Initial and final commit

ADSL.txt

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+This is a shortish rant about my experience building a Linux ADSL router
+for a Telstra Big Pond ADSL service, from a pile of old parts
+
+Equipment: 
+One SMC 10baseT Elite Hub (12 ports)
+One Pentium-100 with 60Mb of RAM,
+                     1Gb of harddisk    
+                     a cdrom, 
+                     a SMC-ULTRA ISA NIC 
+                     a 3Com 3c509 ISA NIC
+Various ethernet cables, power cords, etc.
+
+Originally I tried using Smoothwall Linux, and the green zone worked but I
+couldn't get it to talk to the DSL modem. Also, suggestions mentioned at
+Becsta.net concerning a stripped-down RedHat Linux 6.2 distro with added
+PPPoE didn't work for me either.
+
+On the suggestion of a Rent-a-Geek member, I dowloaded the 279 mb cdrom
+image  
+smeserver-5.1.2.iso 
+from 
+ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/e-smith/e-smith-5.1.2/iso/smeserver-5.1.2.iso 
+
+As root I used cdparanoia to burn this to a cdrom on another machine,
+since the Pentium100 box happened to have a cdrom in it and was able to
+boot from cdrom.
+
+<digression>
+However if neither of these conveniences apply and you're running an ftp
+server on the machine were the downloaded iso exists you can mount the
+iso image:
+
+mount -t iso9660 -o loop smeserver-5.1.2.iso /mnt/somewhere
+
+Then look in /mnt/somewhere for a file called bootnet.img ... when you
+find it, dd it to a floppy like so:
+
+dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0
+
+then boot the prospective router machine off this floppy. The floppy will
+enable the machine to find a PCI network card in the router if one exists,
+and you simply answer the questions concerning where the ftp server is and
+where on the ftp server the
+image is known to exist.
+</digression>
+
+I followed the install and it was very straightforward (remember that
+username is not 
+
+username
+
+it is
+
+username@bigpond
+
+My only real problem was that, while there were kernel-loadable modules in
+the /lib/modules/<uname>/net directory for my ancient ISA NICs, I couldn't
+configure them through the normal install procedure which is built to
+handle PCI NICs but not ISA ones. So I used a text editor and modified
+modules.conf to contain:
+
+alias eth0 3c509
+options io=0x300 irq=10
+
+alias eth1 smc-ultra
+options io=0x290 irq=3
+
+
+I also found I had to set the immutable attribute bit on the
+/etc/modules.conf to prevent later stages of the configuration from
+messing it up.
+
+# chattr +i /etc/modules.conf
+
+Both my linux laptop and Dave's G4 Powerbook gleefully recieve
+dhcp-assigned numbers from the hub when they're plugged in and booted. The
+hub, naturally is plugged into the ethernet port *not* currently occupied
+by the link to the ADSL modem.
+
+
+<predator>

aquacave.txt

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+File: aquacave.txt
+Cont: Description of Aquacave, a recently discovered big drain in 
+      Bowen Hills, Brisbane, Queensland, by <predator>. December 1999
+
+Finally I had my motorbike back from the motorbike shop in Kew NSW (which had
+the approrpiate name of "Far Kew") and could hit Brisbane again. I met Ogre
+in his luxury Brisbane apartment an hour earlier than he expected because I
+forgot to wind my watch back one hour when I crossed the QLD/NSW border, duh,
+so he was still half-asleep when he opened the door. I said hello to Dirge
+while I got the blood circulating in my legs again after sitting on the 400cc
+Predabike for the last four hours... those gloves I found in Charity Creek 
+room (under Victoria Road, Ryde) made excellent motorbikin' gauntlets. 
+
+Brisbane had turned it on for me again. Rain, that is. I was itching to do 
+this new drain that I'd heard Ogre and Trioxide raving about on the web ring,
+but it was pissing rain. Dirge hadn't done the power station yet and was 
+headding back to Sydney the following day and wanted value for her Brisbane 
+Railpass dollar. We decided to have another look at the Tennyson Power 
+station. We got off at Milli-Vanilli-Silly-Billy-Yeerongpilly station and 
+trudged out to the powerhouse.
+
+We scanned the perimeter for a secluded site where we could enter. Ogre, being
+the big beast he is, couldn't fit through the tight squeeze which permitted 
+Dirge and I into the sub-basement, and he pulled off a heroic climb up the 
+bars and through a gap four metres off the ground, and also disposed of some
+chicken wire, before getting in.
+
+The place hasn't changed much since I was last there (see: Tennyson.txt) and
+this time we went all the way to the very top of the roof, in the freezing 
+rain and wind. There was an amusing situation where, at one end of the 
+plant, we looked down at the dwelling where the security guard lives, to
+determine the whereabouts of the guard dog which was responsible for the dog
+shit distributed throughout the place. There it was, being fed its bowl of 
+dinner, by none other than the security guard wearing only his black hipster
+underpants and a wristwatch. Well, there's no likelihood of being busted here,  
+we grinned, and kept exploring until we ran out of light.
+
+                                    **
+
+Dirge and Ogre went home to their rooftop party and I got the train to Bowen 
+Hills Station, which is about 250m from the entrance of Aquacave. The entrance
+is at the corner of Sneyd St and Campbell St, Bowen Hills (Gregorys: 250-F1)
+down a steep embankment near a Queensland Rail depot. I got there in the dark
+and it had stopped raining, but the tunnel spewed a torrent down the canal. I 
+weighed it up: it's an unfamiliar drain, probably with a big catchment (turns 
+out it services most of Fortitude Valley so the floating payloads could be 
+unpleasant too) it's night time, the clouds are threatening, and if I go in 
+there and it rains, I'll probably die. Aw, shit. 
+
+Yes, the threat of death keeps <predator> out of drains, but only so he can 
+come back the next day - which, fortunately, was on a bright sunny morning 
+while the tide was out. It made the whole journey worthwhile.
+ 
+Aquacave is the best drain I have explored in Brisbane. It is better than
+Batcave, better than Brisbane Darkie and One Hundredth, all of which are quite
+worthwhile drains. Aquacave is long, has lots of interesting rooms, ancient 
+sections and shape changes, a nice loop, and is vertically user-friendly for 
+almost all of its length.
+
+The first part, up to the junction, is roughly hacked in a straight line 
+under Sneyd St, straight out of the tuff, with cement-bevelled sloped 
+bottom edges. At other points the tuff has been hewn into large blocks and 
+these make up the walls. 
+
+At the junction these bevels become too steep to walk on. You have to 
+negotiate a large step to take the right hand fork, and it's loud due to all 
+the water flowing over it. This fork takes you up the 2m concrete rectangular 
+section to a large (6m tall, 20m long, 10m wide) arched red brick room beyond
+which is another 2m concrete section, which promptly takes you to the grilles, 
+which are probably in Victoria Park someplace and from which I have not heard 
+any reports of an exit without two people to lift them.
+ 
+I went back to the junction and took the left fork. The shape changes to 3m
+high, moulded concrete with a sloping invert and concreted-in beams in the  
+roof every couple of metres. This converts into a 2.5m old round pipe, which 
+is soon replaced by a welcoming, much older and larger section with its
+own natural lighting, and what appears to be bluestone block flooring and 
+walls, about 2.5m high by 3m wide. This comes quickly to another junction, 
+the right continuing on as is, the left is a debris-strewn 2m round concrete 
+pipe, similarly well lit. 
+
+I followed this round one through several small corner rooms, via a room 
+which has a weird pointy-edge-upstream, wedge-shaped steel plate conduit 
+duct, with lifting bolts on top, across the middle of the drain at about 
+waist height. The round tunnel section then comes to a concrete room which 
+connects with the old bluestone conduit section, and also connects to an
+even older bluestone section 1m wide, 2.5m high (finally they got the height 
+and width the *right* way around!) with eroded bluestone or brick floors,
+and beveled top shoulders. I frequently placed my foot where I expected floor
+to be, and only ended up landing at the bottom of a half-metre deep puddle, 
+awkwardly loading my foot or bruising my ankle. 
+
+This is a old, long, serpentine section, interrupted periodically by 2 x 1 x 3 
+concrete rooms with new (1990s) manholes and stepirons. It is also interrupted 
+by a strange concrete section 4m high, 1m wide at the bottom half, and 2m 
+wide at the top half. Shape changes galore, and they don't stop there. Some 
+of the bluestone wall sections slope gently outwards, and have these annoying 
+iron cross-bars at chest height every few metres. Once the bluestone-upright 
+segment ends, it is replaced with another shape change, first of the permanent 
+shrinkers - a kind of dished bowl shape with vertical walls and a shallow 
+domed roof. 
+ 
+I was conscious of the time and the tide, and after a couple of hours up this
+excellent tunnel I tagged up on some PVC conduit and headded home via the 
+other side of the bluestone loop. On the way out I noticed the shape of the 
+exit had changed - the dished bottom had been replaced by a flat horizontal 
+line, which means one thing - tide waters... so *that* was where the name 
+came from! I made it to the exit with water almost up to the crease of my 
+butt cheeks, and I was standing on tip-toe for much of the wade out. With wet 
+shoes it is a bit of a scramble to climb up and out of the trench, use the 
+right hand side as you face downstream, and leave happy wet footprints up 
+Campbell St as you return to the rail station.
+
+G@tew@y Bridge will need nothing less than a battery powered angle grinder.
+The bolts are about 12mm dia SS round rod, the site is very exposed and lit at
+night.
+
+
+<predator>, Cave Clan Sydney Branch, 22/12/1999

barron.txt

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+File: barron.txt
+Cont: Data on accessing the abandoned power station at Barron Falls, Kuranda
+      (near Cairns, FNQ, Australia)
+Date: 18 June 1999
+By  : <predator>
+
+This is a legendary Cave Clan epic. Following in the footsteps of Diode,
+who had explored the area a decade before the Clan even existed, a lone
+explorer motorbiked about 1700 miles to the far-flung northern Queensland
+outpost of Kuranda in search of trespass, wicked hidden places and awesome
+photographs of dodgy old infrastructure. The site was finally infiltrated
+on May 24, when <predator> turned 28. 
+
+This rant is the personal log of the <predator> on the Clan's most
+northerly Australian conquest. 
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Cairns is about 2700km north of Sydney. Kuranda is a small town on the
+mighty Barron River about 50km north of Cairns. Barron Falls is about 2km
+out of Kuranda, and is part of Barron Falls National Park. It has its own
+railway station with a line from Cairns, and this rail station, which
+overlooks the falls, is where the journey down to the abandoned Barron
+Falls power station begins. I originally climbed across the wier at the
+top of the falls. This demands a risky trek along the railway cutting
+(which has no extra clearance for people when the train comes around a
+blind corner) then a scramble down a scree slope strewn with loose leaves
+and railway metal. With some effort I made it up to the touristy region
+built near the Skyrail tower. The cool earthy whiff of the forested river
+is replaced by the esterified stink of toilet deodorant blocks and the
+clank and squeak of motors and machinery which drive the cable car
+station machinery. Who permitted this place to become a theme park for 
+rubber-neckin' tourists who haven't the guts to brave the trees on foot?
+
+On the Skyrail side of the Barron River wier is a concrete inlet tower,
+at the base of which is a heavy metal debris screen, which used to take 
+water into the penstock far below, but it is fairly well secured and 
+probably pointless to get into anyway. 
+
+The tourist displays at the Skyrail station say this:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
+1) Water power. 
+
+In 1885 the explorer Archibald Meston described the Barron Falls in flood 
+where the raging waters `rush together like wild horses as they enter the 
+straight in the dread finish of their last race ... (where) the currents 
+of air created by the cataract waved the branches of the trees hundreds 
+of feet overhead ... the rock shook like a mighty steamer tumbling with 
+the vibrations of the screw.'
+
+Decades later these waters were harnessed to generate Queensland's first
+hydroelectric power. Two hundred metres below where you are standing an
+underground power station was carved into the cliff face. Water was
+delivered through pipes to drive the turbines, two 1200kW turbo-alternators. 
+
+The substation, workshops and staff houses were built around the area now
+forming the Skyrail station. Look out for the concrete engine mount blocks
+and fence posts as you wander around.They are some of the more obvious
+remains of the power station. 
+
+Delivering equipment was complex. It first came by train to a rail siding,
+was transferred over the falls and then lowered by tramway to the worksite
+below. 
+
+
+2) Power in the Rainforest
+The idea to build a hydroelectric power station on the Barron River was
+first suggested back in 1906. It was nearly 30 years before the dream was 
+realised.
+
+The site presented many challenges : precipitous cliffs, torrential rain,
+and raging floods were foremost. Hauling equipment from Cairns was
+relatively easy. There was no road in the early 1930s but there was the
+railway on the opposite bank. Getting across the gorge was another matter.
+The flying fox solved that problem. A fragile bridge built across the top
+of the Barron Falls failed to withstand the floods. Plans to build an
+outdoor station had to be abandoned. Earthworks proved too unstable. 
+
+Going underground proved relatively easy. That is, once the tramway was
+built down the nearly vertical clifface. 
+
+By 1935 those years of frustration had been largely overcome. In November
+the Governor of Queensland offically opened Queensland's first
+hydroelectric power station. 
+
+It was popular. Demand soon exceeded supply. In 1940 the two 1200kW turbo
+alternators were supplemented by a 1400kW unit. Twenty years later the
+present Barron Falls power station was commissioned. It generated 60
+megawatts of power.
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Naturally, in a country where heritage is thought best sent to the local
+tree shredder or mashed into landfill by a D9 bulldozer, the sad addendum
+to this amazing story of engineering is that the place was decommissioned
+in the 1960s and subsequently, very thoroughly trashed - a metaphorical
+precis of the history of our species, it seems. Nature has nevertheless
+invaded the skeleton and the station is now home to bats and various other
+organisms, which cloak it in the timeless decency deserving of such a
+noble corpse. 
+
+                                    **
+
+Barron Falls is, visually, a mightily impressive gash in the forest and rock.
+
+From the far upstream (Kuranda) end of the station, you can spot a white
+seam of quartz in the rock at the bottom / distant downstream visible end
+of the gorge. If you trace your eye along this you will spot a small dark
+hole, which was the power station's wastewater outlet and which is about
+10 feet tall. 
+
+The jungle hasn't quite overtaken the little brown cement and corrugated
+iron blockhouse on the opposite cliffside, but it's making progress. It
+appears as a brown speck with a silver and black speck beneath it, in a
+carpet of greenery. The black speck is where some of the sheet metal is
+missing from the remains of the attempt to seal the place up with 
+corrugated iron, which provides the silver speck. The brown speck has
+writing on it but there's no way to resolve it at this range. To enter the
+station, this is where you must go. 
+
+The gorge is very, very steep. Getting down was going to be a nontrivial
+exercise. 
+
+On my first attempt at finding a way down I met nothing but cliffsides,
+screeslopes and sheets of entangled thorny plant life. I eventually asked
+a local chap named Greg Taylor about the place, and he came up with the
+name of a guy who had a clue, who gave me a pretty close description of
+how to find the track to get down. Greg had a wrenching lifestyle change
+forced upon him years ago in a car accident, which compells him to get
+around in a wheelchair, and hence I was unable to even consider badgering
+him into coming down the cliffside with me for logistical reasons. The
+cliffside has not yet been fully converted for wheelchair access (and holy
+shit you'd need good brakes to deal with it if it did) - the rugged geography 
+displays indiscriminate contempt for all who attempt to negotiate it, several 
+rock climbers have met their messy gravity-related ends in this setting. 
+The eventual journey, its photos and this text are unlikely to have ever 
+been carried out without the local information he provided. So if you ever 
+get this file, thanks for the info Greg dude. Oh, and thanks again for 
+sending my towel back to Sydney, too. 
+
+I had to look around for a long time to find the track which permits you
+to descend to the bottom of the gorge. It has been deliberately hidden,
+the signs which designated its existance have been uprooted but remain
+lying in the nearby undergrowth. The access to the track is either by
+squeezing past, or vaulting over, the black railing fence on the upstream
+side of the large water tank. The first few metres of the track are very
+degraded and crumbly, use *extreme* care getting through here - the
+morbidly obese need not apply, and penalties for grip failure are severe. 
+ 
+The rest of the track isn't particularly safe either. It narrows to 20cm
+at some places, with significantly fatal sheer drops just past its edge.
+The remains of handrails stick out of the ground, rusty bits of iron
+attached to rotting bits of wood by siezed bolts and disintegrating
+strapping. Some of the track is heavily overgrown by blackberry or lantana
+and might require a machete or brushhook to penetrate. It is a long,
+winding, steep trail, at the end of which is the next difficulty - the
+riverbed. 
+
+It is not a good idea to commence this trip when it is raining, and not
+just because of storm flood waters (the weir mitigates this to an extent).
+Rather, you need to cross the river, and the millennia of raging torrents
+has slowly polished the rock to a high finish. When this is wet it is very
+difficult to clamber around upon without a lot of defensive posturing and
+experimentation to see if your next handhold or foothold will slip out of
+your grasp when you really need to rely on it. Rain and falls-spray and an
+unfavourable wind had lightly misted the rock surface, and it required all
+my rock-climbing experience and caution to stop myself from sliding into
+the swirling waters below. It was a relief to be off the rounded knolls
+and buttresses, but even the horizontal surfaces are not to be trusted,
+being lightly coated in living slime with particularly treacherous 
+lubricating properties. 
+
+I eventually reached the quartz vein at the bottom of the river, with a surge 
+of excitement. I hadn't fallen, drowned, or become lost. I couldn't see the 
+blockhouse from this vantage point because the jungle had enveloped it, but
+there was no mistaking the outlet port. I had a quick look at it, slightly 
+less than twice my height and about five feet wide. Rough hewn - no point 
+laying pipe to get the wastewater out when you could cheaply just dump it 
+back into the river. And - it was thoroughly sealed off by a mesh of 15mm 
+diameter stainless steel rods, mounted in holes drilled into the rock. Hmmm... 
+would the access facilitation tools I had in my pack be enough? Someone had 
+obviously gone to considerable effort to seal the place up. 
+ 
+I didn't dwell on it as I searched for the path up to the blockhouse. Sweaty, 
+I clambered up through earth, moss and fern, using the occasional tree or 
+length of abandoned pipe or cable as an anchor, until I reached a heavily 
+overgrown and leaf-strewn staircase. Small plants were germinating in the leaf 
+litter, which was quite deep in places. On the steel railing hung the rotting 
+remains of tea towels and doormats... huh, what were they doing here? 
+
+I crawled along below the weeds and finally made it to the doorway. The little 
+place was only about a metre wide, two metres high. A rusted fan was 
+vertically mounted in the top of the roof slightly offset from one wall, I 
+couldn't tell if it was meant to suck air in or blow air out. I peered out 
+the window and back at the wall above : there partly obscured by foliage, in 
+the style of metropolitan building text everywhere in the 1930s were the 
+words in half-inch cement relief.
+
+
+                                  BARRON
+                                  FALLS
+                                  POWER
+                                  STATION
+
+
+The entry blockhouse was littered with rotting junk. Old propane cannisters,
+camping gear, mosquito netting, toothbrushes, clothing, a yellow biohazard 
+disposal container, disintegrating pulp Western novels. All the hallmarks of
+makeshift human habitation long abandoned. But whom, and why? The psychedelic
+multicolour artwork sprayed on the walls provided a clue, but nothing 
+definite.
+
+One walks along a short corridor and, just past a rotting makeshift wooden
+bench, is faced by another of the heavy welded stainless steel rod mesh
+installations which block entry to the wastewater outlet. Fortunately some
+kind person has chopped out a segment of this mesh in the bottom right
+corner, which saved me hours of farting around with a car jack and hacksaw 
+and I wriggled through into the coming darkness. I put on my head torch, 
+checked my spares, descended some stairs and took a flash shot with my 
+camera, aimed at the impenetrable gloom in front.
+
+Immediately about a hundred bats detached themselves from the roof and
+stormed the doorway which framed me. Demonstrating astonishing aerobatics
+they'd be pinned momentarily in the beam of my head torch and then bank
+sharply before powering past my head towards the dim light of blockhouse. 
+When I'd remembered to breathe again I swept my torchbeam in front of me
+to reveal a sheer drop and a large space behind it. Evidently whatever had
+functioned as stairs or flooring here had gone. A significantly unreliable
+looking ladder beckoned but I knew better than to use it in such a place -
+if I injured myself seriously, any rescuers would have a hell of a time 
+coming to look for me.
+
+I uncoiled my rope and put on my harness. The unkind individuals who
+installed the anti-fun barrier had inadertantly provided me with a
+super-secure anchor from which to belay myself down into the unknown. With
+my heart beating fast, I knotted the ends and payed out the coils into the
+black volume, clipped in, leaned back and started the descent. 
+ 
+It didn't last very long, my feet hitting the ancient concrete within
+about five metres. I didn't know how reliable the stuff was, so I stayed
+clipped into my rope while I sussed the place out. The place was a grim
+picture of total devastation. As my eyes adapted to the dark, I could
+start to parse outlines and generate a map in my head of what I was
+exploring. What were these strange shapes around me?
+
+I was on the generator floor. Below it was a sub-level with large cast
+iron pipe sections, which had been unbolted and moved out of position. The
+drop to the bottom was about three metres below the floor I stood on. The
+irregular trickling of running water matched the visual chaos. 
+
+The whole building was encased, the cavity having been dug and the 
+building growing up, roof and all, inside it. 
+
+On my right was a rotting double mattress, plus more abandoned clothes,
+empty prescription pharma cannisters (circa 1997), a cheap bulk-carrier
+plastic bag with more rotting junk in it. The walls sported more examples of
+Giger-esque spraycan artwork. Above me was a very corroded, arched,
+corrugated-iron roof, covered in condensation, and immediately under it
+was a large 8.25 ton rail-mounted crane on heavy iron beams. Sigh. These
+metals were smelted before the days when the atmosphere was contaminated
+with radioactive fallout, making them intrinsically special, products from
+a less polluted era - no transuranics in these members here. 
+ 
+I later learned, upon discussions with people who knew about the controversial 
+construction of the Skyrail, that during construction a population of ferals 
+were using the disused power station as a base from which to launch their 
+protest activities. It fitted what I told them about what I found in the 
+station. I was amazed that anyone could actually live here for any period, 
+in such an inaccessible, damp, dark and hazardous place - but simultaneously 
+amazed at the dedication to forest preservation it demonstrated. And before 
+we go slagging the ferals at their lack of clean-up, it needs to be remembered 
+that the station was left as a proxy garbage dump when the power utility 
+gutted it. Ferals and suits presumably left the mess for similar reasons - 
+the effort of getting the junk back up the cliff. 
+
+On the generator floor itself were strewn the guts of the trio of 
+alternators. Huge, heavy six-pole rotors, bits of armature, and various metal
+shapes whose function I had no clue about lay stripped of their valuable
+copper windings and scattered about as if only contempt and gravity cared. 
+
+The green and black cowlings of the hydroelectric generators hadn't moved
+from their regimented layout, presumably by virtue of their mass and
+having been embedded in the concrete floor. The covers were off, their
+exposed blades retained their original ordered configuration, showing the 
+fine precision workmanship of their long dead manufacturers. 
+
+The green machinery and heavy plumbing was to enable the flow of water to
+be controlled smoothly. If the station had been running at full capacity
+and suddenly the valves closed off, the pipe with the massive, internally
+stored inertia of several hundred tonnes of fast moving water would tend
+to rip straight off its mountings and pile up, mangled, in the bottom of
+the penstock tunnel, with the additional bonus of flooding the basement of
+tht station. So the system presumably had to be brought up to speed, and
+also choked back to a stop, over a period of several minutes. This was all
+manually done - no PLCs in this place. Hence, huge levers and handles and
+gear-wheels sprout from the generators. I could imagine 1940's men with their
+vests and caps throwing the switches, the throb and hum of the alternators
+as they spun, the swooshing roar of the waste water as it splattered and
+bubbled down the outlet tunnels. Did they have pride in the place? I can't
+imagine that they didn't. 
+
+The station's long black power systems control panel had been stripped of
+every switch, meter and indicator, the switchgear fittings and racking
+rusted or slumped according to their constitution, what couldn't be
+pilfered and wasn't indestructable was damaged or destroyed. Even a small
+stepdown transformer sits forlornly rusting along one wall, with its lid
+ripped off and windings gone. It was all a bit sad, the place has been well 
+ruined since its heyday. 
+
+Wandering around brought me to each of three short tunnels which took 
+tonnes of spent water from each generator and dumped it into the outlet 
+port. They've been relagated to the task of disposing of the seepage from 
+the penstock tunnel and from the rock cavity in which the station exists.
+
+Another door brought me to the penstock, the large-diameter pipe which
+took the speeding waters from the weir and fed them into the turbines. 
+The penstock tunnel promised much - logically it'd go all the way up to
+the weir, which not only looked like an interesting place to go, but
+which, if it provided an exit, would save me clambering across the river
+and fighting my way back up the cliffside in the rain. It is rumoured to
+have an opening half-way along it, which surfaces at the sheer cliffside
+with a spectacular and rarely-seen view of the railway side of the falls. 
+I was sorely tempted, but stuck to the rules which had kept me alive so
+far and declined to explore this confined and structurally unknown quantity 
+on my own. Aw, drrrrAT.
+
+The biggest hole in the floor drops straight down to the sub-basement 
+floor, which is unadorned local rock submerged in a half a metre of 
+ludicrously clear water. Was this a large, once-covered access hole, or 
+was it left for future installation of another generator? I don't know.
+ 
+I used a lot of film and flash battery capturing the place on camera, and 
+then realised I had to get out if I was going to make it back to the 
+railway before dark. I definately wanted to avoid the dark for the ascent 
+up the tricky track via which I'd arrived. So I prussiked out, coiled my 
+rope, packed and silently thanked the place for having me, before crawling 
+out and compost-surfing back down to the exposed rock of the riverbed.
+
+The sun shone feebly over the lip of the falls, and I knew I'd have time
+to get out in the remaining light, so I commenced the climb. I didn't much
+care about getting wet now, so I waded through some wide, shallow sections to
+cross the river, and clambered up some of the blockier outcrops to the
+track I'd come down a few hours before. The effort of ascent warmed me 
+and dried my clothes, and by the time I arrived at the Kuranda station 
+platform and climbed over the fence (in front of some tourists obviously 
+distressed by my dishevelment) I was thoroughly knackered. I guzzled 
+rainwater from the tank behind the information displays on the station and 
+raided my wet, heavy pack for the last of my munchies. I sat and looked at 
+the place for a few minutes before I gathered my strength and walked back to 
+the carpark. I was glad I didn't have to kick start the motorbike! I rode 
+back to Greg's place at Koah Road, sweating relief and smelling of moist 
+earth, swollen with happiness that I'd finally done the Barron. Stuffed if 
+I was going to carry my climbing gear back to Sydney in my backpack - I 
+mailed it back the next day. 
+ 
+I had the photos developed in Lismore and was amazed anew - yes, I'd
+really been in there. My bum ached after nearly 2000km of southward
+motorbiking, and reminded me that yes, I had indeed done the travel after
+all. 
+
+So there it lies, awaiting the next explorer. It's an excellent place, 
+and I hope you're enjoyed the story, even if it's a little long-winded.
+It's a sad tale of deliberate neglect of yet another landmark chunk of 
+Australia'a early struggle to become a self-sustaining nation. We neglect 
+these relics at our peril, for doing so permits us to forget the struggle 
+which permitted us modern folks to have such comparatively easy, 
+electrically powered, computer-driven, air-conditioned lives - or should 
+I merely say - existances? Have we already forgotten? Perhaps in some senses 
+we already have. Time will tell us eventually. 
+
+<p r e d a t o r>
+
+
+
+

