predator/bill_me.txt

File: bill_me.txt
Cont: More crap in the interminable saga of predator's near-life experience 
Dates: 22 Dec 2k3 -> Jan 6 2k4


On account of Bill's appearance in my neck, I went along and saw Paul the
oncologist again, this time without bringing Dad along since I expected
he'd just fall alseep in the chair again. It was good just being there
alone with the guy, so I could do a bit of a brain dump without having to
care what dad thought. He hadda feel of Bill The Lump. I reek faintly of
methylselenium and volatile sulfur compounds, since I'm stuffin' myself
full of foods full of free-radical scavenging molecules, avoiding carbs,
plus imbibing various transition metal trace elements, enzyme cofactors
and B group vitamins.  He reckons the changes I've made to my diet are
mainly preventative rather than curative, tho the way I see it, any new
tumor cell is another one which can be prevented, or persuaded not to
propagate, if the surrounding biochemical circumstances are configured
against it doing so. To my gobsmacked surprise he reckons we should leave
this thing here in my neck unless it causes pain since its presence there
is irrelevant to the progression of the disease. That is, do what you
like, you're still fucked so leave it there. He'll cut it off if I say
that it's painful. I want the fucker out before it does something bloody
annoying like eat into the nerves which make my left arm work (ruining my
clutch control, wanking technique, and typing speed - you the reader
should be so lucky). He sent me off for a CT-scan so we can determine
wether or not it has invaded anything nearby. Ho fucking ho.

Now, my take is, either chop the fucker out as soon as poss, or, since
it's so conveniently located where _I_ can get at it, try something whacky
like inject into it small quantities of bacterial lipopolysaccharides to
provoke a massive, feverish immune response like Coley used to do back in
the 1920s before chemo' and radiotherapy appeared on the scene. It didn't
succeed all the time, maybe 20% or so, and it was generally tried on
inoperable tumors... If I can get my hands on the two relevant strains of
microbes, I can culture them myself (I know sterile technique, have the
glassware and my old centrifuge will be just fine for getting the pellet
down) kill 'em in hot water, titrate their CFU density on a slide, and off
we go. I'm gonna have to trawl around to find the relevant bugs, tho. One
can't just walk into the university microbiology department these days and
snare an Eppendorff with a frozen pellet of your bug of choice in 10%
DMSO, and nor can one just waltz into Sigma-Aldrich-Fluka and buy a bunch
o' growth medium. Everyone assumes microbiologists are terrorists.


I popped along for my third CT-scan of the year. This was a 32-detector
Toshiba item, with better resolution than the previous 8-detector GE
instrument, but this time they weren't gonna ionise my dick - the
objective of the visit was to cook my brain, neck and lungs. More
sensitivity means they needed more radiation. Scans are a sort of
self-fulfilling technology - if we keep this scanning up I will be mutated
by radiation into the same sort of mutant blob I am attempting to locate
using radiation in the first place. It took half an hour, a bit over half
a grand, and I walked out with an envelope saying "To be opened only by
referring doctor." Grrrr. How dare a patient directly acquire a clue about
themselves?



Christmas is usually insane and depressing even when you're not sick,
since everything's dripping with *enforced good cheer*.


"Shuddup. Be Happy. Obey All Orders Without Question.
 Shuddup. Consume. The Comforts You've Demanded Are Now Mandatory."

-Jello Biafra, "A Message From Our Sponsors" - Terminal City Ricochet
soundtrack.


The usual diversions one might turn to on teev have been replaced by round
the clock saturation christmasturbation (I do *so* love that word, it sums
everything up so well!) and full-spectrum bandwidth bombing with cricket
matches so stupefyingly pointless and boring that it is surely in the
national interest for us to nuke the entirety of the commonwealth just to
expunge the game from the surface of the planet. The roads are crawling
with cops intent on, say, fining motorcyclists for not wearing seat belts,
ha ha. And since the shops are shut, you can't even smack a load of
consumer therapy up your arm when you're in need of it. Not that I am.
Usually I spend the festy season avoiding the 'phone, and dicking around
with various bits of hardware.

