a cult of vicious nutters, so they're trying legal threats against critics. Please spread the link.

• NotN: Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone; Microsoft extends XP downgrade option to 2101; Minister praises high standard of science journalism; Sarah Palin gives maverickilicious resignation speech.

This week has been spent pretty much entirely on cleaning the house (it is now much nicer) and sweating. It's much cooler outside, but British houses are built to keep the heat in. Older teen and younger teen have been assigned chores; younger teen refused hers with shrieks of outraged entitlement but changed her mind after her intarweb was switched off for two days. Hypothesis: Skinner boxes are worth a try.

Tuesday I met secretlondon for lunch and grabbed some obsolescent tech off her, an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 6050, the subject of a pile of Ubuntu bugs filed by her. And a shitty ADSL2 wifi modem which apparently crashes all the time. Tuesday evening, a date with nyecamden, pub then visiting me!

Thursday we took Freda to the dentist. We were previously waiting a few months for her to turn two so they could fix her teeth (baby teeth do sometimes need work), as they wouldn't anaesthetise any child under two except in an emergency; now she's two, they've changed the age limit to three. This is NHS arse-covering, not law per se, so we could go private, except that my anus fails to produce gold ingots on a frequent and reliable schedule. Of course, if the teeth rot in her head and endanger her life, that'll be an emergency and they can do it. We are less than entirely pleased and the dentist is calling around the hospitals seeing what they can wrangle.

Kubuntu 9.10 alpha 2 Just Works on the N410c with a wifi PC card, which is most pleasing. (Yet to try compiling the driver for the W200.) Needed 300MB of updates straight away. Install "firefox-3.5" if you don't want Firefox 3.0. The video driver is somewhat imperfect (pixel crap left in various places). The machine I'm using right now is the Toshiba, because it has a battery. It too ran 9.10a2 just fine. I installed netbook-remix on it and it's mostly just perfect. Good speakers too (for a laptop). Needs an xorg.conf because the Trident drivers are too shit to autodetect properly. (This is fixable, but someone needs to bother.) Wireless antenna in the screen, must try some mini-PCI cards in the wifi slot.

(The Karmic netbook remix "CD ISO" is 833MB. Concept fail.)

Comments

[beckyzoole]

My sympathies on Freda's teeth. My daughter Johanna needed dental work when she was two. She loved her bottle of juice, and I thought juice was healthy. Turns out it's also high in sugar. She had three cavities.

Fortunately we found a dentist who specialized in pediatrics, and my parents helped pay for it. (Since the dentist wasn't "in network", our insurance only covered about half the cost.)

The very big downside was that my parents made sure I felt ashamed of myself as a bad mother, letting my baby get rotten teeth. Dr. Peters wasn't very pleasant to me either. But he was great with Johanna. He used puppets and silly voices, gave her nitrous oxide gas, and she never felt a thing.

[arkady]

In Freda's case, she has a couple of chipped teeth where she took a tumble against a baby gate.