benfords.c

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+#include <stdio.h>
+#include <math.h>
+/* This program is made available under the terms of the GNU copyleft*/
+
+int main(void)
+
+{
+
+char buffer1[20];
+char buffer2[20];
+double symbols;          
+double proportion;
+double actual_symbol;
+
+/*get the nums*/
+printf("How many symbols are available in this system ?\n");
+//gets(buffer1); 
+if (fgets(buffer1,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
+
+printf("Of these, which symbol's Benford proportion do you want? ?\n");
+//gets(buffer2); 
+if (fgets(buffer2,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
+
+/*conv to values*/
+symbols=atol(buffer1);
+actual_symbol=atol(buffer2);
+
+/* benford's proportion = log to the base n of (1 + 1/D) where D is*/
+/* some symbol included in the symbol set */
+
+proportion = log10(1+(1/actual_symbol)) / log10(symbols);
+
+
+printf("Symbol %g occurs with proportion %g.\n\n", actual_symbol, proportion);
+
+
+return 0;
+}
+

bentcops.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
+This is a document which attempts to describe some aspects of endemic
+corruption in the NSW police force, specifically during the period around
+1979 to present. It is a transcript from a conversation with Blackheath
+Flowers 7th September 2000.
+
+
+Thoughts on the mysterious Rick and Luke.
+
+During the period about 1979-80, "Rick" a.k.a. Richard Seary, was active
+in the Kings Cross region. Rick's main occupations, assisted by his
+partner Luke, were narcotics dealing and unsolicited surgery without a
+license to practise medicine. Rick's primary employer for surgery and
+general miscellaneous public nuisances was an anonymous, tall Australian
+gent <large finger pads> who drove a Monaro who used to enjoy the
+hospitality of the Bourbon and Beefsteak, a well known watering hole for
+NSW detectives and CIA agents of the time. Rick was facing a lot of gaol
+time for narcotics dealing and inept surgical procedures on unwilling
+patients, but was able to remain in circulation owing to his other role as
+a police informer. Rick had also insinuated himself into various
+aboriginal groups.
+
+Rick and probably many other informers find themselves in their role
+because their previous involvment in the narcotics distribution system.
+The informer-to-be, usually sourced from a position of socioeconomic
+vulnerability, is threatened with prosecution if they fail to reveal
+information on people involved in other (alleged) criminal activity in the
+locale. Since illegal drug transactions are a victimless crime, and there
+are no complaints raised about lack of prosecutions of disposable,
+small-time dealers and habitual users, there is never any pressure on the
+police to reveal the identities of their informants.
+
+
+
+
+Regarding Rodney Podesta.
+
+Rodney Podesta recently came to some notoriety as one of the police officers
+responsible for the shooting of Roni Levi on Bondi Beach in 1998. He was not
+subsequently charged for this shooting. He has some other interesting personal 
+historical aspects which have not yet seen the light of newsprint. Some of
+these serve to highlight the entrenched nature of corruption in the NSW police
+force.
+
+Rodney Podesta, having failed both of the maximum permissible two applications
+to join the NSW police force, was subsequently permitted to join the NSW police
+as a trainee police officer when he applied for admission a third time. These
+circumstances for admission are highly unusual. Applicants who have failed two
+attempts at admission are, without exception, refused a third application.
+Unless, of course, they have relatives who hold high office in the NSW Police
+training Academy at Goulburn. Rodney was subsequently permitted to undergo
+training and graduated as a probationary NSW police constable in 1996, despite
+te knowledge that he had many friends and associations over many years in the
+Kings Cross area, which would, one might expect, have rased a red flag about
+Rodney's suitability to perform as a law enforcement officer at all, let alone
+in the Kings Cross region.
+
+Rodney Podesta's now deceased father, Joe Podesta, long-time owner of the
+Piccolo Coffee Shop in Kings Cross, was brought up before two Royal Commissions
+and was reputed to be involved in three gang wars of an unspecified nature.
+This establishment provided a safe haven where cannabis dealing could occur
+without any intervention by the local police, and this is the reason for the
+immunity of this establishment to harassment by local police and emerging
+criminal gangs in the region.
+
+Rodney Podesta was initially posted to the Rose Bay precinct upon
+graduation. The choice of assignment was determined in part by the nature
+of the associations he had made in his preferred and subsequent region of
+operation, which was Kings Cross. Rodney, during his time as an
+adolescent, was occupied on Wednesday nights supervising the running of
+the Piccolo Coffee shop, which one might expect swayed the development of
+Rodney's character and view of the world and his place in it. Much of the
+Piccolo's clientele represented a less law-abiding and honest section of
+the community than one might prefer as an environment in which a
+upstanding adolescent might be expected to develop within. Rodney was,
+through his father's ownership of the Piccolo, exposed to influences which
+certainly shaped his later choice of carreer and his attitude towards it.
+
+Rodney was bored (and not sufficiently remunerated) by his initial assignment
+and, because he wanted to "see some action" applied for a transfer. This led to
+his reassignment to the Bondi Beach police station. 
+
+It is alleged that there was unusual behind-the-scenes police computer
+database activity in which Rodney was involved. Access to the police files
+is logged, but this logging does not ensure that access to these files is
+made for valid reasons - for instance, an officer or other individual with
+access to the files could conjure up a reason like "suspected stolen car",
+enter the license plate details and see what - and who - comes up.
+
+The actual nature of Rodney's accessions was never determined, but an
+indication of their significance is given by the fact that neither the
+state or federal police investigated this activity - and this activity was
+never investigated in the courts. The only organisation which investigated
+Rodney's activities prior to the shooting or Roni Levi was ASIO, who
+installed a surveillance camera into the cieling of his Randwick unit (via
+the floor of the unit above).
+
+The issue here is not that Rodney was corrupt, but rather that Rodney was
+an instrument of a system with corruption so entrenced that it encouraged
+and fostered corruption as a way of life for law enforcement officers.
+What does it say that in order to run the police force in NSW that one has
+to appoint a person from another country to do the job, and that the first
+major change he implemented was to prevent the Goulburn Police Academy
+from functioning as a manufacturing plant for additional institutionalised
+and generational corruption and nepotism in the police force.
+

bill_me.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,579 @@
+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>
+

bits_per.c

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+
+#include <stdio.h>
+#include <math.h>
+/* This program is made available under the terms of the GNU Copyleft */
+int main(void)
+
+{
+
+char symbols[20];
+double sym;          
+double bits;
+
+/*get the nums*/
+printf("How many symbols are available in this system ?\n");
+//gets(symbols); 
+if (fgets(symbols,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
+
+/*conv to values*/
+sym=atol(symbols);
+
+bits= log10(sym) / (log10(2));
+
+/*shannon's law is expressed in terms of log2(x) hence fiddly conversion*/
+
+printf("This is a radix=%g system with %g bits per symbol.\n\n", sym,
+bits);
+
+
+return 0;
+}
+

blog-index.html

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>Predator's blog index</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="consent.txt">consent.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="gutful.txt">gutful.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="gutting.txt">gutting.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="gutted.txt">gutted.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="hunting.txt">hunting.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="bill_me.txt">bill_me.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="getting_it.txt">getting_it.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="losing_it.txt">losing_it.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="ides.txt">ides.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="march.txt">march.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="foolish.txt">foolish.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="fools.txt">fools.txt</a></li>
+<li><a href="mayday.txt">mayday.txt</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>
+<small> created posthumously by andy -at- cat.org.au, stacy -at- cat.org.au -- Monday June 07 2004 </small>
+</body>
+</html>

channelz.c

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+#include <stdio.h>
+#include <math.h>
+int main(void)
+
+{
+char sn_ratio[20];
+float ratio ; 
+/*ratio is the sn_r expressed as an actual ratio, not dB */
+char bwidth[20];
+float bandwidth;          
+float channels;
+char chan[20];
+float bits_per_sec;
+float dB;
+
+/*get the nums*/
+printf("How many Hz of bandwidth is available?\n");
+if (fgets(bwidth,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1);}
+printf("What's the signal/noise ratio (NOT in db, eg 30dB=1000) ?\n");
+if (fgets(sn_ratio,20,stdin) == NULL) { exit(1); }
+printf("How many channels exhibit these parameters in your system?\n");
+if (fgets(chan,20,stdin) == NULL)     { exit(1); }
+ 
+/*conv to values*/
+ratio=atoi(sn_ratio);
+bandwidth=atoi(bwidth);
+channels=atoi(chan);
+dB= log10(ratio)*10;
+
+
+printf(" B/W : %f Hz , SNR : %f dB\n\n",bandwidth, dB);
+
+/*shannon's law is expressed in terms of log2(x) hence fiddly conversion*/
+
+bits_per_sec=  (log10(ratio +1) /  log10 (2)) * bandwidth;
+ 
+printf("Total bits per second per channel is %.2f bps\n\n", bits_per_sec);
+printf("Total throughput for combined channels is %.2f kbps \n",
+((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024) );
+printf("which is equal to %.2f Megabits/sec \n",
+(((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024)/1024));
+printf("which is equal to %.2f Megabytes/sec \n",
+(((bits_per_sec * channels)/1024)/1024)/8);
+
+
+return 0;
+}
+