Weapons-grade farts aside, the oldie's dog has proven itself most amusing,
insofar as our new postie has failed to deliver letters to us on the
grounds that he considers our remarkably docile pooch to be too savage to
make it worth his risk putting his armload of mail through the gap in our
fence. The dog normally races out, barking, and runs up and down the fence
yappin' at the postal motorbike. She's doing this entirely for show, but
the new postie hasn't been told. Oz Post officialdom came to investigate
the savage dog claim. The mutt waddled out calmly, and when the postal
investigators opened the gate, she gave 'em a polite lick, a bit of an
inquisitive sniff and sat on her bum, looking upwards at them plaintively.
We've stopped calling her doggo, and now refer to her as Savijdog. Poor
postie.


My apologies: I was gonna have some links in here to pictures of the
scanned images of the tumor they chopped out of me, but that's not gonna
happen anytime soon. After fighting with it for two days, I have given up
getting the HP Scanjet 5100C to work with Debian/Knoppix 3.2... I've
transplanted drives, installed the whole OS anew, installed more recent
kernels, patched them with the horrible kludge-around required to
implement SCSI over parallel ports, frigged around with the BIOS settings,
apt-got more packages than is reasonable over this shite 56k modem link
and I'm at that point I so often arrive at in a Linux install, which is
defeated, resigned frustration. As far as Linux installs go, Knoppix is
very fucking good. For the first time, I conclude it's not the OS's fault,
or even mine - it's just that this particular scanner is a really, really
stupid design, most uncharacteristic of Pewlett-Hackard. As shamefully
wasteful as it is, I am gonna just drop the whole rig in the bin, victim
of its own poor documentation and interface design kludginess. I'd go
playing with a USB rig 'cept the interface stakes on this mobo are layed
out incorrectly for every USB feed socket I've ever laid my hands on. And
I don't have one handy either. I might have a PCI SCSI card lying around
somewhere. Maybe I'll just go up to a net cafe and scan it in there, and
fight with whatever broken ftp clients they force me to use.


I've been playing with hardware of a transportational nature too. After I
re-packed the pedal bearings with lithium grease and oiled the chain and
derailleur, I took my old aluminium-framed pushie for a spin. Slowly. I
shamefully bemoan the lack of raw acceleratory grunt and monster
respiratory reserve upon which I used to unthinkingly call as a serious,
kill'em'all, fuck-right-off urban commuting weapon nearly half a decade
ago before I really became enslaved by the convenience of liquid
hydrocarbons. In 1998 I was pushing 150km a week, keeping up with cars on
arterial roads. I destroyed bottom brackets and pedal bearings with
impunity... my lungs greedily gouged oxygen and nearby insects from the
surrounding air, vast planes of dorsal meat plated my back, and my pelve
was welded to a pair of sculpted, throbbing, half kilowatt Krebs cycle
engines barely recognisable as legs. By comparison, at the moment I'm a
weedy piece of desk-driving shit, and the muscular remnants of my arse
exhibit all the athletic responsiveness of a scoop of icecream gone soft
in the sun. So soft, in fact, I've gotta snare myself some seatpost
suspension, I am tired of having the seat hammered up my bum every time I
drop the back wheel into a pothole.


It's actually been a pretty pleasant week, but it contained various
stupidities. I angrily chopped a friend of ten years out of my life, after
deciding he was being rather more interrogatory than he shoudda been. Ah,
well, it isn't like I didn't warn him. It's intriguing - I am much more
freely prepared to do this, these days, but even if awareness of my life
expectancy hadn't suddenly dropped by three decades in the last month, I
wasn't about to have anyone make unsolicited, unwarranted deductions about
my shag life, crow about their success at it when they're wrong, and then
keep at it when I tell 'em not to. I'll reveal what I will, which is quite
a bit, but will not be interrogated, no matter how subtly. Nor will I have
my crankiness about this specific incident written off as a background
effect of my being suddenly aware of the foreshortening of my lifespan. If
you're reading this, and you know who you are, you have a couple of years
to think about it before I'll take you out of my killfile.

Anyway.

On the 'eve I had a delightful nosh'n'blab and a couple of beers with a
couple of friends over at Maroubra, a stroll along the beach, with
complementary perving upon the nearly naked bods of nearby women who got
their gear off and ran into the freezing, pounding surf. Salt spray
condensed on my specs, a cold wind raced off the choppy ocean and sucked
all the heat out of me. We went back to my friends' share house and in
don't-give-a-shit mode I ate lots of delightful foods dripping with carbs
and sugars. I'm sure Bill grew a bit as a result, but arrr, fuck him.