consent.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
+File: consent.txt
+Cont: (pre)venting one's spleen : fine art of consent and legal obfuscation 
+Date: 18 Nov 2003
+
+
+If you take your top off and feel your belly below the left lower margin
+of your rib cage, you won't feel anything much, but that's because you're
+probably normal. I can, and I'm a bit curious about it.  I normally sleep
+face down with a forearm across my abdomen, and of late, stuff has been
+moving about inside my guts when I do this, to accommodate a change. This
+is 'cos my spleen has become large and relatively rigid, taking up more
+room than is normally allocated to it, a condition known by a word which
+rolls delightfully off the tongue - splenomegaly.  I knew that's what it
+was called, 'cos when, years ago, I did honours and (deliberately) became
+acquainted with cytomegalovirus III (which is present in about 90% of the
+human city dwelling population, and has called me home for about 20 years)
+splenomegaly was one of the listed symptoms of active CMV infection. CMV
+usually does fuck-all as long as you're not immunosuppressed or a neonate,
+in which case it raises all kinds of hell. I sure as shit don't feel
+immunosuppressed and am exhibiting none of the signs associated with that
+state (like, being sick all the time). So what's going on?
+
+Spleens (a few people have more than one, some are born without them) are
+the centrepiece of your lymphoid system, wherein is trained an
+astoundingly complex army of highly specific, molecular recognition
+capable, cellular attack dogs. Spleens are connected to the lymph nodes
+(most people call 'em glands, such as the ones in your neck, armpits and
+groin which swell up when you're sick) via specialised lymphatic plumbing
+wherein these attack dogs (lymphocytes) roam in search of specific things
+to kill. You can live without a spleen but you tend to be an easier target
+for massive bacterial infection if you lack one.
+
+I waddled off to retrieve me ol' Merck Manual (any time you're feeling
+hypochondriacal, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK) and had a gawk at the shitlist of
+conditions associated with splenomegaly. The 'Manual is best read when
+you're in perfect health, since it's pretty depressing if you're not. The
+list is extensive and distasteful. It includes EBV (gives you glandular
+fever, close viral rello of CMV). CMV (hello old friend, hope it's you).
+Polycythemia Vera (broken erythropoiesis leading to too many red cells in
+the blood, the spleen has to expand to provide sufficient resources to
+destroy 'em). HTLV-3 (which is what they used to call HIV before they
+realised HIV was an RNA retrovirus). Wilson's disease (inherited disorder
+of copper metabolism). Lymphoma (malignant cancer of the lymph system,
+ooh, yummie). Spleens also enlarge for other reasons... sarcoidosis
+(nobody really knows what causes this), chronic parasitisation,
+spherocytosis, sickle cell anemia, kinks in their associated vasculature.
+Various bone marrow fibroses which, on account of their preventing
+erythrocyte synthesis, can also provoke the spleen to start making these
+cells instead, but spleens aren't very good at it and tend to release
+erythrocytes before they're really ready to do their job. With the
+exception of CMV, all of these things are probably far too exciting to
+apply to me.
+
+So... what's doing it?
+
+I arranged to go and have a full blood count, electrolyte analysis, and
+hepatic function test. The analytical processing used in haematology is
+heir to knowledge won by humans struggling to understand chemistry and
+biochemistry over a period of centuries, but nowadays is mostly automated,
+so it's pretty simple, you just pop along, give 'em a few mL of venous
+claret (it's always encourgaging that they send it off to the lab in a bag
+prominently labelled `Biohazard') and wait for the results to come back.
+Inbetweentimes, machines separate your blood into several different
+components, humans peer intently at the nature of the isolates, and ponder
+upon wether or not your metabolism is broken in some significant way.
+ 
+I got the sheet back a couple of days later and according to it I am,
+haematologically speaking, very reassuringly boring, within expected range
+for pretty much everything. For a guy who does little exercise, I am
+stuffed full of haemoglobin. The things I wanted to know are all there -
+specifically, lymphocyte and erythrocyte counts and morphology are
+goodish. I'm not gonna turn into a life support system for a load of
+tumors just yet (that'll happen later when the mesothelioma starts).
+
+This test ruled out a lot of things, but still doesn't tell me anything
+about why this is idiopathic splenic bloat is happening.  The final bit of
+interrogation will be an abdominal CT scan, in a day or two. These use
+X-rays, so in order to make oneself more radiopaque, one is required to
+selectively stuff oneself with heavy atoms in advance of the scan. One
+gobbles down a load of barium sulfate the night before (I know all about
+that stuff from my Merck Index - same publisher as the Merck Manual,
+different topic) to make one's intestines less transparent to the incoming
+electromagnetic rays. On the morning of the scan, though, they inject you
+with ... well ... something.
+
+The consent form doesn't say exactly what it is with which one is going to
+be injected. It mentions that the stuff which will be injected into you is
+a radiopaquing agent, implying it's a vasculature contrast medium, and
+alludes that the material contains iodine (makes sense, iodine's a heavy
+atom, the sort x-rays cannot penetrate) and is non-ionic (exists in an
+uncharged state... so what?). Nowhere, however, is the molecule or mix of
+molecules actually specified. Iodine in its native aqueous diatomic
+state would kill you stone dead if you were injected with it, so
+it obviously isn't that. But what is it, exactly? They give an associated
+death rate when using this stuff intravenously as less 1 per 180,000. But
+which stuff? How can I give them informed consent to shoot me up
+with some or other crap if they won't tell me what it is? If they tell me
+what it is, I can investigate its metabolic half-life, LD50 and eventual
+fate perfectly well in the existing literature, and make a decision.
+
+I'd normally go looking in my Martindales 38th pharmacopoea, but opaquing
+agents are not, strictly, pharmaceuticals, so they don't list any, as far
+as I can see. 
+
+The mention of iodine, lower down in the form, is an important giveaway...
+one can whiz off to the Merck Index and directly observe structures of any
+molecules whose names start with io- or iodo-, and grep immediately at the
+bottom of these entries looking for the words `opaquing agent'. This won't
+get all of them (I mean, there's a heap of different ways to iodinate any
+of a squillion different molecules for this purpose) but one can at least
+acquire something like a clue about their probable natures.
+
+It appears most of the ones in this section of the Merck are variations
+on, or oligomers of, 1,3,5-triiodobenzene. Don't get the idea there's
+anything spooky about iodine, one needs it for thyroxine synthesis, and 
+one gets goitred without it, among other things. I think I'm going to be
+shot up with any of iobenguane, iobenzamic acid, iocarmic acid, iocetamic
+acid, iodamide, iodipamide, iodixanol, iodoalphionic acid, iodopyracet,
+ioglycamic acid, iohexol, iomeglamic acid, iopamidol, iopanioic acid,
+iopentol, iophenydylate, iophenoxic acid, metrizamide, metrizoic acid,
+iopromide, iopronic acid, iothalamic acid, iotrolan, ioversol, ioxilan, or
+ipodate. I could sieve these entries by their water and lipid solubility
+to narrow it down to ones likely to stay in the blood rather than be
+incorporated into my cell walls for the next few years.
+
+None of these are radioactive (of course, they just scatter the x-rays,
+they don't emit anything themselves)  and I think I excluded all the ionic
+ones from the list (and who in hell invents these names?!) But which one?
+I got LD50's for mice, rabbits, and just about everything else that moves
+there in the Merck, some of these things are actually moderately poisonous
+(especially if you're an experimental mouse or rabbit) though you'd have
+to shoot a lot more of them up your arm than the equivalent mass of
+diacetylated morpine required to kill a heroin user.
+
+I wonder what percentage of the population in general knows what is meant
+by non-ionic contrast agent anyway? I know what it means, but don't know
+why non-ionisation matters to the procedure.
+
+By signing this form I effectively say to these people, I don't care what
+you're gonna shoot me full of, go right ahead. This is, actually, an
+_uninformed_ consent document, wherein you put your signature on a chunk
+of paper that says that you neither know or care what is going to happen
+in this procedure. If, subsequent to some mishap in the scan, you wanted
+to get up MayneHealth for compensation, and had made the mistake of
+signing this thing, they'd piss their pants laughing you out of court.
+
+And, interestingly, they're right. I actually don't care. So shoot 'em up
+and pass the bremsstrahlung, I wanna know what's goin on in my guts.
+
+
+<predator>
+
+
+
+(the next .txt in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutful.txt)
+
+
+
+
+
+

foolish.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+Still with us? Well. Ok. It's April 21. I go to Melbourne on the 23rd and
+plan to come back on the 29th.
+ 
+There's a bigger rant coming (fools.txt) but this one is the little crumb
+you get to look at instead of a 404 message.
+
+The meaty stuff is: My neck is getting shittier. Bill the Lump invaded my
+left jugular vein about a week ago, blocking it. If he'd invaded the
+carotid I'd be stroked out, a dribbling veggie. I'm reasonably freaked out
+about this. The axe is falling. So I'm planning my end mode. I want
+control over it.
+
+If you have anything terribly important to ask me about anything now might
+be good time. The chance might not remain. Heavy epistemological and
+philosophical questions are OK as are others.
+
+<predator>
+
+Oh, yeah. I just added this today, May 1. fools.txt is nearly done. Some
+of you need to relax, the logs tell me there's people hitting apache every
+few hours and shit. Patience, Neo. The answers are coming. 8-)

getlaid.html

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
+<html>
+<head>
+   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<center>
+<li>
+<b><u><font size=+2><font color="#FF0000">Getting Laid :</font><font
+color="#000000">
+acquiring your own large, fast data pipe.</font></font></u></b><br>
+<BR></li></center>
+
+<ul>
+<center>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Do you <font color="#000000">really </font>need to get (data
+pipe) laid?</font><br>
+<BR></li></center>
+
+<center>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Problems getting laid commercially</font><br>
+<BR></li></center>
+
+<center>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>How to get laid on the cheap</font><br>
+<BR></li></center>
+
+<center>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Cat@lyst - helping the community get laid in
+Sydney</font></li></center>
+
+<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;
+<p>&nbsp;<font size=+2></font>
+<center>
+<p><a href="getlaid2.html">next</a></center>
+
+<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;
+<br><font size=+4></font>&nbsp;</ul>
+
+</body>
+</html>

getlaid2.html

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
+<html>
+<head>
+   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<center>
+<h4>
+<u><font size=+2>Do you <font color="#CC0000">really</font> need to get
+laid?</font></u></h2></center>
+<font size=+2>If you want to do the following, it helps to get laid
+-</font>
+<ul>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Run any kind of server</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Take more concurrent hits with less lag</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Video streaming / other bandwidth intensive
+tasks</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Provide connectivity for multiple dumb boxes</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Host content<font color="#990000"> unpalatable to powerful
+organisations</font></font></li>
+</ul>
+
+<center><a href="getlaid.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid3.html">next</a></center>
+
+</body>
+</html>

getlaid3.html

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
+<html>
+<head>
+   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<center><b><u><font size=+3>Problems getting laid
+commercially</font></u></b></center>
+
+<ul>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Insistence on use of proprietary operating syste<b><font
+color="#000000">ms</font></b></font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>&nbsp;(un) Fair Use Policies : no servers, few
+guarantees</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>High Price (per connect/MB/hr/port; more for
+hi-speed)</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Bandwidth asymmetry - as if the Internet =
+television</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Won't do `weird' stuff: dialup, ISDN, cable, ADSL
+only</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Policy to not connect to some buildings (eg:
+ours)</font></li>
+
+<br>&nbsp;
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Fast data pipe rollout didn't go everywhere</font></li>
+
+<p><br>
+<center>
+<p><a href="getlaid2.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid4.html">next</a></center>
+</ul>
+
+</body>
+</html>

getlaid4.html

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
+<html>
+<head>
+   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<center><b><u><font size=+4>Reclaiming the bandwidth</font></u></b>
+<br><b><font color="#CC0000"><font size=+2>(getting laid on the cheap)</font></font></b></center>
+<font color="#CC0000"><font size=+2></font></font>
+<ul>
+<li>
+<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Parallel several phone lines
+(BSD/Linux;
+33kbps each)</font></font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Co-opt/bribe a neighbor; install
+cable,
+share use</font></font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Take HDD/CD-RW, move to nearby fast
+fat pipe :-)</font></font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>Packet radio (need a license, limited
+to 9600bps)</font></font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font color="#000000"><font size=+2>SlyNet - roll out your own
+clandestine
+wires</font></font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font color="#009900"><font size=+3>Packet microwave at 2.425GHz :
+2-10Mbps.</font></font></li>
+</ul>
+<font color="#009900"><font size=+2></font></font>
+<center>
+<p><br><font color="#000000"><a href="getlaid3.html">back&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+<a href="getlaid5.html">next</a></font></center>
+
+</body>
+</html>

getlaid5.html

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
+<html>
+<head>
+   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.72 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.14-5.0 i586) [Netscape]">
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<center><b><u><font size=+3>Reclaiming the bandwidth at
+2.425GHz</font></u></b></center>
+
+<ul>
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Achievable with old, free or relatively cheap junk&nbsp;<br>
+(diskless 486-33s, D.I.Y. aerials, ISA WaveLan cards)</font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font size=+2>No radio licensing required (low power, 0.1 Watt)</font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Well supported by Linux; very configurable</font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Usable with line of sight over several km</font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Some interference from rain and domestic
+appliances</font><br>
+<BR></li>
+
+<li>
+<font size=+2>Tiny lag (&lt;3ms), big throughput&nbsp;
+(megabit/sec).</font></li>
+</ul>
+
+<center><a href="getlaid4.html">back&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="getlaid6.html">next</a></center>
+
+</body>
+</html>

getting_it.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,735 @@
+File: getting_it.txt
+Cont: Pred's friendly metastasis. Reality nibbles gently. What the fuck'll
+I do now?
+
+
+I can't remember what it was which provoked this memory. In 1993 I was
+doing the practical component of the TAFE explosives course. This was
+where I held my first old, sweaty (the nitroglycerin had started to sweat
+its way out of the cartridge), stick of AN60 gelignite, which we were
+gonna condemn to death by laying it down in the quarry and torching it in
+puddle of diesel. A long way away from where we would observe it.
+
+It's been a long time since I've had that creeping, prickly feeling of
+fear that accompanied the realisation that the nitroglycerin was migrating
+across the skin of my fingers and I'd have a fucker of a headache later,
+since nitro' is a potent vasodilator as well as a vicious explosive. It's
+the cold grey feeling of discovering you're being infiltrated by something
+malevolent, but are powerless to prevent it. Dropping old AN60 from any
+height is a good way to become dead fast. I couldn't let it go in any
+manner other than was required by the disposal protocol. I could feel the
+explosive oil on my fingertips. Yes, I did indeed get a fucker of a
+headache later. I have never handled NG since, preferring the nitrated
+pentaerythritols and the salami-like sausages, thick as your arm, of 3151
+PowerGel.
+
+Whatever it was, it came to me while I was headding up to the doctor's
+office via the elevator. Maybe the hydraulic oil of the elevator and the
+NG smell the same.
+
+The redheaded flautist, who kindly donated me a pair of khaki pants before
+departing for the apple isle (these were the genuine ADI item, too, not
+some imitation low-durability crap from a chinese sweatshop), has me under
+a momentary vow of monogamy. I mentioned to her after saying I'd cop this
+for about a month at most, that since my time is short and I'm grabbing
+most things offered to me, that if any carnal offers came up in her
+absence I'd probably say yes. She's sounding resigned to my stance, saying
+unconvincedly that I should just do what I have to do, but I said that
+while we're in the loop, she can negotiate with me about what else we get
+up to. She told me to just do what I had to do and tell her a story when
+she came back. Wow. This is the same person who without a moment's thought
+just walked into the geek room and offered to shag me a few weeks ago. And
+we still haven't, though we've been pretty close. I think she's right -
+it's gone beyond simply fucking, we're getting to know each other so it's
+no longer the straight proteinaceous exchange one can get away with under
+the blanket of anonymity which comes from barely knowing each other.
+
+I figure we've got the pathogens and pregnancy aspects under control, so
+it comes down to how vulnerable her ego is to the percieved threat of
+anyone else who shags me, whom she would consider as a superior or
+competitor, or the assumption that I would, or even could, (I'll phrase
+this indelicately for maximum effect) fuck her cheaply and forget her, and
+I'm sure as hell not about to do that. But then, maybe that's why she
+offered to shag me, from her point of view - I'm disposable. Fair's fair.
+
+I dropped her at the airport and rode to the doctor's surgery in Kogarah.
+I noticed later her blood on the front of the khakis (and they're not
+AusCam so the blood contrasted darkly against the green drill fabric, but
+ah, there was nothing else to wear). So did the doctors. I would expect
+they'd have an eye for blood.
+
+I had a chat to Aslan _and_ Cozzi, the dudes who spent a few hours playing
+about in my guts back in Nov. Cozzi, who resected my cancerous chunk o'
+lymph nodality out of my retroperitoneal area, had a look at the scar,
+which has healed well. If I have to complain, it could only be because the
+scar's fucked up my ol' six pack, even though I never did any work to
+obtain either of them. I asked 'em about the homicidal maniac incubating
+itself in my neck. They're gonna pass the job to his mate at Randwick and
+he will probably opt to chop it out. I am glad I can rely on my previous
+tactical slash merchants to be of the opinion that we should slash first,
+ask questions later. Okay okay, de Sousa reckons I'm fucked anyhow and I
+mostly agree with him, but for reasons mainly related to the need to
+support the idea that I've got some sort of a chance (and that I want a
+scar I can wear in public for maximum gratuitous egotistical street cred
+without freezing my arse off in winter), I'm not going down without a
+fight. Finally, someone has the clue. So I see the professorial dude in
+Randwick on the 19th. Arrr... precious days elapse, during which time Bill
+feeds on my ichor, presumably preparing to launch cytological tentacles
+into the important adjacent infrastructure which keeps me alive... little
+things like oh, you know, my carotid fuckin' artery. I told 'em I'd been
+reading the scientific literature and that it was my opinion that the more
+I read about this creeping doom the less I liked it, and frankly the odds
+sucked. They said there wasn't much they could do about that. Looks like
+medicine is still DIY to some extent these days.
+
+So I'm also off to see Fluhrer on the 13th about some lipopolysaccharides
+from strep pyrogenes and oh, what was the other one.. serratia marcassens.
+If we fail to provoke massive immune response to this thing and its
+invisible buddies by stuffing a few hundred nanograms of immunogenic crap
+into it, we'll chop it out afterwards.
+
+
+It's been a good week for scavenging, but it usually is in the couple of
+weeks after Christmasturbation, since all the perfectly good old stuff
+gets tossed to make way for more perfectly good new stuff.
+
+I hauled an _astounding_ bit of stereo hardware out of a dumpster last
+week, while bicycling breathlessly back from the paint shop adjacent to
+where I went to school as a little kiddie in the mid-late 1970s. It's a
+serious weapon from Sony, will drive 160 watts root mean-square into eight
+ohms, per channel. It has bass enhancement, surround sound and all that
+related digital signal processing accoutrementage of which the Japanese
+are so enamoured, and which English electrical engineers such as NAD have
+correctly held in contempt from the day they built their first amp out of
+thermionic valves nearly a century ago.  I still haven't figured out how
+to program the graphic equaliser, and have not figured out exactly what
+much of the rest of it even does.
+
+It doesn't have a damned left/right balance control on it, but at least
+the volume control is a nice, massy knob with no dead spots. It is very
+spacey to hear in operation. It drives my dumpster-dived (and re-coned)
+Technics SB1950s with the ... well, noticable effortless transparency
+which comes from an amp which is not working very hard to do what it does.
+Liquid sound, man! Excellent, and I don't give a fuck what the snotty
+audiophile set sez about it. Skinny Puppy's messianic `Warlock' poignantly
+flares my nostrils and... I can't quite explain it ... makes the glands at
+the back of my jaw ache (listen to everything after four minutes, ten
+seconds into the fifth track on the Rabies album, at as much volume as you
+can tolerate). I almost have to weep when listening to the rolling,
+oceanic, bass tectonics which underpin the Pet Shop Boys' track Jealousy.
+The savage dog twitches to it while she sleeps on the carpet. I haven't
+wired the surround drivers into it yet. Ahh. Thank you, oh bountiful gods
+of Dumpster.
+ 
+Along with this audio bounty came a toolbox with lots of good tools and
+hardware in it. The tools came up pretty well with a little work involving
+some oil and steel wool. Man, I must have found or scavenged just about
+every tool in the shed by now... everything from fuel pumps to cathode ray
+oscilloscopes. But it's getting crowded. I've started throwing out stuff
+that I have accumulated there which had a low probability of my using it
+in the next two years. I'm glad of the space.
+
+I mention the paint shop because adjacent to it is the primary school
+where I spent the first seven years of forced incarceration in the
+pedagogic monster which has consumed most of my life. In the corner of the
+playground where the carpark of the paint shop abutts, is a large gum
+tree. I planted it in 1977, at the age of six, on a day pouring rain, with
+the then state environment minister, Paul Landa. He died of cancer (are
+you bored yet?) a few years later. It was but a fragile sapling when I
+packed the wet earth around its roots with my clean, small, childish
+hands. It's a BIG tree, now, twenty five years later. The only honest
+state politician I have ever met, Paul said it would grow to be so, but I
+guess he knew he could be sure in his opinion. It makes me smile to see
+kids eat lunch under it.
+
+I am cycling more, and the lungs are obviously awaking from a long
+slumber.  Geez, there's so much more traffic these days, and more
+noticable when I'm not keeping up with it on the pushie. I got on the
+scales at the veterinarians and they said I am captain to 64.65kg of mass.
+But my memory's odd. I went to use my TheftPOS card and I remembered the
+PIN from three years ago, which it duly rejected.
+
+I went down to the bicycle shop where I got components for my first
+bicycle in the 1980s. It's run now by the son of Ron, who used to run it,
+who was claimed by mesothelioma some years ago. I'm on the hunt for a
+suspension seat post now I'm back on the road.
+ 
+I've also started stability testing of my next bit of computing machinery.
+It's a mongrel with a tale worth telling. I dragged the chassis (where oh
+where do the side panels always go?) in from the roadside last year. The
+power supply was a cat.org.au item but was broken since someone dropped it
+so hard its circuit board broke on the mounting lugs - I fixed this, and
+also soldered in a nice IEC-III noise suppression socket... maybe I'll put
+in some MOVs later for spike quenching. I found the cdrom drive on the
+roadside too, a couple of years ago. The RAM is cat.org.au's and I'm
+testing that too. The Pentium-III CPU came from a mobo felled by errant
+onboard electrolytic power capacitor explosion (irremediable, sadly, since
+the resulting short blew some of the adjacent regs) and scavenged from
+NDARC by Jude Hungerford, who was *sure* it would be useful for something
+(yep - a CPU is a Good Thing).
+
+I had to fling the broken GX-150 mobo; the actual motherboard is one from
+XML, who said it `had problems', and I figured them out : it was doing
+segmentation faults mainly 'cos the jumpering and BIOS settings were
+changing the core/bus ratio to something faster than the processor could
+handle (and it helped to put a heatsink on the south bridge too) so it'd
+just seg-fault itself to death a few minutes after boot. So it's in the
+other room, doing memory tests, running lots of concurrent maps of its own
+process table entries, running a GUI and factoring huge prime numbers.
+It's doing about 733MHz, which is a bit sluggard by modern glitzo
+standards but is twice as quick as my not-very current Celeron/366
+Robo-608. If it's gonna shit itself I'll know by morning. If not, I'll be
+happy. I am glad when I live on a planet where usable recyclable computing
+hardware, for which free software is also available, adorns the roadsides
+and junk on the living room tables of friends.
+
+The motherboard came my way at Smokering's, the day after I slept in XML's
+bed (and we didn't shag tho we did listen to a lot of Yello which I hadn't
+heard for 15 years and I remembered almost all of it, too). Which was
+before I spent a couple of afternoon hours in the graveyard behind King
+St, Newtown under the huge spreadding fig trees as the sun descended,
+holding Wolfie in my mosquitophilic arms and failing to escape the feeling
+that I was surrounded by a historical example of my next big change in
+domicile - holes in the ground with slabs on top.
+
+---
+
+I spent some of today in the back shed with my shirt off, doing the case
+metalwork for this Pentium-III machine I'm putting together, which I'm
+happy to say spent all night testing itself (a knoppix 2.4.20-xfs kernel,
+several instances of top -d0, memtest, a gui, and about thirty
+factorisations of large prime numbers - a considerable load average) and
+didn't skip a beat. I think, ladeez-an-ginnulmen, we have a winner. The
+PCI bus works too, which i can't say was ever the case for the '608.
+
+I love metalwork. I would have elected to do it as a full subject in
+highschool but I was considered too bright for that, which strikes me as a
+decision diagnostic of shameful disdain for the great engineering arts of
+metallurgical cuttin'n'weldin'n'drillin'n'foldin, and I've sure as hell
+done more useful things with my limited metalwork skills than I have with
+anything I ever learned in, say, higher school certificate Modern History.
+It's summer and the back shed (where all the real work happens) is hot and
+poorly ventilated even with the exhaust fan on and the door open.
+
+I did the sheet steel work with aviation cutters and a hacksaw (this was
+an old ATX tower cover, so pretty easy to retrofit onto a smaller box).
+The other case plate came from the aluminium chassis of an obsoleted
+19-inch rackmount Digital DECserver MX-200 hub from 1992. I hate wasting
+aluminium sheet so I carved it up with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool, and now
+it's the side casing of my next machine. Also scored some mains
+noise-suppressors out of the ol' DEC item. Cool.
+
+Cuttin' metal requires manual effort. Sweat poured off me, I stank of
+burnt cutting lubricant (stuff you put on the blades to make 'em glide
+through the cut metal edges more easily) and that rusty tang from the
+reaction between sweat and freshly cut iron filings. The aluminium job was
+too big for the bench vise so I cradled it in my lap with my left arm and
+used my right hand to guide the jigsaw, which has a customised blade in it
+which I tooled down with a grinder a year ago for precisely these sorts of
+jobs.
+
+It was fast work, and hot alloy shavings rained off the smoking, snarlin'
+blade onto my belly and thighs but aluminium cools fast (low specific
+heat) and I knew I wouldn't be burned. Fuck this new belly button of mine,
+though. My previous belly button, protruding slightly as it did, didn't
+catch metal shavings with anything like the amazing efficiency of this new
+one, and the shavings are sharp, hard to get, and being aluminium won't be
+persuaded out with a magnet. I tried to get 'em with the long-nose pliers;
+that didn't work, and I eventually used a hose. Bugger. If I sound to you
+like the sort of person who will find anything to complain about, it's
+obviously 'cos you've never had alloy shavings stuck in your natal scar -
+they're a fuck of a lot more of a nuisance than generic bellybutton fluff.
+
+
+Normal mundanity - the thing I continue to live for - is biting again. I'm
+gonna go back tomorrow and paint the place I was gonna paint in November
+but didn't 'cos I got sick. I'm not looking forward to it since my
+destestable sister has made the kitchen messy and smelly again. Fuck I
+hate, hate, hate cigarettes and the arseholes who smoke them near me. Even
+her vacuum cleaner's exhaust stinks of fag ash.
+
+------
+
+
+Some dudes I meet are telling me about things I consider to be possibly
+dodgy cures. The present one about which I've been zealously enthused to
+is laetrile, also known as amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside from almonds,
+which is supposed to destroy cancers. Some people call this stuff vitamin
+B17, which is just silly since it sure as hell isn't a vitamin, (tho if
+you were going to call it a vitamin, it'd be right at home in the motley
+molecular crew which comprises the B's, nomenclaturally speaking) as far
+as I can tell, it's not even an enzymatic cofactor anywhere in mammalian
+biochemistry.
+
+Laetrile's not any good as an antineoplastic according to my Dictionary of
+Plant Toxins (but that's a book about plant poisons, not about oncology),
+nor is it any good for this according to my Merck Index. These two tomes
+haven't jerked me around before, but the Merck's description struck me as
+rather unusually ambivalent in its phrasing - I've never heard of The
+Merck putting in an entry for a "putative synthesis". Why anyone'd bother
+anyway eludes me - plants *always* get the chirality right.
+
+According to the Merck, the last paper to seriously take the piss out of
+laetrile was written in 1982 before whoever wrote it could have had a clue
+about what we know now about enzymes in human metabolism. According to
+quackwatch there's been a lot of hostile commentry on the material in the
+last 20 years. Dudes have gone to gaol for selling it.
+
+I'm thinking maybe what I am up against here is anecdotal evidence
+unquantified, and amplified, through the meme-propagating power of the
+internet, and exposed to people who are desperate for something to believe
+in since they believe (correctly) they're gonna die without some or other
+cure... natch, the med industry has its own agendas: if cancers were all
+easily cured, nobody'd make any bucks out of oncology, chemotherapy or all
+the other fun things we people in Club Metastasis live to enjoy for a
+while.
+
+
+
+"Don'tcha get a fuckin' chokko when you
+ watch one of those docos about
+ those diseases which mean you're born with flippers?
+
+ You're feeling sorta well and, next thing you know
+ it's the Peter McCallum,
+ for the haircut they give you without clippers."
+
+TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing, Do Not Manufacture
+
+
+I'm never one to dismiss the observations of thousands of ordinary people.
+Time to crank up that ancient part of my head into which I hammered
+organic chemistry into years ago, and make a judgement for myself.
+
+
+"Worf, shields up, activate bullshit filters!" 
+-something Picard never said.
+
+Never done chemistry? Here goes. Don't be afraid, most of organic
+chemistry is just a bunch of exercises in electron-pushing and accounting
+for it by equivalent amounts of proton theft. They expand this paradigm
+into a whole degree at university but it more or less boils down to this:
+electrons are the negative things which get pushed around wires
+(electron-ics) and are also the material out of which chemical bonds are
+made between atoms. A proton is a hydrogen atom without an electron,
+protons are positive. Other atoms have more protons in them and need more
+electrons to keep 'em electrically balanced (atoms like it when
+electrons=protons). Protons repel each other and will rip electrons off
+other things to form chemical bonds to them.
+
+Electrons repel each other and like to go where protons are not already
+shrouded with too many electrons... so you can shove electrons in one
+place in a molecule (molecule=group of atoms glued together with
+electrons) and the electrons'll rearrange to accommodate this, which has
+consequences for the end structure of the molecule, which will either bond
+to something new, throw something away, or rearrange itself to stash the
+electron someplace within (frequently this creates a negative ion). You
+can shove protons in and much the same, but opposite sorts of things will
+happen. So much for lay terminology, let's chow down.
+
+Laetrile is two hexose sugar molecules glyco-bonded to each other, in this
+case, one of them is bonded via one of its oxygen atoms to a carbon atom;
+this last carbon atom is also bonded to a benzene ring (the -Ph below), a