"That's WHAT he does. That's ALL he does." -Kyle Reese, referring to
Terminator


The Cookie Manufacturer and I rode back to the ice cream factory through
suburbs largely depleted of traffic, and after killing dozens of midnight
mozzies before they could drill us, shagged farewell shags since one of us
was leaving the country for a month. Christmas only comes once a year, but
I'm glad we don't. Off she goes, back to the land of the free where they
imprison more people per capita than anywhere else on the planet, landing
at an airport on the edge of a state run by precisely the same fuckin'
Terminator that Kyle Reese was referring to above. Fucked if I'm ever
gonna go to the US again, they fingerprint everyone who goes there now,
which is a sure sign the place has turned into a police state the likes of
which it specifically set out to avoid becoming, if their constitution is
anything to go by.


Goddamned mozzies have no decorum, I discovered in the morning there were
several mozzie bites on my arse presumably installed while I was
distracted by shagging from the task of smashing them into bloody mash
against me.


Christmas day was crushingly hot and murderously dry. I soaked my T-shirt,
put my leather jacket on over the top of it, and motorcycled up to Palm
Beach (maybe 60km north) in the hazy, shimmering thermal waste. When I
started the bike, the fuel was *boiling* in the tank, toxic, flammable
vapours hissed out of the fuel cap. The road was sticky - the kick stand
had sunk slightly into the melting tarmac. I kept the visor down because
otherwise the dry breeze sucked the moisture out of my eyes. The traffic
was heavy, I saw several cars on the roadside with their owners gazing
under the hoods. I had a pretty good run apart from encountering some
homicidal tailgating clowns, who I motioned to pass me only to watch them
tailgate the cars in front of me. Dickheads. Much of the way a
motorcyclist stays alive out there is by reading people's roadcraft and
vehicle damage status and assessing people's ability to fuck up in such a
way as will fatally include oneself when one has not positioned oneself so
as to avoid the wreckage. This defensive tacticality is habitual, these
days, and its still worth the effort of keeping my eyes peeled.
Reprogrammed to self-destruct from the nucleotides up, nonetheless I'm not
driving around with a deathwish. The wet shirt under my jacket was bone
dry by the time I got to Palm Beach. The place amazes me, it looks like a
fuckin' four-wheel drive convention, huge Toorak tractors parked all over
the place, obstructing the roads.


It was good to see Lissie and Craig - my cousins. I watch their kids grow
up at intervals of twelve months and there's something oddly satisfying
about it even though as an adoptee I am biologically unrelated to them.
Lissie and I have some pretty raucous, very enjoyable conversations. I ate
a ton of seafood, configured Liam's evil X-box for him (Micro$oft:
Enslaving Your Children), had a swim in their pebblecreted pool, and
caught up with some of my proxy rellos. Their maniacal bad-attitude male
pomeranian has literally arse-raped, disembowelled and scattered the
pieces of every stuffed toy in the house, which makes me glad it's not a
rottweiler. I took Liam's grandma Julie for a spin (admittedly, she had me
at knifepoint) on the motorcycle which she thought was pretty cool, if a
bit draughty on account of the aerodynamics of spread legs and a dress. It
was great to catch up with them all. Half full of piss, I answered their
questions about my cancer as best I could, which probably wasn't very
well. Liam's only about three, and he reckons I have a nasty scratch up my
front. Well, yeah, I do.

I'd have hung around for longer but I had to meet an old friend on the
19th floor in the offices of the NSW Minstry for Police. I locked him out
of my life two years ago and I thought we were about ready to tolerate
each other again. To look at him he hadn't aged a day, but I could see in
his right eye a cloudiness that spoke of a cataract. Staring out the
window at the nighttime view upon which the chrome-domed NSW police
minister used to gaze, with our feet on the furniture, we caught up in the
heat of a stuffy office with broken airconditioning. We would have got
pissed but all the pubs on Oxford st were shut so we couldn't score any
Guinness.