+proton (the H atom) and a nitrile group (which people who haven't done any
+chem tend to call a cyanide group, but really, it is a nitrile group -
+cyanide's an ion, the nitrile group ain't - big behavioural difference).
+
+  glucose
+   |                    
+  mannose-O     C%N     <-- nitrile
+           \   /  
+             C 
+           /   \ 
+          H     Ph       <--- benzene ring
+
+The chemically astute will, if they ignore the nitrile (CN thing) in the
+top right for a while, see in the ugly ASCII-art above the residue of a
+benzaldehyde precursor (Ph-CHO) in the ether bond to the mannose.
+Benzaldehyde is the stuff they sell as bitter almond essence in
+supermarkets and you'll see a picture of it in a sec when we pull this
+stuff apart. Maybe we'd be better off rotating our heads 90 degrees
+anticlockwise and calling this thing the glucose-mannose ether of
+phenylacetonitrile, but maybe not. Fuck it. Who cares? IUPAC does but
+chemical nomenclature's enough of a shit already. One name'll do.
+
+The exact nature of the sugar molecules don't matter especially, they're
+the metabolically profitable `bait' that the cell is attracted to... the
+cell enzymatically drags larger sugar molecules into itself for processing
+because they're energetically worth it.  Now, if tumors preferentially
+metabolise sugars like glucose (but there's a LOT of different sugars in
+biochemistry... mannose, lactose, fructose, maltose, erythrose, threose,
+trehalose, ribose, rhamnose, just to name a few from memory) 'cos their
+protein and lipid metabolism is somewhat broken, then it makes sense that
+this stuff gets processed preferentially by tumor cells, IF laetrile is in
+fact metabolised by tumor cells at all - the enzymes which cleave sugars
+tend to be fairly picky about what they choose to cleave.
+
+Now we have to think about what happens when a cell tries to eat it.
+
+First it'd rip off the glucose and use that for the usual glycolysis
+pathway into the Krebs cycle, leaving the mannose stuck by an ether bond
+(R-O-R') to the phenylacetonitrile, probably floatin' around in the
+cytosol someplace.
+
+Now my chem's a bit rusty, but if, enzymatically (which is more or less
+organic-chemist-speak for magic, which is what biochemists know enzymes do
+everywhere, all the time), a cell tries to rip off and metabolise that
+remaining sugar by pushin' an electron into that ether bond (tricky -
+ethers are pretty inert) I'd expect it'd leave a phenylacetonitrile
+radical like so:
+
+   O.
+   |
+Ph-C-C%N
+   |
+   H
+
+the electron (represented by the lone . ) either has to attract something
+electrophilic to bond to, or the electron has to go someplace locally. 
+
+The benzo (Ph-) is already stuffed to the gills with these things in its
+aromatic bond structure and is just gonna electrostatically tell the
+electron to go away; the single bond to the proton can't accept any more
+either, and the nitrile's fairly dripping with electrons already. The
+radical is unstable but it happens that the oxygen wants to keep that lone
+electron to itself, to get the sort of double bond it needs to fill its
+outer octet... and oxygen being oxygen (the electronegativity rant can
+come another day), it's gonna be pretty forceful about getting it.
+
+So that electron stays right there on the oxy and forces its probability
+distribution cloud onto the nearest other thing electrophilic it can bond
+to, which is the central tetrahedral carbon. The single bond between the
+central carbon and the singly-bonded oxy atom is joined by another single
+bond, and (twang!) we get a nice C=O double bond.
+
+[A probability distribution cloud is the best way to think of an electron;
+because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't really say
+exactly where an electron is, but you can describe the space of where it
+is most likely to be in a given slice of time. Some of these clouds have
+some funny shapes... go look up electron orbitals if you're bored.]
+
+This'll push an electron off the central carbon, onto whatever can soak it
+up (whatever's the most electrophilic now that the carbon's stuffed with
+one more electron than it can usually take) so the radical will degrade to
+benzaldehyde and a cyanide radical (a nitrile group with a lone electron
+on its carbon atom, which happens to make the whole nitrile electrically
+negative, at which point we can refer to it as a cyanide ion):
+
+
+--->
+
+
+
+   H
+   |
+Ph-C            -C%N   
+    "O
+
+benzaldehyde   cyanide 
+ molecule       ion
+
+Benzaldehyde tends to get oxidised to benzoic acid fairly quickly in air,
+and I guess the same'd happen in oxygenated cells, too, though I can't see
+how it could chew up very much of the cell's available oxygen. It would be
+bad news for any marginal cell which tried to metabolise this stuff,
+especially anything not well oxygenated due to poor vasculature (as tumors
+tend to be), since not only has it had much of its oxygen chewed up by
+this sudden appearance of something which likes to be oxidised
+(consequently the cell momentarilty can't run its respiratory reactions by
+shovin' electrons onto the normally available oxygen, which would in the
+usual circumstances subsequently steal a couple of protons to form water).
+But you'd still need to eat a LOT of benzaldehyde or its dietary
+precursors to have this effect.
+
+The real headshot for the cell is that the immediately available cyanide
+ion has an innate ability to irreversibly bind to components of, and thus
+shut down, the cellular electron transport chain. A cell trying to
+metabolise this stuff is gonna have a hard, very short life if it can't
+accommodate these two problems somehow. Hmmm. I dunno what benzoic acid's
+gonna do for the cell's pH either.. probably not much, it's a very weak
+acid.
+
+Ok, so chewing laetrile as a plausible generalised cytotoxic agent passes
+my chemical mechanism sanity check. But. But! It immediately occurs to me
+that eating this stuff is just gonna protonate the nitrile group in the
+low pH environment of my gut (contains HCl, so, uh, about pH=3, about
+10000 times more acidic, that is, more prone to donate protons to anything
+nearby, than is water, with pH=7) and give me low-grade cyanide poisoning,
+which is probably why the almond plant makes the stuff: eat enough of its
+seeds and you'll die and be no further threat to its species. At this pH
+disaccharides tend to hydrolyse in the gut anyway, leaving me with
+phenylacetonitrile derivatives floating around in my gut too, even if the
+nitrile doesn't come off and form cyanide.
+
+Also - why my other cells wouldn't also try and metabolise the stuff, and
+die trying too, eludes me.... maybe they do but can deal with the damage
+and tumors lack some of the enzymes which normal cells use to cope with
+damage to their electron transport chain. I don't really know. Someone
+mentioned something about mitochondrial rhodanese sulfurtransferase
+failure in tumor cells so they can't turn the CN into thiocyanide and
+excrete it, so they die. I've never heard of rhodanese and it's not in my
+copy of Lehninger, nor my old copy of Stryer, but it's known about at
+EMBL.
+
+
+"Cancer cells, tax accountancy - the ways we all are failing."
+ 
+-TISM "This Morning I Had Work To Do" - from the Best Off compilation
+
+
+Time to start chewin' bitter almonds, then? Oh, fuck it, I should face it,
+I've already turned into a pill-poppin' freak. Se, B-vitamins, garlic
+(well, that's not a pill but it's not something I'm eating because I like
+eating it, it's for allyl compounds), A, E. I can't say `it cant hurt' to
+take these things, 'cos cyanogenic glycosides *can* hurt. But then so does
+Se, and so does retinoic acid, if you eat enough of them, and they're
+normal parts of your metabolism.
+
+So now I've gotta go back to the people who swear the stuff'll cure me,
+and they're gonna ask me if I've investigated their amazing wonder cure,
+and I will tell them yes, I have - but not with the same conclusions as
+they have. It's plausible but I can't say I'm convinced yet. But whaddo I
+know. It's on the internet so it must be true, right? 8-)
+
+Maybe they'll say, oh, ok, go ahead and ignore our advice, see if we care
+if you die. It's only half as insane as shooting up yer metastasis with
+dead microbial coats. Which is what I'm investigating day after tomorrow.
+But I'm doing a lot of things... I'm altering my biochemistry in a lot of
+ways. I am a statistical sample size of one. If I don't die of this stuff
+my survival's not going to be attributable to a single thing.
+
+Whatever laetrile does, it's not gonna provoke a long term immunological
+reaction anyway, which is why I'm going for the lipopolysaccharides. Can I
+think of a way a population of tumor cells could adapt to low dosages of
+cyanide? Yes. One or more of them will somehow exhibit a tolerance (why
+*should* a tumor not make rhodanese?) and will then go on to be the
+progenitor cells which make future tumors. The same way any tumor deals
+with any chemotherapeutic agent, synthetic or not.
+
+
+
+
+Jan 12
+
+I was listening to Regurgitator's Unit album today, on this thumpin' amp I
+pulled out of the dumpster last week, and it has a great, great track on
+it. Thank fuck there's musicians somewhere with their heads screwed on
+properly.
+
+
+ All that I am and all I'll ever be
+ is a brain in a body.
+ And all that I know and all I'll ever see
+ is the real things around me.
+
+ All I've heard, and it's true - 
+ there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
+ I don't see a point to this place.
+ But I'm happy to be floating in space.
+
+ I won't mind if you're holding my hand 
+ and life seems sublime when you don't understand 
+ that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
+ if we all die away and we never come back again.
+
+ All that I am and all I'll ever be
+ is a brain in a body 
+ I live till I die, then rot away
+ it's a beautiful story.
+
+ All I've heard, and it's true - 
+ there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
+ I don't see a point to this place.
+ I'm happy to be floating in outer space.
+
+ I won't mind if you're holding my hand 
+ and life seems sublime when you don't understand 
+ that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
+ if we all die away and we never come back again.
+
+
+
+Jan13
+
+Manly Beach, South Steyne. I went out and chatted biochem with Joachim
+Fluhrer, who is unusual for a doctor in that he seems to actually know in
+some detail the sort of cellular biochemistry which one needs to know
+about for tumor processes. It's great to crap on with someone who has a
+clue and isn't afraid to articulate it.
+
+Despite all the stuff I just raved on about above (trust me - this dude
+earned every cent of the $200 he got paid to talk onco-biochem with me for
+an hour) he's not experientially convinced laetrile's especially useful
+either, and he's of the opinion that we should chop Bill out rather than
+inject dead bacterial things into it if someone can remove Bill cleanly
+(which given the CT scans we probably can). He suggested some doses of
+retinoic acid which struck me as outright toxic. Also folate, but that
+makes sense. Bunch of immunomodulatory dietary things. I've bored you with
+enough of this stuff already.
+
+----------
+
+
+Jan 16.
+
+Not that I want you to think I go feeling myself up all the time but I've
+noticed Bill The Neck Lump has shrunk. I'm not kidding myself, it's really
+happened. Now, while this is much better than its previous agenda of
+expanding to devour my whole head, I'm not getting hopeful about it. For
+all I know, next week I'll wake up and there'll be lots of other lumpy
+Bill-equivalents elsewhere. I think maybe what it means is that there's
+tumor cells there (which means there could be others elsewhere), but now
+my major scar is mostly healed up (I notice the scar tissue has started to
+grow its own superfical microvasculature now) and my serum levels of
+growth hormones such as one secretes when one's flesh is traumatised by
+the surgeon's blade have returned to normal, they're not growing under
+their own instructions. Good. I hope they all fuck off and die, even if
+Bill's a pretty convenient sort of lump... I can feel it and gague the
+mood of the tumor, to some extent. For easy-access diagnostic purposes it
+sure beats having one in, say, your prostate gland. Or your brain.
+
+I spent the day debugging my new machine (can't boot off the slave drive,
+so I've swapped it; can't boot knoppix but I think that's the weirdo scsi
+device jamming the autoconfig, so I swapped that too; can't get red colour
+pixels in quake which I think is a bug in the card, not the driver, so I
+took out the Alliance Semiconductor item and slapped in a Tseng ET6000; I
+couldn't get the other sound card recognised, slapped in my old one and it
+worked fine; otherwise it's great) installing another bit of a LAN, moving
+some furniture, and being periodically deafened by the bloody panic alarm
+to which some of the furniture was attached by screws.
+
+Feb's coming around quickly. Back to work. I'm sort of looking forward to
+it. Graham sent me an email asking if I was up for it and I think I am,
+given the way I feel at the moment, which aside from some random gut pain
+is actually pretty good.
+
+
+Jan 17th
+
+Dad dragged home the copy of what my oncologist wrote to my kidney
+chopper-outerer on the 23rd of Dec.
+
+Status:
+-Post nephrectomy, high-risk renal cancer.
+-?Adjuvant therapy
+
+It was his opinion that the lump in my neck was probaby due to
+lymphadenopathy. Which is rather like saying the lump in my neck was due
+to lymph-node lumpiness. Off I go to Goldstein on the 16th, which is the
+day after tomorrow.
+
+Ok. So. Now what? I've got cancer and I've had a few weeks to accommodate
+myself properly to this fact. What am I gonna do now?
+
+Is it better to proceed on the assumption that I will survive this? Maybe
+it is, even if I won't. Among the consequences of that decision would be
+that I could return to my original mundane life and stop documenting it as
+if it mattered to anyone else who would care to read about it. I could get
+on and write about stuff like the things I did last night, which wasn't
+get laid for a change (monogamy to an absent person really is a drag) - it
+was scarier and in some ways, better ...
+
+0) Ate a cheeseburger at the McDollars at Heathcote, while waiting for the
+rest of the Clan to assemble to do the journey down to Port Kembla. This
+was possibly the riskiest thing I did all night. I haven't eaten any of
+their stuff for oh, seven years. It tastes exactly the same as I remember
+it, which means we've probably both degraded equivalently. I sort of don't
+give a fuck now. A friend spent ages searching for a power point to charge
+his phone, found one in the ceiling tiles, and was then accosted by a
+McDroid for charging his fone off it.
+
+1) motorcycle 100km through extreme fog and light drizzle at 120km/h to
+the huge industrial precinct at Port Kembla. I didn't know the way there
+so I was following other Clan vehicles and sped to keep up, but it turns
+out, you can't miss the Port, yellow-white and blue gouts of flame sear
+into the night sky, huge clouds of steam well up from the clanking dark
+shapes dotted with the yellow pinpoints of a thousand sodium lamps,
+scattered like so many miniature suns. When I arrived and unzipped my
+weathersuit I noticed the _stench_of_fear_ wafting out of the pockets of
+warm air held against me for the journey.
+
+2) with about 20 other people, explore the vast, recently mothballed Port
+Kembla Copper Smelter. The fence is a shit, as is the barbed wire. After
+that... not a guard anywhere (and there's a million places to hide).
+Everything's still lit up. Evidently nobody watches the security cameras.
+The huuuuge vent stack, at least 80m tall, sez something about the nasty
+outlet of the plant process - whatever it is they want to waft it over to
+New Zealand. The sulfur-dioxide detectors still work, which is good, since
+that's the hellish toxic gas which comes off copper sulfide when you smelt
+it down to metallic copper...  near Port Pirie in South Australia this
+same gas changed the pH of the surrounding soil so much that it killed
+every tree for miles adjacent to the copper smelter and not a thing grew
+back for 20 years. At 10 parts per million it'll kill you if you breathe
+it. They add the gas to water and sell it as corrosive fuming sulfuric
+acid (hence, lots of stainless steel pipes to guide it around), but there
+wasn't likely to be any here, the plant's been shut for months. We wore
+gloves to stop us from touching anything corrosive, but I suspected if we
+did touch anything corrosive it'd just momentarily pause to eat the gloves
+before getting into the meat below. It's that sort of place. Everything,
+and I mean everything, is covered with warning signs. Funniest danger sign
+of the night:
+
+Entry Prohibited Without Permission From The Acid Technician
+
+Pass the LSD, maaan.
+
+I didn't know what half of it did, it was like being in one HUGE, vastly
+scaled up pair of interoperating enzymes, each designed to do one reaction
+at kilotonne scales:
+
+CuS + O2 -> Cu + SO2
+SO2 + H2O -> H2SO4
+
+Huge crucibles, cranes, hoppers, silos, tanks, motors, analysis and sample
+control laboratories, radioactive materials handling arms, floor after
+floor of steel mesh and I-beams, miles and miles of pipes and conveyors
+and cabling and chain... it just goes on as far as the eye can see. Huge
+rotating kilns (I could fit my hand crossways in the gap between the drive
+gear teeth of these) sit frozen in position with dark slaggy copper
+stalactites hanging off their outlets at 45 degrees to gravity. Below it
+all is a train engine, and tracks, part of the railway via which
+presumably came the ore. I don't know where it gets made into sheet and
+wire and pipe but I guess it'd need to be electrolytically purified first,
+judging by the stalactites, it looks like shit when it comes out of the
+kiln.
+
+It's untouched by graf artists. It must cost 'em a thousand bucks an hour
+just to keep the place lit like this. The whole place looks like you could
+just turn it all on again in a day or two. I pissed off when we spotted a
+lone forklift driver doing the rounds. Experience has taught me not to
+hang around to get busted.
+
+I rode back slower, and slept very well, to be awoken by the sound of a
+chainsaw. I was convinced there was nothing left to cut down in this
+suburb but I am evidently not correct, the people two doors down are
+taking out the ancient paperbark trees in their back yard.
+
+I estimate from being 7.5cm long when it was CT scanned, Bill is not more
+than an inch (2.5cm) in its longest dimension. Hmmm. Pass the
+cheeseburgers.
+
+18 Jan
+
+
+I wonder at times why the Flautist has offered me something she is
+evidently not prepared to give. What good is her provoking a hardon if she
+won't use it? Arr, I'm not one to impose, but it's frustrating. She's been
+accepted to go to Brissie, and I am happy for her. Rural Tassie is,
+according to her report on her time down there, crawling with crazies.
+Maybe I shouldn't go there.
+ 
+Bill The Lump is smaller again. I have to go to some effort to find the
+fuckin' thing now. By the time the interleukin pusher gets to biopsy it
+(will somebody, ANYBODY kindly suck some guts out of this adenopathic
+lump, please?) it'll probably be in hiding, lurking to pop out again
+later. Hmmm. It's 1am, Jan 19th. That's today. They'd better move fast.
+
+
+Next load of screen-searing bilge will be at
+
+http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt 
+
+
+
+<predator>
+