We chatted up about a lot of stuff, but some fundamentally annoying things
about him have not changed. He mentioned to me as news things I remembered
him telling me two years ago. The percentage of his thought processes
ripped directly from TV still exceeds the number of hits I want on my old
news / useless bullshit filters. It's not gonna be a prolonged reunion.

I rode home topless in the stinking nighttime heat.


By the time I got there Dad had got his hands on the CT-scan report.

To everyone's surprise, I have a brain, and to my surprise in particular,
it appears to be normal. So are my lungs, though they're the lungs of a
slack bastard who doesn't do enough exercise. The report is worded
obscurely, almost defensively, as if they didn't trust me not to rip the
envelope open a couple of days ago and come to my own conclusions from
whatever the radiologists wrote. They report a large, hypodense mass,
where I had told them it was. Well, surprise, surprise. It seems to have
not invaded the surrounding bones or vasculature yet. They didn't say it
_was_ a lymph node... its identity is referred to obliquely - `there is no
other evidence of metastatic disease'. I feel like I have learned
precisely two fifths of fuck-all about this lump. I'm from the school of
though that sez, biopsy the bastard, stick some of it on a slide and
identify its cellular morph. But maybe that'd rupture it, freeing whatever
is contained in the putative node, to wreak invasive havoc on the rest of
my neck.

When I see Coz on the 5th, I'm gonna ask that he wield the tactical
machete once more. Out, damned spot!


27th Dec

I got an SMS from a number I didn't recognise late on the 26th, and was
invited out to a fuck-my-anticancer-diet dinner at an Italian restaurant
in Newtown, by a mysterious brown woman of part South African extraction whom,
when she wears her distinctly 1970's silver-rimmed Polaroid sunglasses and
straw hat, bears a startling resemblance to a famous Chilean dictator. The
nosh was great, inclusive of garlic bread with enough topping to change
the refractive index of my exhaled breath after eating the stuff. We
wandered down to her friend's place to play with a nice telescope (Saturn
looks the best it has for thirty years just now, since its orbital
inclination is at its maximum so the rings are obvious) but it was a
cloudy night so we couldn't see the stars, and had to settle for perving
into the neighbor's front windows and discovering the type and rating of
various fluoroescent bulbs in the nearby streetlamps. And, later, snogging
in the park at Camperdown. Next day I popped over to her place on the way
to drop a packload of books in East Hills and spent rather longer there
than I intended, for reasons which you could probably guess by now given
the content of previous rants. Man...  people go buy fibro houses in
suburban wastelands and wonder why they're isolated, lonely
and bored outta their minds when they're not out, busy working. To
alleviate this, she's looking for some sort of long-term relationship but
I told her I'm not really in a position to participate in such a thing.
I'm happy to share a shag even if it is simply to relieve the solitude,
which appears to be engineered into the very fabric of the suburb - I
speak with authority when I say this place's groundwaters, secluded and
swaddled in rusting cylindrical ferrocrete, are more interesting than its
streetscapes. Regardless of how good such shaggery might be, it's a
meaningless gesture against the brute fact that the whole district was
designed to partition its inhabitants off from each other, to prevent the
spontaneous growth of a community before it ever might take root. Nobody
plays in the treeless parks, prowling cops hassle every cluster of kids
which happens to condense anywhere, etc etc, and you can only hang around
in the sprawling mall if you're spending money. Even the public seating,
optimised for discomfort, is specifically manufactured to tell your bum to
get lost after five minutes.


28th Dec

I finally caught up to a head torch modification project I've had in the
works for at least two years. See conway.cat.org.au/~predator/whiteled.txt
I thought for a moment during testing I'd fucked the MAX1698 chip (a truly
incredible bit of DC-DC engineering!) which would have been an expensive
exercise, but it turned out I'd just blown a Schottky catch diode (surface
mount, B4H) which rectifies the N-channel FET output on the way to the LED
array. I swapped it out for something slower, fatter and tougher from my
parts bin... rated to 4A, 1kV. The SMD part which I had blown up was 1mm x
2mm and the exact replacement would be an absolute pain in the arse to
solder in, anyway - capillary action makes the fuckin' things stick to the
point of the soldering iron, during which time they get fried and don't
work any more.

Pete and his f'yonce Louise (great... there's gonna be two people in the
family named Lousie Maher now) popped in, which was a good excuse to stuff
myself with all that shitty carbohydrate I've recently noticed how keenly
I have missed. I might pop in and see them down in Wollongong when I am
next doing a clandestine reconnoitre of the Port Kembla copper smelter. I
miss good coffee - the vac-sealed Vittoria stuff, plunged through
stainless mesh in gleamin' borosilicate.


30th Dec.


Long lost (well, about 12 years since we've seen him) cuz Tony showed up
without warning. Great to see him and I would have chatted to him more
except that I had pre-arranged to go waste some time with Keoh. Keoh's
done a good job on the cubby at the back of the junkyard. Fuck alone knows
how he acquired the very swish pair of cufflinks he gave me - embossed
with the NSW police service emblem, and cloaked in the insignia of the
Drug Squad. Very amusing, but they're illegal to wear if you're not a cop,
and besides, wearing them could very well get me killed in some of the
circles I move in.

The Cat firewall (tarvat, so named since our previous fw was called
avatar) has developed some odd glitchiness. Thinking it was thermally
related I did a guts transplant (harddisk, display and network cards, this
way we know there won't be any interrupt conflicts or failed module
dependancies on bootup) into our hot standby box but I got the same error
there.

While I was furiously hammering this stuff to see if I could make it go,
Coco comes into the geek room to slowly drone in my direction a stream of
low information content small-talk. Coco is a pain in the arse who has
disappeared from the Ice Cream factory for a month - his cat has remained,
dropping cat turds in unexpected places and, if you ask me, considering
itself very lucky not to have been found euthanased in a deep freeze
somewhere. He says, how ya going, and without looking up I mention
"frantically busy and unable to talk to you, sorry." "Ok, get fucked,
then." He says. Yeah, never mind that I was genuinely frantically working
on something important which lots of people depend upon, or that I gave
the dude a key to my old squat when he was moaning about his impending
homelessness last month, nor that I was fighting to get his net link
working as I spoke. Sometimes I wonder if I should just give up
volunteering and find some fool who's prepared to pay me to do what I do
for fun anyway. Arrr. but then again, maybe I'm becoming a grumpy prick
and he's just doing me the favour of telling me.

It's amazing. After I blew Coco off, Len, David, and Rana blew in for a
chat. I'm trying to track this bug down, and nyaargh there's all these
people chewing on my brain while I'm tryin' to get this box workin'. Rana
cooked me a delightful tofu/eggplant something-or-other.  I eventually
pinned it down to a bug in shorewall's IP-conntrack.  The firewall's still
knackered. Andy logged into it remotely later, and fucked it up even more,
which is uncharacteristic. So I have to go out and torture it in person.
Not tonight tho.



New Years Eve.

The oncologist rang up in the morning to tell me what I already knew about
the CT-scan. Which was, more or less, nothing more than my fingers had
told me. I reckon I'll try and talk Cozzi into doing a fine needle biopsy
of this neck thing - if you have to accuse me of spending too much time in
front of microscope slides, go ahead, but I reckon there's a lot you can
tell from cell morphology which no CT scanner on the planet is gonna ever
reveal.

I rode up to North Head to a Cave Clan party in the abandoned gun turret
emplacements nestled in the saltbush on the sandstone flats above the huge
cliffs which rise, sheer, 70m out of the Pacific ocean. Fireworks exploded
on either side of me as I drove across the Harbour Bridge under police
escort at 20km an hour like all the other drivers, but I couldn't waste
attention on the pretty colours.

Fortunately there was a southerly breeze, since the biggest sewage
treatment plant in Sydney was only 200m north of us.

Like all Clan parties, it seriously rocked. Really, given such a high
concentration of worthwhile, kick-arse, criminally minded free spirits,
sex, drugs, wicked melancholy electro plus old school rock'n'roll, no door
charge (no doors either), no dress regs, and a site with a view the
government's been trying to sell to developers for bazillions of dollars,
where the fuck else would you bother to go on NYE? 'Oxide brought his
generator, Siolo his Linear Designs speakers and an amp' which could
easily incinerate both of them; to this seismic survey apparatus was
connected an .mp3 player which had about ten thousand ripped tunes in it.
Word's got around. ... diode announced some weeks ago to the Clan on my
behalf that I've been seriously sick of late, people were glad to see me -
I got an ear-smashing reception when I arrived, which was cheering.