gutful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,603 @@
+File: gutfull.txt
+Cont: the new me, and why I want to be rid of him
+Date: 21, 22, 23 Nov 2003
+
+I owe a lot to the likes of Planck, Fourier, Radon, deMarignac, Roentgen,
+Maxwell and a bunch of other people. Their legacy is the truly astounding
+ability to see through one's bones and their fleshy wrapping, and peruse
+internal workings which you could otherwise not without a big long slash
+through the external plating beforehand. Lensless RF imaging technology
+cannot answer on your behalf the question of wether or not you're prepared
+to see what it can show you, but you can't have everything.
+
+What on earth would the entrail-reading Romans have made of CT-scans and
+NMR?
+
+Haematology, while it can tell you a lot, can't give you an image. So, two
+nights ago, I swilled down an unpalatable beverage of heavy metal sulfate
+and yesterday I took all my clothes off, donned a distinctly Roman
+disposable gown and was fed head-first into an computerised axial
+tomography rig. Which is a huge x-ray machine which takes lots of
+exposures from multiple angles, which represent slices of your body;
+grunty computers take all those slices and, mainly using linear algebra
+with a few layers of other maths on top, build them into human-readable
+images of your internals in cross-section, provided these internals admit
+enough x-rays to be detectable on the other side of the rotating beam
+path (which is why I had to guzzle the astringent white radiopaque slushy 
+I mentioned earlier).
+
+The aforementioned slushy stays in your GI tract and makes your intestines
+show up on the x-ray exposures, but it doesn't make it to your
+circulation, since the compound is deliberately chosen because it doesn't
+dissolve in your gut acids, which is good 'cos soluble barium compounds
+are hellishly toxic. This insolubility is why they also cannulate you and
+punch a load of clear orange liquid into your veins - so these too can be
+made visible to the short-wavelength eye of the machine. I did ultimately
+find out what the contrast medium was - iopamidol - and looked it up in
+the Merck. I'd have to shoot up about four kilos of it before I could be
+expected to die of poisoning, and the molecule is specifically constructed
+to be rapidly excreted by your kidneys.
+
+There's trefoiled IONISING RADIATION HAZARD stickers on the door to the
+room, and the radiologist gazes in on you through a VERY THICK window. You
+lie on a tray, and the tray is fed, under precise machine control, into
+the central tunnel of the CT rig, which is a floor-mounted,
+room-dominating contraption with all its interesting pieces hidden by
+beige plastic cowlings; The first run is to calibrate the machine to your
+particular radiological parameters, the actual scans happen on subsequent
+runs. The machine makes low, quiet humming sounds, inches you back and
+forth at a slow, precise rate, and you can see through the beam aperture
+that something large and heavy is rotating, very accurately, around you,
+but you'd never know it was throwing hard EM at the atoms of your body.
+
+The machine powered down, and like a compact disc in a very large player,
+I was gently ejected.  The radiologist came out and asked me to move my
+penis - prone on my belly, it was evidently obstructing their scans. I had
+no idea it'd be opaque to that part of the spectrum. It's simultaneously
+reassuring and disconcerting to know that they can see so much stuff under
+the flimsy blue gown - but who am I to refuse if someone suggests I shift
+my dick out of the way of a beam of ionising radiation. So I shoved it
+down my leg, then he crammed a few cc's of triiodinated isophthalic acid
+up my arm.
+
+Most people report odd effects when shot up with this stuff. I did. My
+arsehole felt very hot for a few seconds, then the back of my throat felt
+hot, then I swore I could smell some sort of burnt, bleachy stink. With my
+guts rendered sufficiently visible to this anchored, domesticated version
+of Superman's eyeballs, the radiologist left the room and the machine
+inhaled me again.
+ 
+Then the scan started. The machine tells you to breathe in and hold your
+breath (bzzz, scans are happening), then breathe out, but it stops
+there... maybe programmers could remember to change this to something
+which instructs the scanee to breathe normally. This repeats itself a few
+times while the machine gets lots of juicy images and you turn anoxic in
+the belief that you have to have empty lungs for no apparent reason, and
+eventually give up and breathe like you normally would anyway.
+
+The bloke comes in and says, "We're gonna scan you again, and pay
+particular attention to your left kidney." Which it immediately occurs to
+me they wouldn't do if everything was normal and boring. Uh-oh. So they
+scan that a couple of times. Then he comes in and sends me off down the
+corridor to an hilarious old lady in a darkened room, who asks me to lie
+down and take my gown off, squirts a load of imaging gel on my gut and
+then manually moves an ultrasound probe around on my left flank. 
+
+It felt a bit ticklish, but is way more interrogatory than your average
+massage. She did this for a LONG time, and got lots of snaps, but didn't
+say anything (and I can't see anything on the screen from where I am).
+Then she passed me a towel to wipe the goop off, and told me to go and put
+my clothes back on.
+
+So, clad again in my usual stuff, I returned to the outside world. I got
+the report later that day, shortly before they told me to get myself down
+to the nuclear magnetic resonance imaging crew in Kogarah. Which I did. I
+read the CT scanner's report in their waiting room. Yatta yatta neoplasm,
+renal in origin, yatta yatta kidneys still working, blah blah needs more
+investigation. I know enough anatomy and med-lingo to understand what
+they're talking about. I have cancer. 
+
+I've met the enemy, and it is me. Well, it is _of_ me, anyway. It isn't me
+in the sense that it isn't a chunk of cells doing stuff I would like them
+to do, and it isn't me in the sense that none of it should be there
+according to one's embryological body plan. It is me in that it's
+genetically full o' my code, it is me in the sense that my immune system
+hasn't identified it as a targetable impostor, hence the normal lymphocyte
+count. Hey, maybe I can make money off it, license it and flog it as a
+cell line to mol bio companies, once they chop it out? I'm gonna need to,
+getting this fucker out is gonna cost me a pile of bux I don't have.
+Tumors are immortal, and a sample of this stuff will potentially outlast
+me. Enduring fame, in an Eppendorff tube. 
+
+Collectively, the DNA in our cells take millions of nucleotidyl insults
+every day, but most of them either occur where they don't matter, or are
+repaired, or produce cells which commit programmed suicide (apoptosis) or
+die an uncontrolled death from regulatory failure (necrosis), or die after
+they reach their Hayflick limit (and hence are telomerase-negative and not
+immortal). Of the remnant, we get hundreds of potential tumors a day.
+Almost all of them get smashed by NK's, macrophages, and other sections of
+your immunology, which spot and kill these things which in the process of
+becoming tumors lost the molecular passwords which allow them to be
+considered part of the whole. Depending on your genes, what diseases you
+get, what chems you are exposed to, eventually, a few of these make it to
+the immortal league of extraordinary cells.
+
+So, it's a numbers game. Once a few of these things get their act
+together, they can grow, but they remain _diffusion limited_ and get no
+bigger until one or more of them decide to turn on their angiogenesis
+signalling. Then the adjacent arteries and veins start to supply it with
+access to the community nutrient lode pumped around your body. This it has
+evidently done. It's a big fucker, longest dimensions are 10 x 14 x 18cm,
+it's threaded through with vascular supply, some of which probably used to
+feed the nephrons in my renal cortex.
+
+Because it's big, and well supplied with blood (it appears, thusly, that
+I've been dining for at least two in recent months) it will enlarge,
+exponentially, and push other things out of the way (which is why my
+spleen felt enlarged - it was forced upwards from below). Because this
+growth process entails more and more cells, each with its own chance to
+forget to make adherin proteins and thence bud off and become another
+tumor, the bigger it is, the more dangerous it becomes, for reasons
+unrelated to mere metabolic load. Renal neoplasms have a noted tendancy to
+metastatise.
+
+I guess if you're gonna have cancer, this is one of the better places to
+have it. No limbs off. They don't have to chop any bones up to get at it,
+it isn't anywhere near your personality executes, and one is luckily
+bestowed with redundant kidneys so if you have to piss one off, you can do
+so without staring down a life of dialysis. At this stage, though, I don't
+know if it's a lone primary or a descendant of some creepy oncological
+mothership lurking somewhere else.
+
+NMR imaging works on a different principle to X-rays. If you think of
+X-rays in the same way as you might think of a very strong, penetrating
+searchlight, you're well on the way to understanding them. But NMR is
+totally, utterly different and exploits tricky quantum mechanical aspects
+of one's own molecular stuffing, to provide images of astounding
+resolution - down to microns in the really recent machines.
+
+NMR and CT-machines look pretty much the same to the people fed into them.
+They sound very different. CT is almost silent. NMR, which uses huge,
+liquid-helium supercooled, superconducting magnets and which bashes them
+with powerful changing magnetic fields applied by large coils (producing
+magnetostriction - same phenomenon which makes power transformers in the
+street produce their characteristic hum), is very fucking loud, so one is
+fitted with nonmetallic earmuffs to protect one's hearing. These double as
+headphones to enable the NMR operator to tell you when to stop breathing
+and breathe again. The headphones have no wires, since the fields
+generated by the machine would induce huge currents in such wires and melt
+'em; sound comes in through tubing, with characteristic pipe distortion. 
+One has to have no metal implants, jewellery, anything, when one goes
+in, wearing another of those hospital gowns which if not done up correctly
+tends to expose one's arse to all and sundry. Funny how I care about that
+when my internal organs, which have never seen the light of day, are
+about to be displayed by proxy to the world at large.
+
+How it works is roughly like so. You lie down, and a pair of coils
+(presumably graphite or some other non-metal, but I really don't know) is
+placed, one below and one above the area one wants to look at. These are
+the aerials which detect the changes in alignment of your protons (and
+carbon-13 nuclei, too, but only barely) when the imposed magnetic field
+changes. They feed you into the machine and energise the electromagnet
+(which is an idiotically strong, supercooled rare-earth jobbie, something
+on the order of 20 Tesla, which would rip any ferromagnetic materials out
+of you and embed them in the machine as soon as they energised the
+magnet). Your protons become aligned with the (static) magnetic field - in
+effect turning you into a weak magnet. Then another coil is energised
+which rotates the magnetically aligned protons towards it, and when this
+second coil is de-energised, the protons want to re-acquire their
+orientation towards the big magnetic field which was turned on the first
+time, and when they do they emit RF... you can figure out where they are,
+if there is a gradient in the static field, which is of course carefully
+arranged. The machine records what the coils detect - which is an RF
+signal from your hydrogen atoms, saying what their chemical environment
+is, which relates to what kind of molecules they're in, and what sort of
+tissues contain them. Heavy math crunching (of the Fourier transform of
+the free induction decay spectrum of the alignment of your protons after
+they turn the second coil off, for each slice) gets your image.
+
+As the machine electromagnetically sectioned my carcass, stridently
+wrestling the raw forces of the universe, I could feel strips of faint
+warmth moving up my body ... my protons were dissipating as heat the
+energy stashed in them by the imposed magnetic fields (this must be how a
+tape head feels when it is demagnetised). It made a lot of loud humming
+tones, some very discordant. The equipment produces astoundingly high
+resolution images - I'd always wanted to be imaged (is gratuitous MRI the
+ultimate in self-obsession?) - and I have had that wish granted, though I
+hoped it might be under better circumstances. Ah, well, in 2012 we run out
+of helium; no supercoolant, no more MRI scans. Better to do it now.
+
+I did lots of breathing in and breathing out while the machine
+interrogated my proton distribution. A while later someone named Lynette
+told me she was gonna shoot me up with a contrast dye. This isn't an
+iodine-based material, I knew, so I asked her what it was. She said,
+gadolinium-somethingorother, and I reckon, probably gadopentenic acid
+(geez, the Merck's a handy tome) which is a paramagnetic relaxation
+agent... makes things containing it really stand out on MRI. They can't
+use a glass needle (they break) or a metal one, so they cannulated me with
+a plastic item, they shot me up with Gado', did more scans, and let me get
+up and get my clothes back on.
+
+I snuck a look in the room with the pictures in it, with my guts in
+cross-section on the screens, and fuck me, it looks detailed and messy.
+There's a lot more plumbing than is meant to be there, connected to a big
+... thing ... where most of the kidney was. Amazingly the remnants of the
+left kidney still works. They said they'd need a while to come to
+a conclusion on this one and they'd send the pics and assessment off
+tomorrow.
+
+I came home and departed with some gadolinic, slightly iodinated, dense
+barytic turds, and thought about the situation a bit. I don't know enough
+to really take a position yet. The dog is a reassuring island of blithe
+normality, tail wagging as tumor boy dismounts from his 'cycle and takes
+off his helmet.
+
+I told mum what the report said. "You know what a neoplasm is, don't you?"
+I asked. "It's a tumor. A big one." She got all teary. Later she mentioned
+she wondered if this was a secondary to something else, like a lung tumor
+she might have, over the years, supplied to me via my proximity to her
+tobacco habit. I told her we don't know yet, and speculation is pointless.
+I had to admit I kind of enjoyed watching her squirm for a teensy bit,
+amazed that she thought, maybe there were real consequences from her
+unapologetic, callous, fuck-you stubborn inconsideration of what people
+around her like to breathe. I ran a quick thought process, along the lines
+of, diag with lung tumor secondary to tobacco smoke exposure, strangle mum
+on the spot, go to court, and claim self-defense against proven poisoner.
+But that'd be silly. Aside from needlessly enriching bastard lawyers,
+there would be more satisfaction in letting her live out the rest of her
+life in awareness that she'd carcinogenated me.  I wonder, if in running
+these sorts of thoughts, I am subtly telling myself to get my head scanned
+too. 
+
+Dad's sort of odd. He reckons I should cut my goatee off 'cos it'll
+interfere with the administration of anaesthesia. He _very much_ gives a
+shit how I am going to present myself as a patient in the hospital where
+he works. Sends me up the road to purchase some acceptably boring clothes.
+And fucked if I'm gonna. The cash goes on Eigen: Rules of the Game;
+Lehninger: Bioenergetics; Tainter: Collapse of complex civilisations,
+second hand. They should get here in a couple of weeks.
+
+Today (Friday) I get a call, to go and have yet another CT-scan. This time
+they want to look at my chest. I go there, and there's a crowd of people
+in the waiting room, but they ask me to come in right away, which is 
+abnormal - the immutable laws of queueing are only broken for the insane,
+the very important, or those suspected of dying, and I don't think I'm
+either of the first two. The CT-machine at this place, which is made by
+weapons manufacturer General Electric, probably sells commercially for
+several million bucks, is newer and faster than the one in Hurstville
+(and has obviously been got at by the school of design which says
+everything needs to look streamlined and aerodynamic), has higher
+resolution, is more capable of ionising my dick, and all that. 
+
+The injected contrast agent feels just as weird as it did yesterday. Why
+does someone want to look in my chest if they've found something in my
+abdomen? Obviously 'cos lungs is where these things usually start. If it
+has, then the neoplastic freakshow in my belly is a secondary, and I'd say
+it's a good bet asbestos, or passive smoking, or something of that nature
+has finally come to collect its dues somewhere in the lobes of my
+respiratory system. 
+
+I walked out of the nuclear medicine / CT-imaging place and walked down
+the footpath to the place where yesterday my protons learned to dance, in
+the expectation they'd have my scans and they could pass them over to me
+so I could 1) deliver 'em to dad, who referred me there and 2) I could get
+the straight dope from the enclosed report and look at the scans myself.
+If there's anything that shits me it is the _not_knowing_. But there's
+some dude at the desk, I think he's a radiologist, and he says I'm meant
+to be getting my chest scanned. Uh, yeah mate, I just did that, are the
+NMR scans available so I can take 'em over to Hurstville? He says the NMR
+scans are here, and he and another one of the diagnostic radiologists and
+some kidney-choppin' surgical dude (who dad has watched operating and
+approves), are gonna look at all of them together, including the chest one
+I just had, on Monday and come to a conclusion about what to do, so they'd
+like to keep it all together in one place.
+
+Um, right.
+
+I wander off to the carpark and ride back to Blakehurst.
+
+The pact of silence shits me. I've had more scans than your average
+barcode, and _know_ they know what I want to know, and aren't showing me.
+I think, am I condemned to cark it sometime in the next few months or
+what? Hmmmm.
+
+I decided I'd go round to Turella, bitch about the idiots two levels
+upstream of cat.org.au chopping off our web and email feeds, get pissed.
+Ooooh, Chatelle Napoleon brandy alternating with Peters Wicked Honey and
+Cashew Icecream is very fucking good. I crash in the cot of one of the
+locals, and we chat for a while. I let the oncological cat out of the bag.
+After a while, she's in the loop to the same extent I am. She invites me 
+for a shag. Maybe it wasn't the best time for a shag. It's sad to be being
+shagged by someone and have them suddenly burst out crying all over you. I
+ask why she's upset and she says it's not so much that I have cancer, it's
+that I said I wouldn't bother to fight it if it's already an entrenched
+aggressive, metastatic one. I guess it would seem like I was rejecting
+everyone, by not making an effort to hang around, by choosing to let 
+myself be removed from their life.
+
+It is in the absence of knowledge that superstition and fear fester. In
+the absence of awareness about what is going on inside, the decisional
+logic becomes simple. If it's localised, chop it out, cool. If it is
+metastatic and distributed everywhere, well, I think - it might be time to
+prep an azide milkshake, ride down to a part of the National Park that I
+like, dig a hole, climb in, and irreversibly lock my metabolism. Fucked if
+I want to be stuck in a cot somewhere, emotional football for a load of
+people crying around me as I die, all of whom think they have something
+very important to say to me, and who think we're gonna meet up again
+later. I want calm, indifferent nature around me.
+
+The timescale of my life looks like it might be dramatically
+compressed. Now, most people have reasons to stay. Spouses, rugrats,
+careers, infrastructure they expect to use for their lifespans, or God
+says they have to stay, or something.
+
+But I look on my life so far, and wonder, is there anything which really
+recommends me? Am I worth, in the purely economic rationalist view of the
+world, the effort of saving?
+
+Dad seems to think so, I suspect he's been pulling various strings to 
+get all these scans arranged with such suspicious efficiency. Why does he
+want to save me? We get on pretty well but I am secretly convinced I have
+been, on the whole, a nuisance to him.
+
+What do I do that makes me worthwhile? To whom do I matter? Why should
+anyone miss me on a planet stuffed with millions almost alike? Thousands
+of people exist, just like me, with this same sort of predicament, and
+quite possibly I will be saved by blind luck alone, they will die and I
+will never hear about it.
+
+If I am full o' metastatic malignancy, I'd only go through with the
+nauseating bullshit associated with chemotherapeutically fighting such an
+illness, not 'cos I feel I really have to do anything special before I
+cark it or need to live for some additional thing I have to complete, but
+since I feel there's something altogether wrong about my dear old man
+having to put me in the ground rather than the other way around. I can't
+think of any real justification to prolong my existance. I've lived long
+enough to get grey hair, be fucked senseless, blow shit up, play god with
+the genomes of living things, learn most of the things I wanted to know,
+free myself of religion, despair of the future of my species, travel much
+of the world. Some people I want to say bye to are out of the country. I
+skipped a few drugs, though, and it's too late to whip up a batch of mesc,
+or score a few tabs of LSD. Oh well, tough shit. I should check out the
+Powerhouse Museum, the Bletchley Park exhibit, a few other little things.
+Go skydiving. Get my naked arse flashed by a speed camera at 100kmh above
+the limit. The four remaining books I want to read are already in the
+post. Ar, bugger, I haven't finished renovating the kitchen either. Oh
+well, tough shit, too. I've done all the good stuff, I reckon.
+
+
+It is great a) having a molecular biological clue what I am up against and
+b) being an atheist. Having no god to beseech or delude myself that I can
+plead with, I can get straight to the point. Most people go through the
+disbelief, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance cycle, but I seem to
+go to acceptance first, depression second, then back to acceptance.
+Knowledge is power. Self knowledge brings power over oneself. 
+
+Wills are odd, I never thought I should write one. What stuff do I have
+that other people would possibly want? Like I'd give a rat's what happens
+to it if I am dead. What kind of person lives a life that leaves not
+only nothing to squabble over, but no descendants to squabble over it?
+Hmmm. I'll just be a job creation scheme for the Public Trustee, I 'spose.
+Funny, when I think I'm gonna die, odd things pop out, like that I
+have to discretely dispose of my stash of hardcore porn, so as not to
+offend the sensibilities of the people who find it when they go through
+the stuff I used to own. Various clandestine possessions also need
+stashing in the ground or to be moved on to someone else.
+
+
+I like black humour. TISM have a lot of songs mentioning cancer, and I
+still think they're funny now I have some of my own.
+
+"There's cancer in the south of France
+ Cancer lurks in Rome.
+ Cancer circles the while globe, 
+ until it finds you home."
+
+and
+
+"Cancer? I dream of cancer! Cancer can eat my BONES!
+Oh, lucky I would consider myself to be racked by cancerous moans -
+a fate more evil, a life more lost, the devil for me foresaw!
+Imagine the day I awoke to find the Milats had moved next door."
+
+
+
+
+
+It's saturday morning. Rain's pissing down on the steel roof. I like the
+sound. White noise, stochastic arrival of discrete, glistening carriers,
+loud enough to drown out the straining engines of the local revheads who
+emerge to do burnouts on the wet roads. I am climbed upon by the form
+previously feigning sleep next to me, and have one of those strangely
+distracted fucks, where everything is sort of done on autopilot and I'm
+thinking about something else. I wonder, ferinstance, what _it_ does while
+I'm having this shag, how does it move, what does it know about the
+blissful fire spreadding through my pelvis when I come. I dunno. I had
+this odd idea that there's something defiant about the reproductive act
+when performed by a condemned individual, but then, that's crap, I thought
+to myself. We're all condemned. Some of us just have the luxury (or curse,
+you pick) of knowing when and how. There's nothing remotely defiant about
+fulfilling the main purpose for which your organism exists any more than
+one is defiant of death while breathing. At least there were no tears this
+time.
+
+I haven't told many people what I know: three cat people (so they know why
+I'm off-net for a while). They all think it's a bit grim. One said she'd
+miss me if I died. Some people don't believe it. I was massaged by a young
+lass a few weeks ago and she too noticed the malevolent lump. I SMS'd her
+the info and I recieved in reply from her dual-case SMS phone: "DONT FUCK
+WITH ME PRED". I sent back "IM NOT" but only because I don't have
+lowercase on my wankerfone. 
+
+I eat breakky, and am glad my hangover is only a little one. I am tempted
+to fanatically read up about renal tumors, but I think it'd only depress
+me.
+
+Eventually I ride to Newtown, eat a ham and cheese melt and swill some of
+the faintly burnt coffee they flog at the Old Fish Shop on King st. They
+usually give me something other than what I ask for, but that's OK since I
+get the mistaken order for free. The rain has turned the usual footpath
+parade into a serried trickle of umbrellas and bipedal bedragglement.
+There's people dressed up the way they are because, to my neverending
+amazement, they apparently give a shit who wins the footy. I pop around to
+Ned the Anarchist's place but he's out, driving to Wollongong, probably
+testing the suspension with his new squeeze. So I pop back to Turella.
+
+I fuck around there for a while, pulling files out of the server via the
+age old method of floppy disk 'cos someone's changed the IP numbers again,
+grrrr. I'd send mail but our provider's provider has, incredibly, turned
+the mail system off, the idiotic bastards. I get a pile of parts to take
+back to the shed, there's a GX150 motherboard which I consider well worth
+the effort of salvaging and retrofitting into the ATX tall-form chassis I
+found on the roadside last week.
+
+I'm about to leave for Blakehurst, taking advantage of a break in the
+rain. Ah, ya know you're appreciated when the person who shagged you in
+the morning blew a large part of an ounce of good bud on manufacturing
+some punchy cannabis cookies. Serious weapons in the fight against pain
+and depression. And, a nibble tells me, rather tasty too. Newly appointed
+a trafficker of commercial quantities of natural analgesics, I start up
+and ride through the drizzle. Hmmm. I hope I can keep mum away from them.
+
+I get back to the Old's place a while later. They're watching the footy on
+TV, the volume is up REALLY loud, earthworms in the back garden are
+doubtless clued right up about the fucking wallabies. For fuck's sake,
+even my wankerfone has stopped telling me where I am and now, instead of a
+suburb, displays
+
+GO WALLAB
+IES
+
+by default. Puke. I wonder if brain process saturation by televised sport
+is a treatable pathology. The game hasn't started, they're half an hour
+into the hour of pre-match advertising bait which is now customarily
+played before the actual footy. I turn the volume down (normally this
+creates uproar if I do it) and have a chat to dad. He does most of the
+talking.
+
+"We've looked at the MRI, the CT scans, and we're gonna have a chat to
+Peter Aslan on monday. On wednesday, you'll be on his list."
+
+Which is dad-speak for, you'll be in hospital and they're gonna chop it
+out. I wonder which anonymous renal patient was bumped off Peter's list to
+accommodate me. 
+
+"Ok, so they're gonna fling the kidney, right. What I want to know is,
+how far has it spread?"
+
+"Looks like it hasn't. One lymph node in the hilus is enlarged, there's no
+other involvement, the spleen's normal, the liver's normal, your lungs
+are normal."
+
+This should be reassuring, and is, but not completely. Maybe it's
+metastatising and just hasn't cooked up anything detectable yet. But I
+couldn't have hoped for a better prognostic. Tobacco, meso, and Sydney air
+haven't got me yet. Tho, some total strangers are gonna chop me open and
+steal my internal organ (they'll pass it on to the histology lab, then
+it'll probably be incinerated, incorporated in dog food, or sold to a
+biotechnology company as a renal tumor cell line), and I can't say I'd
+recommend it as a way to lose weight. Not that at 65kg I need to. If I was
+a blob, I'd probably never have felt this thing until it was too well
+established to treat. 
+
+This evening, I finally got my hands on the actual MRI and CT assessments.
+What I like about these people is they don't fuck about when they write
+their reports - if you're getting both barrrels, they'll give 'em to you
+straight.  When three people write stuff like:
+
+"There is a large heterogeneous soft tissue mass in the left hypochondrium
+extending to the left loin which appears to involve the middle and lower
+thirds of the left kidney."
+
+"There is a mass lesion measuring approx. 14cm in size involving the
+lateral portion of the left kidney extending from the undersurface of the
+spleen to just above the illiac crest."
+
+"The huge left renal lesion with multiple draining cortical veins can be
+seen."
+
+"There are several enlarged feeding arteries from the aorta, either
+engorged lumbar arteries or accessory renal arteries supplying the tumor."
+
+
+it means I'm in for a slashing... it's too big to remove piecemeal
+endoscopically (and too risky, they might leave some in). I 'spose you'd
+expect that, seeing as it is plumbed into the biggest artery in my body.
+I've spoken to dad enough about accidental removal of perfectly good 
+organs, etc, that I am going to bring along a texta and write on my right
+flank before I go in, in large letters:
+
+PLEASE OPEN OTHER SIDE ---->
+
+
+I slowly notice, everywhere in the patho reports, they studiously avoid
+the use of the term cancer. Lesion, tumor, neoplasm. Has political
+correctness reached med terminology too?
+
+The rest of the evening is sort of mundane, how I like it. Mutant freak
+kidney and I eat some cold fish. We go out to the shed and do some tricky
+metalwork on the computer chassis. I love doing this, since we use these
+as servers, and get server-level performance out of these sorts of
+motherboard, despite their bring deliberately layed out to prevent their
+implementation as servers since it would cut into sales of equivalently
+performing overpriced servers with logically identical guts. I dunno what
+mutant freak kidney thinks of it. That done, mutant freak kidney and I
+come in and sit down to type some more of this rant. Hey, you in there,
+you're the star in your own suicide drama! Enjoy it while it lasts, you
+get the chop as soon as we can arrange it.
+
+
+
+Sunday. 23rd Nov.
+
+
+I have to sort out what the hell's going wrong with this pirate satellite
+dish decoder. I reckon they've changed the crypto keys, as I said would
+eventually happen. Can I be fucked right now? No. I wash a bunch o'
+clothes to wear in the hospital. Walk the dog. Why I suddenly get so much 
+schadenfreude upon reading in the sunday rag that the Wallabies lost to
+England eludes me. Nah. Turns out they retasked the sat; different data
+transfer rate, different slice of spectrum, yatta yatta. Our dodgy dealer
+knows the score, it's good, and I reprogram the thing, then wait for the
+new codes to come down from the orbiting broadcaster.
+
+Mum's spending a lot of time on the fone today, which (of course) impedes
+net access here under the parental roof. She's in martyr mode. An old form
+master of mine used to refer to such people as `the ones who have to be
+the first with the worst'. Finally, she's Got Something Important To Talk
+About. But worse than that, these phone calls propagate the news, and
+prolly most people don't need to know (why is this rant on the net? Oh,
+rank egotism, probably). 
+
+She rang up her sister, who, completely unnecessarily, skitzed out
+immediately. Rellos I rarely hear about in places I have never heard of
+will have detailed information about my urinary tract, what colour my piss
+is, and from what planet originated the thing they'll chop out three days
+from now. I got on the fone to uncle Des, and mentioned it in terminology
+he could understand - one of my beer processing organs is about to blow
+up. 
+
+The back lawn is carpetted in lush green grass, topped with brilliant
+lilac jacaranda flowers, all wet from the unseasonal rain. I savour
+walking through it in bare feet as I move things to and from the shed, and
+the freaky colour scheme. 
+
+I move a bookshelf and a cupboard. Good - mundanity is returning. I fill
+in the hospital admission form. I have to go get more ichor sucked outta
+my arm tomorrow. And see if I can't score a pair of those electronic
+noise-cancelling headphones... hospitals harbour machines going PING all
+night, screams, moans, raugous, lunk-busting coughs, pukes, phones
+ringing, door slamming, nurses chatting, tele-fucking-inescapable-vision,
+and other noises I'd prefer not to hear. I want my own tinnitus and the
+thump of my carotid arteries as the blood pounds through 'em.
+
+
+
+I might write tomorrow, but I might not. You've suffered enough. 
+
+
+
+
+<predator>
+
+(next in this series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutting.txt)

gutted.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,448 @@
+
+File: gutted.txt
+Cont: 6 days post-op. 
+
+I arrived at the hospital at 6:30am, went up to the ward, dumped my stuff
+in the cupboard, hung up my clothes (black beanie, black Cave Clan shirt,
+black trousers, and some gleaming white sneakers I found a couple of weeks
+ago). I put on one another of those arse-baring white gowns, and did the
+pre-op checklist... did I want anti-anxiolytics, asked the anaesthetist,
+and on hearing the name of the benzodiazepine I decided I'd rather go in
+with a clear head. They put on some fetching white compression stockings
+on my lower legs, these are meant to lower my likelihood of getting a
+venous thrombus while I'm not moving around. I chucked my spectacles and
+watch in the bedside drawer. The staff clipped some ID tags to my left arm
+and leg. They thought what I wrote on my abdomen was pretty amusing.
+
+Mum and dad were there, and mum was surprisingly cool about it, but she
+looked edgy when they both left. I rang her up a little while before I was
+taken down to the OR, and she answered the fone in the sort of voice you
+expect is going to tell you someone's just died. I could hear the bloody
+*dog* moaning sympathetically in the background. I told her, look mum, I
+appreciate the concern mum but would you please just bloody relax? I'm ok,
+I'm not gonna die yet, I'll be out of here in a few days and this'll all
+be over. Dad told me later she appreciated the call, but it didn't stop
+her angsting.
+
+Some dude named Alex wheeled me down to the roomful of other trolley-bound
+patients who, like me, were stashed there awaiting to be knocked out and
+chopped open and so forth. I got caught up in a conversation with him and
+forgot to do Professor Derrida Deconstructs. The ceiling tiles were there
+to farewell me, as was the anaesthetist, who expertly cannulated a vein in
+my left arm, asked me to identify myself and then, injecting a load of
+some crap with too many z's in its name to be identifiable by its IUPAC
+chemical formalism, popped me off into unconsciousness. Dad told me later
+I was too doped out to say anything intelligent as we passed each other in
+the corridor outside of the theatres, he on the way to do his ops and I on
+the way to do mine.
+
+
+One of dad's mates, Greg (for whom I did a Playstation mod' a while ago)
+popped in while I was on the table, for a lookie. I was very lucky. When
+they did the initial incision, they decided they need not do the ugly
+lungbusting transthoracic gash I had expected them to do. Nevertheless,
+Greg still got more than a worthwhile eyeful. Natch, when they open you up
+(skin, muscle, peritoneal lining) the first layer of actual guts they have
+to get through is coils of intestines. Generally the surgeons locate the
+mesenteric attachments which hold them in position in your abdomen, and
+cut 'em off the inner back wall of your bod, then pull the whole lot out
+and dump it on your chest, so they can get at the kidneys, main arterial
+supply, and lymphatic networks involved in the op. So that your guts
+doesn't dry out while you're being worked on, they chuck a couple of wet
+towels on top of 'em. High tech, man.
+
+The arteries feeding the mutant freakshow are small and difficult to tie
+off without tearing and subsequently bleeding everywhere, so these days
+they just staple 'em closed a couple of times with a few stainless steel
+staples, between 6 and 11 mm wide, then chop 'em off at the occluded end.
+If I fly anywhere now I'll be setting off metal detectors at customs. They
+lifted the kidney/tumor out entire, then went to work on the lymph stuff.
+Once that was done, someone shovelled my guts back into my peritoneal
+cavity, sewed the two sundered halves of my abdomen back together, and
+closed me up with a long, subcuticular stitch from sternum to mound. I'm
+glad I didn't know a damn thing about it.
+
+First thing I remember when I woke up was more ceiling tiles, mostly
+obscured by the face of an intensive care nurse telling me I had to stop
+swearing so much, tho I wasn't actually aware I was saying anything to
+begin with. Someone had been a bit rough with the air tube, I noticed, I
+had bruised lips on the right side of my mouth, tho maybe this was due to
+someone smacking me one in the gob for being unacceptably rude while my
+anaesthetically drugfucked brain was in the gradual process of rebooting.
+
+I woke up a bit more later on. My throat was dry. There was something
+stuck up my nose, which I figured out was a nasogastric tube, which made
+it hellish to swallow properly, though that didn't matter since I was on a
+nil-by-mouth regime. For some perverse reason I'd also had a long blue
+urinary catheter fed into my dick while I was out. I discovered it when
+I wanted to take a piss and couldn't feel it happening, but did it anyway
+and wasn't immediately swimming in a warm puddle of my own urine. It went
+all the way into my bladder and was held there by a hydrostatically
+inflatable balloon. Hmmm. Must.... Think .... Pure .... Thoughts. I didn't
+want to mess up my reproductive plumbing by getting a hardon while this
+thing was embedded in it. A tube from the catheter went into a bag hung on
+the side of the gurney and was watched hawk-like by nurses for blood,
+cloudiness, and general volume.
+
+There was an IV stuck in my arm, and I also had a central line plugged
+into my right jugular vein, stuck onto my neck with sticking plaster. I
+half wanted to puke but something was stopping me, which I later found out
+was some or other anti-emetic which was being fed in through this central
+line along with my delicious, nutritious intravenous saline, potassium,
+glucose, antibiotics, and my new best friend, morphine, which is an
+awesome pain-destroying alkaloid derived from opium poppies, and next
+chemical cousin to thebaine and heroin.
+
+I had control of how much analgesia I got: very simple, if it hurt, I'd
+press this button pinned to my hospital smock, and the pain went away,
+since more morphine was fed into my veins. I chewed through quite a lot in
+the first couple of days. I watched dreamily as I was given jabs of
+anticoagulant into the flesh of my thigh every 12 hours and didn't even
+feel the needle go in. I spent wednesday night in the ICU and came out on
+thursday. An ICU nurse, I think his name was Gray, cleaned my teeth
+for me with a cotton swab soaked in mouthwash, which felt like going to
+the dentist after a week of eating basalt grit topped with sawdust. 
+
+It felt like I was vomiting when they eventually yanked the NG tube out of
+my head, and aside from a faintly pukey remnant tang in my turbinates, it
+was a great relief to be rid of it.
+
+Intensive care sucks but I think I had a relatively easy time of it, the
+old dude in the next bed along, who had also had a kidney out the same day
+as I did, was moaning with pain 'cos he couldn't find his morphine button.
+Across the room a patient was throwing stuff at one of the nurses,
+paranoid that the nurse was stealing his possessions.
+
+My olds came and visited me in the ICU on thursday. I remember the visit
+only vaguely.
+
+A physiotherapist asked me to cough for her, and I told here there was
+just no goddamned way I was gonna do that 'cos it'd hurt too much.  I was
+breathing fine, though. She passed me this clear plastic toy with three
+lightweight plastic balls in it, each of which would rise up when one
+inhaled 600, 900 or 1200 cc's of air per second through an attached
+mouthpiece. I could pull all three of them up with a good drag, and hold
+them there for long enough to suggest my lungs hadn't filled up with
+too much crap. I was very glad, again, that they hadn't slashed my thorax.
+
+I made it back to the regular north ward on thursday night. Everything was
+still a bit of a blur. Trev Hyde came along for a visit, and I can't
+remember what I said to him. Paul Cozzi came in and mentioned that they
+got the kidney all out cleanly, but we all had to wait for the pathology
+report to come back in a few days to see if we've really succeeded. I
+slept on my back, morphined up to the maximum extent that the patient
+controlled analgesia (PCA) machine would admit.
+
+"Drugs are fuckin' fun, pal."  -TISM
+
+Yeah. I had some weird dreams, but at least I was asleep.
+
+I was very, very glad I packed the earplugs. Aside from the proximity of
+my room to the ward reception and nurse's desk (very loud conversations
+when the door was open) I had to deal with the accursed, Pythonesque,
+Machine Which Goes BING - a peristaltic pump mounted on an intravenous
+drip stand, which had the responsibility of forcing the contents of a
+suspended bag of electrolytes and assorted pharma into my veins at a
+predetermined rate. While it worked I could hear its internal gears
+grinding away faintly, which was quiet enough to suffer and still get to
+sleep.
+
+However, for reasons related to running out of fluids to feed me, or the
+occurrence of a kink in the lines, or a vein in my arm going awry, it
+would chime, BING BONG... BING BONG... BING BONG... for hours if
+necessary, and loudly enough for staff in the corridor to hear it so they
+could come and attend to it. I found out where the SILENCE button was
+fairly quickly but that only gave a minute of respite. Unplugging the
+bastard didn't shut it up either, since it had battery backup. But it
+dawned on me, in my opiated daze, this demonic item was responsible for
+keeping me hydrated and doped up. Arrrgh. And it was plumbed into my
+circulation, too. Captive audience. I hoped whoever designed this thing
+died and went to a customised hell where an infinity of these things
+stretched from horizon to horizon, were cannulated to 'em by an
+inescapable web of PVC tubing, beeping furiously, no earplugs in sight,
+and nobody came, ever, to turn them off.
+
+On Friday I stood up, got out of bed, and walked around the ward a bit,
+slowly, with the help of a physiotherapist, i.v. drip stand functioning as
+a kind of walking support. I couldn't stand up properly, I was bent over
+since the abdominal stitches still hurt.
+
+I gingerly peeled the long adhesive dressing off my wound. If you buy a
+steak at the supermarket you'll notice there's a bit of absorbent padding
+stuck to it on the bottom side of it, sodden with blood. Mine was like
+that, longer, crustier, more colourful, but clean - didn't look infected
+at all. I was impressed that none of it stuck. The pattern intrigued me
+for a few seconds before I tossed it in the bin. Whoever sewed me up knew
+what they were doing with a needle but I'm stuffed if I know where they've
+hidden my old belly button. I had a shower, sitting down, for the first
+time in some years, and felt a lot better, and went back to bed, into the
+waiting arms of the nicest drug I'd met all week.
+
+Frank came along and dropped off a load of roses chopped from his wife's
+garden. They smelled very nice. A couple of my ancient rellos, Mon and
+Paul, dropped in to say hi, also bearing a load of flowers. I'm such an
+ungrateful bastard about such things... I think of them as more stuff to
+take out when I leave the ward. Trev Hyde came in and told me the
+condensed version of his life story, which was interesting. He's pretty
+old now, considering retirement since the insurance situation is insane
+these days. We got to the bit about dying. He's afraid of the judgement
+which he thinks will come after he dies. I think religion has shortchanged
+him - he's lived a life in fear of god, and will die acutely terrified of
+the impending sentence. I was like that once. I ditched god and started
+living a decade ago. My death is a cleaner one, where my metabolism shuts
+down; my personality submits to the implacable grip of thermodynamic
+entropy, and dissolves irretrievably into the molecular noise which my
+organism fought so hard against for three decades. There's no succour,
+though. Trev thinks he will survive death. I know, in the very neurons
+thinking this thought, that I will not. But at least I'm not scared of an
+eternity of anything.
+
+Since I was on nil-by-mouth I couldn't drink, or eat, or swallow oral
+painkillers. By friday night I finally became tired of having paracetamol
+suppositories jammed up my bum and told the nurse I was not gonna have any
+more of 'em, which was probably as much of a relief to me as it was to
+her. I was gonna miss the morphine when it eventually went away. I also
+finally decided to toss the oxygen prongs which had been stuck up my
+nose ever since the NG tube came out. The gas came out of the feeder
+tubes anhydrous and cold, and gave me recurring bloody snotty nostrils.
+They fell somewhere behind the bed and gradually oxygenated the whole
+room, hissing quietly in the dark and doing the job anyway. One less piece
+of equipment to tie me down.
+
+Stupid little things became important... wether or not I was farting, for
+instance. On friday, I took my first crap for a couple of days. I had to
+unplug myself from the wall sockets, and carry a bagful of my wee with me,
+in order to go to the bathroom. Cozzi was happy about this shitful event
+when I told him, since it indicated my reshuffled cabinet o' guts hadn't
+adopted some strange kinked or knotted topology not conducive to pushing
+partly-digested dinner through it. It surprised me, since I hadn't eaten
+anything since tuesday, that anything remained to be discarded.
+
+Simple things scared me. A person came in with a vacuum cleaner. She asked
+if I wanted the room vacuumed, and I pulled the bed covers over my face,
+shaking my head and pathetically moaning "NOOOOOOoooo!" ... I was in
+terror of the agony of any sneezing which might be provoked by whatever
+dust the vac' might exhaust into the air in the room. Thankfully she
+retreated into the corridor with her allergen aerosolisation weapon in
+tow.
+
+A nurse named Nadia walked in and told me she was gonna take my catheter
+out. Holy shit! Want a bloke's undivided attention - threaten his rigging.
+She plugged a syringe into a port on the protruding end and evacuated the
+balloon which held it inside me, then before I could even say "be careful"
+she rapidly removed the thing in about one second of blistering urethral
+agony. It was great to take a leak normally again but I had to remember to
+pay attention when I did it again, having not had to do so for the past
+few days.
+
+Saturday came, and with it, finally, a clear fluids diet, so Cozzi asked
+me if I wanted to lose the drip, and oh, hell yesssss, I did. So I was
+finally freed of that blasted BING generator by the evening. With it,
+alas, went my beloved narcotic. 
+
+Coz' mentioned that I wasn't allowed to eat any fat for two weeks, since
+one apparently tends to get problems with chylomicron accumulation
+immediately after lymphatic resection when on fatty diets. Oh, cruel...
+the cannabis cookies in the 'fridge at home, built around a fatty,
+butter-laden biscuit mix, were now off my list of things to eat, just when
+I needed them. This is apparently more problematic with the longer chain
+fatty acids, so it'd be sorta-ok to eat fish. Someone had sent up a large
+box of chocolate thingos which I hadn't opened. Once the news about the
+no-fat diet arrived, I decided to give the chocolates away to the nursing
+staff, and they had gobbled 'em all by sunday morning.
+
+On Saturday, Raffo and Tee also showed up and we had a chat, though I
+dunno if I mumbled anything especially intelligent. Stuff was still
+painful. I'd been on my back for consecutive days, since rolling over
+caused pain as my detached guts sloshed about inside my abdomen under the
+influence of gravity. Tee understood the significance of what was on the
+MRI scan, since she's a nurse, but really, one could suss this out fairly
+straightforwardly with the untrained eye. They held it up to the window
+and had a gawk at my previous tennant, and were suitably impressed. 
+
+Sunday was the first day I got any solid food. My guts rumbled as if not
+quite sure what to do with this unfamiliar manna coming down from a
+long-empty oesophagus, but oooh, it was good to eat actual food again.
+Digesting it was a different matter. I felt the coils move around,
+painfully trying to decide how to pack themselves, and my dinner, in my
+abdomen. They made lots of noise. They haven't they figured out there's a
+load of new space to live in, now half my renal system's gone, but then,
+they're guts, not brains, I suppose, so one can forgive them of this
+learning deficit. Pack in, dudes, shut up and chow down. Do yer job. Keep
+me alive.
+
+Several people came on Sunday. Most of the geek crew from cat.org.au
+ventured out on the train. It was good to see 'em. 
+
+
+I got out of bed on Monday morning and walked the ward unassisted,
+unemcumbered. Aslan (geez, I'm already misspelling his name, can't
+remember if it ends in m or n) came in and told me the histology report
+had finally come back. They got all the kidney out and its margins
+suggested it hadn't invaded anything nearby, which was reassuring.
+
+However, all but one of the lymph nodes which Coz' resected was
+_involved_, which is pathology-speak for invaded by tumor cells. It's
+already spread. What this op has achieved is to push me back along the
+exponential growth curve exhibited by uncontrolled, proliferating cells,
+but not to get me off it.
+
+Aslan said I could go home. I called mum, my long-suffering taxi. I put on
+the same clothes as I wore when I came. Black. I had spent the whole time
+in a hospital gown so nothing in the pack had been used, adding subtle
+idiocy to the ruckus which went into controlling what went into it. I
+slung it over my shoulder and walked slowly down the corridor. I checked
+out with the sisters on the desk, and suggested there were two jars of
+cut-off plant sex organs in my room for which I had no further need and
+which might look good on their counter top.
+
+I sat in the lounge and awaited mum's arrival. A man and woman in their
+seventies were chatting about their cancer. It struck me I could just as
+well be having the same conversation, but they were less bleak about it, 
+being twice my age, and less clued into its molecular biological nature. 
+Maybe ignorance is bliss, but in general I find it just leads to one being
+bitten on the arse more often than not.
+
+Its formal name, by the way, is renal clear cell metastatic carcinoma. It
+will re-emerge. Somewhere, sometime, as surely as night follows day. This
+is the way of living things, the logic of cells gone mad. The game is
+afoot, and I am it. All your cell are belong to us.
+
+The oncological cat is out of the bag, running loose in my vascular and
+lymphatic systems, the intricate fractal ducting which has served me for
+so long now subverted to facilitate my destruction. Unlike normal cats
+with nine lives, this cat is immortal, clonal, malignant and predatory, as
+one might expect.
+
+
+"I am Locutus of Borg.
+ Resistance is futile.
+ You will be assimilated.
+ Your life as it has been is over.
+ From this time forward, you will service us."
+
+-Picard.
+
+
+
+Well, fuck you, pal. 
+
+I was gonna say to it, you'll never take me alive, but then, it *has*
+already done so. After all, it *is* me. So the game changes to
+scorched-earth.
+
+I know where the azide is, where the ropes are. I have a half-kilo of AN
+prill somewhere, too, if I feel the need vapourise my head faster than the
+nerves inside it can possibly process the experience. Yeah. Fuck you, pal.
+_I_ live here. I'll burn the house down with you in it, if needs be, to
+get you out.
+
+I type this with a curling upper lip, snorting air through flared nares,
+not quite sure of my own vehemence but rapidly becoming convinced. 
+
+Mum drives me home. My guts jiggles as we drive over cracks in the
+highway. I don't tell her about the metastatic nature of the thing till I
+get there. I am a pretty grumpy guy all day, thinking about this
+situation. Chemo and radiotherapy are pretty much useless for this
+disease. It has to be fought immunologically. Maybe some recombinant
+chemokines would help at this point, but I don't know anything about their
+effectiveness yet.
+
+Another option, which I know a little bit about, is the construction of a
+DNA vaccine against this thing which has taken me over. We kept some of
+the tumor, in order to extract from it some short segments of its DNA
+which encode for proteins unique to the surface of the cells which make it
+up. Using the usual restriction enzymes and DNA ligases, one splices this
+into a mammalian expression vector - a hoop of DNA which is constructed so
+that cells injected with it read the DNA and synthesise the protein
+encoded thereon. There's a sting engineered-in, however: the hoop of DNA
+containing the tumor protein sequence is arranged so that another bit of
+DNA, encoding another protein with which the immune system already has the
+shits, is spliced in adjacent to the segment codifying the tumor protein.
+
+This hybrid is called a chimaera, or a fusion protein. When the cells
+injected with this engineered hoop of DNA make the protein, they'll carve
+it up into fragments 9-16 amino acids in length, serve it up on the major
+histocompatability Class I and Class II systems to various surveilling
+lymphocytes, which will then learn to recognise these fragments, hopefully
+go clone themselves up, distribute themselves and attack any cells bearing
+any parts of this unnatural molecular construct. From what I read five
+years ago in '98 when I was doing honours, this sort of strategy works
+well on some viruses, some proteinaceous venoms, and in certain
+immunocontraceptive roles. People were only starting to think of
+vaccinating themselves against their own tumors back then.
+
+Nobody does it in Oz, but fortunately, labs exist in Deutschland and
+Nippon which do this sort of stuff to order, and once fabricated, can send
+it back via airfreight. It might work, it might not, I'll have to go trawl
+medline to see if it's worth a shot. I am not feeling especially hopeful,
+but five years is a long time in molecular biology. Particularly in mine.
+
+
+It's monday night, no, 3am tuesday morning, and I cannot sleep. I didn't
+sleep again last night, I lay there trying to figure out which position
+would let me conk out into blessed unconsciousness but none of them did.
+I'm a bit hiccough prone, which makes my guts hurt. I'm producing bloodied
+phlegm, but not by coughing it up. Panadol isn't a rat's arse on morphine,
+but I figured I'd better wean myself off the opiate. I do these strange,
+uncharacteristic muscle twitches when I am drifting off to sleep.
+
+The score at the moment:
+
+-1) I have cancer, but not so much of it. This process will
+    progress, and eventually cancer will have me. When this happens, I
+    will die.
+ 
+0) I lost five kilos in four hours with this uh, amazing kidney-free diet,
+   but I only had 65kgs to begin with. 
+
+1) I have a big slash up the middle, which hurts when I try and stand up 
+   straight. It leaks blood a little bit. My belly button has disappeared,
+   which probably means I have Joined The Unborn 8-)
+
+2) My intestines are playing musical chairs with themselves, which
+   also hurts. They're rather like an unruly room of schoolkids; take 'em
+   out for an excursion and they muck up for the rest of the month. I'd
+   smack 'em if I thought it would improve matters, but that'd hurt too.
+
+3) right 'nad occasionally painful, OW. I hope this is referred pain.
+
+4) I'm shooting blanks. Obviously I did not Think Pure enough Thoughts 
+   while catheterised, or I was damaged when it was fed in, or removed.
+   Bummer. 
+
+5) Bordered by lines of incredible adhesive which refuses to come off with
+   soap, are several rectilinear patches of hair missing from my arms,
+   adjacent to bruises where needles were wrongly inserted or pinpricks
+   where they went in OK. Small black pocks dot my legs where the
+   anticoags were administered.
+
+It has finally sunk in that I am actually alive, despite all this stuff,
+but I'm not out of the shit, not by a long way, and may never be.
+
+
+Tuesday.
+
+This fat-free diet sort of sucks. It's not like I have a lot of it on me
+anyway. Milk with no fat, which is called "Shape" instead of "Taste" for
+good reasons, is an insipid, transparent, runny waste of effort, showing
+up a bowl of cornflakes as the uninspiring foodstuff it is. I eat toast
+with honey for breakfast, with a banana. Mum excelled herself tonight and
+cooked up a steamed lemon and pepper barramundi so fiendishly delicious
+I'm sure I'd swap it for a kidney again if I had a spare one to donate.
+
+I'm off to an oncologist on Thursday to clue in about the options.  A chap
+named John Hunter said, in the eighteenth century, that surgery was like
+an armed savage who attempts to get that by force which a civilised man
+would get by strategem. I've done the armed savagery, but I'm not feeling
+especially civilised at the moment. Perhaps when I awake tomorrow I will
+be when I chat to the cancer heads. I hope, whoever they are, they speak
+molecular biology. 
+
+
+
+<predator>
+
+
+(the next in the series is now at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/hunting.txt)
+(It is long, and unlikely to be an enjoyable read. You've been warned.)