As might be expected of a bunch of mortals in denial, we're a catalog of
sickies. Hatchet's kerosene habit has cost him a lung, curly-haired Pete's
liver's being eaten alive by Hep C, Oggie's MS is chewing him up slowly,
MrI was nearly felled by pericarditis, on it fuckin' goes. About fifty
people who are collectively a bigger law enforcement job creation scheme
than the entire district of Cabramatta showed up, ate, drank, smoked good
grass (for which I can vouch), danced like epileptics on nitrous, fucked
in the bushes (for which I can also vouch), detonated things of an
explosive nature, conjectured on what was _really_ in the tabs they'd
taken before they got there, sat and chatted by the fire which was perched
on the iron mountings where the army's coastal surveillance optics used to
be installed. I met some Adelaide clansmen who were amazed that I'd been
there and tagged up in the drains under their city, and who mistakenly
think I am some sort of god (Chinese Whispers effect, I guess). Feenie and
I compared scars - they used his tattoos to align the edges of the one in
his legs, but his sensory mapping is wrong now, he feels the back of his
leg on the front of his leg, or something like that. Marauder, grinning
fiendishly, his hair short and bleached white, looked terrifyingly similar
to Billy Idol except he's a metre too tall and six orders of magnitude
smarter.

We were too far away to see them but heard the muffled thumping of the
harbour fireworks at midnight. The klaxons, and roar of the blowers and
scrubbers of the sewage processing site kept us company throughout the
night... along with the blink-blink, blink of a lighthouse somewhere on
outer South Head. I got some shut-eye in nine dollars fifty worth of
fluorescent orange, half-deflated dinghy MrI had dragged out there and
failed to go to sleep in, but I managed, I guess because I was definately
more stoned than he was. Out of the corner of my eye, through heavy lids
(but not so heavy that they'd close properly) I watched uncaringly as some
smartarse got a photo of me crashed-out in the dinghy. I was not so stoned
that I couldn't perch myself cross-legged atop one of Silo's speakers and
gaze at the sunrise. The thumpin' bass signals deliciously jabbed up my
body, faster up my backbone.

A sax/synth track by KennyG (called Infinity, I think) came on while I sat
there gazing at the fiery pink beams radiating from gaps in the distant
clouds, and I had one of those little searing, teary moments where I
wondered if I'd see the next New Years. I gazed out to where the sky and
the ocean met indistinctly, and looked at the tiny boats tossed on the
endlessly repeated waves stretching from the gleaming white cliffs to the
horizon. The wind flogged my hair against my skin, I stank of cannabis,
campfire smoke, sex on crushed shrubbery, leather preservative and Talby's
(legitimate chocolate chip) cookies, and I didn't know wether to feel
defeated or exuberant. The dawn arrived and hurt my eyes which were
leaking already anyway. I climbed down and went to sleep against the
concrete footings of the makeshift fireplace and woke up a couple of hours
later with some wanker stickin' a camera in my face as - action shot - I
discovered I'd accidentally snorted a blowfly.

I dunno about you, but I think if you are ever called upon to justify your
life in terms of what you do on such an arbitrarily decreed day as New
Years, raising hell with a bunch of people you played a key role in
bringing together over ten years, and who are here because of something
you decided to write and make freely available to the public at large,
really beats the shit out of flocking with a nameless herd to watch
delightedly as the government sets fire to your sequestered tax dollars,
or sitting at home watching the Edinburgh fucking Tattoo on the telly.


On with the year then. The hardcore kamikazi kore of the Clan is off to go
abseiling or skateboarding without authorisation down 100m drops in 12m
diameter pipes in the upper reaches of the Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme
(empty since there's a drought on). Slightly drugfucked and wussy, I rode
back to Blakehurst and spent the day zonked out in bed, only emerging to
write this before the neurons responsible for remembering it commit
programmed suicide in disgust at what they remember. Five beers, a cone
and a root could only devastate me like this if I was in shit shape to
begin with.

T-6 days to biopsy. Listen, lumpy, we have ways of makin' you talk.


Jan 3.


Fuckin' PCI interrupt allocation... grr. Andy had logged in and fucked up
the gateway entries while he was remotely messing around tryin' to get the
firewall working, thereby locking himself out. He got shorewall working
again but there's a wrinkle... when I did the gutz-transplant from one
machine to another to check about the (I think) thermally related kernel
barf, I put the NICs back in their slots in a different order. Now, on my
planet, a card gets an interrupt on the basis of what it's set to ask for,
but this particular mobo assigns them partly on the basis of which card
asks for one first. The DMZ and LAN NICs were assigned opposite IRQs, were
thus initialised in a different order, and although cabled the same way as
before the rebuild, were in fact now assigned as different interfaces so
the original routing tables were now totally fucked up. I eventually
figured this out and now it works. If you ask me, ISA buses work better
just because you can have definitive control over them with bits of
fuckin' metal on the boards deciding how they behave instead of some wafty
dynamic interrupt assignment workaround implemented to circumvent the fact
that most computer hardware people appear to be unable to count to ten
more than once. It seems to work for the time being. Good.


The kind individual who offered to shag me came pretty close to making
good on her promise early this morning, after we ate some Thai and
demonstrated our recorder playing skills (or lack thereof) to each other
in the dark at Enmore Park, but she was leakin' erythron and not entirely
happy with shagging in that circumstance, so we just lay upon the futon,
clinging tightly to each other in the lavender scented sheets, being
occasionally inspected by her inquisitive dog (got a hardon you want to be
rid of? Try an unexpected canine nose in the eye, heh heh).

I grew up in the 1980s and was bombarded by the Grim Reaper ads in the
early 1990's, and have done enough pathology to scare anyone off getting
outta bed in the morning, yet I find myself strangely blithe of the
personal consequences of all this knowledge - e.g. being bled upon by
immunological strangers holds no terrors. I'm getting NRMA syndrome -
nothin' really matters anymore. It would nevertheless be rude of me to
become a viral vector in the final months of my life, a free software
conduit between people who know me, so I keep a few microns thickness of
polymerised isoprene handy. Arr.. I'd love to ride bareback, but it'd just
be irresponsible of me.

Something's changing. Contrary to my misanthropic default, I'm starting to
appreciate this whacky species of which I am a member. I am not sure why.
We're the same bunch o' treacherous creeps as we were before I got my
oncological marching orders from the rank and file of the human race, but
as I stand at the edge, it is hitting home that they're all I've got.
Maybe I've never seen it from the point of view of someone unaccustomed to
what appears to be the sudden availability of shags-on-tap, but I'm
becoming more hungry for company than shaggery. Maybe one appreciates more
the things one has irretrievably lost or thinks one is about to. I am
keenly aware what a privelage it is to hold these precious beings in my
grip, be cradled by them intimately, even if we do run the same
metabolisms as the thing which is trying to kill me, and I can't help
getting a bit furrowed of brow and teary eyed amidst it. I am gonna miss
them as I am dying. If this dopey disease can decide wether to take me out
or not.

Before taking life off you completely, cancer takes over your life in more
insidious ways than you realise (and in my case, chains me to the
keyboard, QED). I popped into Kogarah to return a book, and chatted to
Larry who is missing a lot of guts since he had colon cancer chopped out.
We concur that the worst thing about cancer is possibly that everyone else
who is aware of it can't have a conversation with oneself without talking
about it, so one ends up having permutations on the same conversation to
dozens of people before you get killed by it. It's sort of unavoidable, I
guess. It's not that we're not grateful for the concern, but as you the
long-suffering reader of these rants would surely agree it's just fuckin'
boring repeating the same stuff over and over again. So boring in fact I
want to get back to my mundane life of meaningless, anarchist
thermodynamic-eschatological drifting. Painting walls. Writing aleatory
crap. Uncaringly watching red traffic lights stay red for ages. Fuckin'
with computers and pondering on the computational nature of chemical
systems.


I ate breakfast at midday at the old Fish Cafe and couldn't help smile at
the parade of unconcerned locals walking past. If the place was any more
laid back you'd need velcro to stop your drinks sliding off the table.
Cool.



-----
If, perhaps in a moment of masochism you want to look at the next file in
this series try

http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/getting_it.txt

It might not be available yet. 

<predator>