gutting.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,484 @@
+File: gutting.txt
+Cont: evisceree-to-be gets clues, experiences The Fear, watches the dance.
+
+Is there any diagnostic value in observing what people do in the face of
+impending doom? Sunday night, I ate some pizza, dropped a book back to
+someone off whom I had borrowed it, then whizzed around to a friend's
+place in Newtown, and to a backdrop of Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy, we
+shagged each other to an absolute standstill (surprisingly good music to
+shag to, I think). I guess impending massive trauma is as good an excuse
+as any for a spot of debauch. Once we could stand up again, I threw on
+some clothes and fanged it home on the understanding that the reason we
+have license demerit points is, you're supposed to lose 'em. I know for
+sure now the speed camera on the Princes Hwy at Kogarah won't get ya if
+you drive a 'cycle right in the gutter out of the field of the induction
+coils they embedded in the middle of the lanes. Tho, doin' a hundred k's
+with your footpeg one inch from the kerb is somewhat dogdy.
+
+No user servicable parts within. Refer to qualified service personnel.  
+
+Monday morning, I went to meet the guys who are going to gut me, Mr Aslam,
+and Mr Cozzi. Aslam does kidneys. Cozzi does lymphatics. I'd address 'em
+as doctor but I've been deconditioned of that habit, since it's not how I
+address dad, who has been a DokTa for longer than I have been alive. He
+came along for a listen, and also because he's my immediate next of kin.
+
+Aslan and I had a look at the CT scans on a fluorescent backlit screen. On
+the right side of my body is a normal kidney. On the other side is a
+smattered veneer of (surprisingly, still functional) recognisable kidney
+trying desperately to hang onto a fuckin' big chunk o' mutant cellular
+bureaucracy gone mad. It is dimensionally about the same size as my head,
+if you were to cleave my head down the centre first. I'm not quite sure
+how I fit it all in. Into my head popped a quote from Parker (Yaphet
+Kotto) in the movie Alien, who delivers the line with exactly the right
+emphasis for this circumstance:
+
+"That son of a bitch is HUGE."
+
+The consequences of just how huge were finally revealed. It's not gonna
+come out through the usual renal incision. When people as conservative as
+surgeons invoke the word _radical_ and follow it with nephrectomy, there's
+a gonna be some serious slashin'. They're gonna insert a blade just above
+my pubic symphysis, run it all the way up the middle of my six pack (can
+they do something about that protruding navel while they're there?) to the
+base of my sternum, then do a left turn through my abdominus rectus
+(that's gonna fuckin' hurt while I'm healing) and run along under the
+margin of my ribs, then go through the pleura of the left lung (which will
+collapse for a while, which sucks but I guess I'll find a bicycle pump and
+reinflate it later) and through the intercostal muscle between the eighth
+and ninth rib. Same thing again with the peritoneal wall. Then they ligate
+a lot of heavy-gauge vasculature. I am so glad of the existance of
+anasfuckinthesia and really sharp knives carefully wielded.
+
+Let me quantify this. I just measured these distances with a tape measure.
+I'm up for ghastly half-meter gash in my torso, half midline, half
+centre-to-edge. I am gonna fuckin' fuckin' fuckin hurt for fucking weeks
+and it scares me a lot. I hope they have a sewing machine or a staple-gun
+handy for when they finish removing the thing, and a spare 44 gallon drum
+of refined opiates to dunk me in. Regardless to what level of accuracy it
+is executed, it'll more or less be tactical butchery getting into and out
+of my carcass.
+
+
+Aslam reckons they might damage the spleen in the process of doing this
+procedure, and damaged spleens tend to bleed all over the place, so they
+might have to chop that out too. I don't have a spare one of those,
+unfortunately. I'll be more happy if I keep it. To cover the possibility
+that I lose my spleen, this arvo, in each arse cheek, via inch-long
+23-gauge needles, were administered recombinantly engineered vaccines
+against pneumococcus and meningococcus, which are two kinds of bacteria to
+which you have an increased (forty times!) probability of succumbing when
+you're asplenic. My bum hurts bilaterally. I can sit down, but not move
+about without a strong ache in the bottie. Vaccination's a pain in the
+arse, but it beats being eaten alive by an opportunistic microbe.
+
+Part of why they need an opening redolent of something I'd normally find
+on a CityRail vinyl train seat is because Mr Cozzi is gonna resect all the
+lymph nodes up and down my inferior vena cava, in the event that the
+suspect lymphatic drainage from our friendly mutant has contaminated them
+with metastatic cells.
+
+Tumours all begin as one cell. The one I'm nursing is now several
+_billion_ cells, all of whom took time to execute their capitalist genetic
+imperative of "go forth and uncontrollably exponentiate". Today arrived
+some other clues; first, a pointer to when it might have started; second,
+how I could have known about this thing earlier; and third, an insight
+into its general nature.
+
+Once Was A Kidney looks about as ugly in NMR images as it does in CT
+images, but there's better resolution of the arterial and venous supply.
+Tumor cells aren't very clever, collectively; they're effectively clones,
+all equally unimaginative and proliferative, rather like an insidious
+subspecies of middle management. Whilst busily reinventing half my renal
+system as the sort of disease for which abattoirs reject slaughtered
+carcasses, the stupid fucker grew into, and blocked off, most of the renal
+vein which the kidney uses to return piss-depleted blood to the inferior
+vena cava (which is a BIG pipe, I could (very uncomfortably) fit my thumb
+into it). NMR shows the occlusion fairly clearly. I thought for a moment
+it'd have been funny if it occluded the renal artery and effectively
+starved itself before it got a chance to get massive (well, duh), but
+that'd just kill my kidney, which would become necrotic and would need to
+be removed anyway. Less slasho, but slasho nonetheless.
+
+Natch, the progressively-less-kidney is still being force-fed a load of
+pressurised arterial blood from my descending aorta. So ...the thing...
+had to find some other place to drain its venous output. Sure enough, it
+decided to head downwards, and involved itself in my gonadal vein, on the
+left side. When it did this, it raised the venous pressure therein and
+de-elasticised the collagen in the veins which take circulatory drainage
+from, you guessed it, my left testicle. I have no idea if this means I'm
+gonna lose a 'nad, but hey, I have a spare one of those too. Bilateral
+symmetry has its privelages. 
+
+I've been walking around for a couple of years with a 'nad sac which
+occasionally feels like a bag of worms hanging off my pelve, but it
+doesn't bug me. I had it checked out by a GP the same day I discovered it
+while having a shower at my old squat in Annandale, and he told me what it
+was and said, well, if it doesn't bother you, don't worry about it. It
+didn't, so I didn't. I mentioned it to dad and he didn't think of
+anything, but then he generally operates on people with no scrota. I
+didn't think of anything, either. I rationalised it as age-related
+idiopathic collagen failure, I'm getting it in my lower legs, too. It
+seems, however, that bags are the embryonic form of these cans of worms to
+which I hear people refer every so often, one of which I have recently
+opened.
+
+Chatting to Aslan today, mentioning my complete lack of symptoms other
+than splenomegaly... no night sweats, no pissing blood, no pain ... I was
+just in the process of mentioning that I had a left varicocele but he got
+the words out two seconds before me. Encouraging - therein lay the
+correlation. But when did this appear?
+
+I had to trawl my email archive for "scrotum" to get a clue when this 
+started, 'cos I remember emailing someone about it. Must have looked odd
+in the process table entry on conway - 
+
+predator@conway:~$ grep -r scrotum * | more
+
+which for those of you not conversant with the gnu/linux command line
+shell means:
+ 
+search everything under my home directory for the occurence of scrotum
+and display anything you find, chopped into individual screenfulls.
+Visualise that process as you will.
+
+According to the datestamps on vasquez.zip.com.au and conway.cat.org.au, a
+message mentioning my varicocele appeared a few days before Thurs Feb 28
+2002. So I've been an oncogene farmer for at least 21 months, and probably
+for a few months longer than that, since when the initiating cell started
+down its proliferative career path, it needed a few months to get enough
+buddies to block a a vein. This is, in its own way, sort of encouraging.
+Big, slow growing tumors are generally less prone to metastatis than their
+malignant, aggressive, fast-spreading, fast-growing, kill'em all and let
+god sort 'em out relatives. If it was likely to be malignant, it's
+probably had at least two years to figure it out. It has involved ONE
+lymph node. So if we're lucky it still hasn't figured out how to take over
+the rest of me, and it can be scooped out more or less entire. Good
+riddance, fucker. You can propagate all you like... in a cell culture
+bottle where I can feed, nurse and autoclave you at will, bwahahaha...
+say... fancy spending the rest of your life in vapour phase liquid
+nitrogen, with a handy preservative of 10% DMSO and 5% dextrose?
+
+
+I'm starting to lose confidence in GPs and not simply 'cos of the "forget
+about the varicocele" incident in Feb '02. I popped along to another GP
+while I was doing some kitchen renovation a couple of weeks ago (probably
+late October), moaning faintly about this splenomegaly and that for some
+reason the waist strap on my backpack didn't fit comfortably any more. He
+checked for enlarged lymph nodes, palpated my guts asked me if there were
+any other symptoms, and when I said no, said not to worry about it. I'm
+glad I worried about it a bit more and asked dad to feel my guts one night
+in front of the (you guessed it) footy. If I'd taken the same "don't worry
+about it" approach to this thing as I did to the varicocele, you'd be
+reading this rant in late 2004 or maybe 2005, about my impending death
+from inoperable cancer, and how it came to be that I'm up on a charge of
+the manslaughter of my general malpractitioner. Maybe I'm getting
+infinitesimally smarter about these things as I age. Am I enough of a
+prick to send him a copy of the CT report? Yeah. Lift your game, pal.
+
+
+Ar, shit. It just occurred to me I'm gonna miss Jello Biafra on Thursday
+at the Enmore.
+
+I bagged TISM member Jock Cheese's album Platter today and it's pants
+shittingly funny and also sad in some places. I wonder if this guy's brain
+isn't somehow entangled with mine.
+
+
+Vote me for President.
+I'll ban patriotic sentiment.
+Introduce a virus pest control
+that reacts to the mention of green and gold.
+
+Up there Calici, in there and fight,
+wipe out jingoism overnight
+there's no marketing that can stop it
+I don't care if there's ten Tony Locketts.
+
+
+I caught the bus home and remembered how much I like the feeling of my
+head vibrating against the glass to the throb of the diesel engine under
+the floor of the bus, and that cloud of hot, almondy burnt diesel which
+you often walk through when you walk towards the folding entry doors.
+I went to a service station and stuffed my wankerfone full'o credit in
+anticipation of a ton of SMSs I will have to send in coming days. 
+
+I walked up the hill in the rain and enjoyed the light splashing and the
+cold, wet, astringent smell that the trees emit when their kino is washed
+down their trunks. I've walked up it thousands of times, it was one of my
+first big excursions, on the way to and from primary school. I get home
+and the dog whinges to me, wanting a walk, but my arse is complaining
+about its brush with bacterial proteins, tetanus toxin and aluminium
+hydroxide adjuvants and I'm not going to walk much tonight.
+
+I'm getting short with mum. I tell her stuff and she asks questions which
+indicate she didn't listen, which is the worst kind of question to ask me
+since it makes me uninterested in answering again, making her ask more
+questions which indicate she didn't listen the first time. I don't know if
+she's going deaf, or senile, or something. Or maybe she's always like that
+and I'm getting stroppy.
+
+
+Tuesday, 10am. 
+
+This time tomorrow I'll be on the table, halogen floodlit, peeled open and
+hovered over by people who dress in funny green smocks with blue masks,
+and wield sharp, disposable blades, various 316 stainless alloy tools,
+pass each other the right instruments without asking for them 'cos they're
+_in the loop_ and to whom clings the hope of those who would be glad to
+see me come out alive. A machine will be doing my breathing for me. I'll
+be very thoroughly paralysed, deprived of sensibility, and bits of what
+used to be my guts will accumulate, detached, on the table beside me. I
+go into the hospital, starved from midnignt tonight, at 6:30 am tomorrow
+morning. They carve me up at 9am. 
+
+They reckon it'll take 'em about 90 minutes to take the freakshow out, and
+about two and a half hours to get all the lymph nodes and other shit, then
+insert a drain and sew me up. Procedures of this length are known as major
+ops in the trade. I'll spend about four hours splayed on the table, total.
+By a perverse twist of fate, dad will be in the theatre next door,
+operating. It won't surprise me at all if he comes over and gives me a
+haircut while I'm out. I'm gonna be drugged out of it, in intensive care
+for a day after this trauma. I hope someone has the good decency to tell
+me what day it is if I wake up.
+
+
+
+I popped into dad's office this arvo. I figured I might as well make him
+the executor of my will, which should be logistically easy, since I can't
+think of any instructions and have no worthwhile stash of desirable
+goodies for distribution. His parents wrote him completely out of their
+wills, which has pissed him off for about thirty years. I don't know if
+it'd be appropriate or ironic to leave all my stuff to him. I figure he
+can do what he wants with my stuff, but knowing dad, he'll chuck it out.
+What would he do with a climbing rack, a 60MHz CRO, weird computer shit, a
+stack of CDs, twice his bodyweight in books, a motorcycle? Nah. I don't
+care just yet.
+
+
+There in every classroom, in every secondary school
+and in every workplace and every typing pool, 
+there beside you on the bus with the lifeless stare
+nervously outside surgery waiting for doctors there.
+
+Together, loser. Loser. 
+Loser, loser, losing, lost.
+Loser, loser, losing, lost.
+
+There's cancer in the south of France
+Cancer lurks in Rome.
+Cancer circles the whole globe
+'Till it finds you home.
+
+In heart and liver it is waiting
+for all of us or most
+our very cells join hands and sing
+loser, loser lost.
+
+Loser, loser, losing, lost.
+Loser, loser, losing, lost.
+
+"Lose your Delusion  I" (from TISM - the Beasts of Suburban)
+
+
+I'm starting to think I should choose more carefully what I slap on the CD
+player. Pink Floyd's "Breathe (Reprise)" sprung out of my speakers and
+stopped me in mid-breath. I'm not frightened of dying, either. I'm just
+frightened of the pain and stupidity of the likely routes to that end when
+the process isn't under my control. I am In Harms Way already, but the
+escape route is risky, and includes possible iatrogenic damage (a spleen
+is a terrible thing to waste) and nosocomial infection. I hate hospitals
+for a number of reasons mainly associated with getting a knife in ya, but
+also 'cos they're full of microbes which eat antibacterial drugs for
+breakfast... cyclosporins, beta-lactams, chloramphenicols, tertacyclines,
+you name it. Rip off a couple of atoms and, Borg-like, assimilate them
+into the molecular collective. Humanity trained these microbes to learn
+these resistance tricks over the last fifty years by overprescription of
+antibiotics, and failure to complete courses thereof. I've seen the
+plasmid maps of the antibacterial resistance genes these bugs pass between
+each other, molecular cassettes of free software, shared by the bacterial
+community to defend itself against the semisynthetic chemical onslaught we
+throw at it. If anything gets into me while I'm laid open, I'm up for an
+ugly septic cytological shitfight, 'specially if I lose my spleen
+somewhere in the theatre. Even if everything goes brilliantly, it's still
+gonna fucking HURT.
+
+Yesterday, the patho lab upstairs did a blood group and hold on yet more
+of my brachially extracted claret, but I noticed they didn't ask for a
+crossmatch on the stuff they took out of my arm. This is a good sign.
+They're not expecting to need to transfuse me. 
+
+I found out that the noise cancelling headphones are three hundred bucks
+from Sony, and I think I'll just bring my normal squishy earplugs instead.
+Amazingly, for three hundred bucks, they do no digital signal processing
+at all - it's all fast analog circuitry. Three hundred bucks is a fuck of
+a lot for a small mic, an SMD operational amp and a couple of passive
+components on each side of your head. I think I'll have to go track down a
+circ diag off the net and go from there. If I get out alive.
+
+
+Welcome to my last shower before The Slashing. I've chemically mowed off
+most of my pubic hair with some thioglycolate goop, so some stranger
+doesn't have to do it with a razor leaving pointy ends on the hairs, which
+would make it more likely to itch when it grows back. It doesn't help the
+scar heal if I scratch it all the time. Anyway, I'm not happy to have some
+random person doing alien crop circles in my short'n'curlies with soap and
+a razor blade. I might get cut. Or hard. Or something.
+
+
+I wake up early tomorrow morning with a load of clothes (black), a
+toothbrush, a hairbrush, mobile phone (and charger), Kuhn's "The Structure
+of Scientific Revolutions", an artline texta. This will all be waiting in
+a black backpack which dad insisted upon my using on the grounds of
+hygiene (I can't argue - my main backpack amounts to a nylon-substrate
+ecosystem which uses me to get around Sydney, and turns wash water black
+when I wash it) - but the black backpack is another of dad's `image'
+requirements wrapped up in med-speak justification, and it isn't like I'm
+gonna go deliberately smearing my backpack on my wound or anything) but
+it's unfamiliar to me, and I've had, and sometimes lived out of, my other
+pack for ten years.
+
+I think the BOEING emblem looks better since I coloured the E and I out of
+it.
+
+Amazing amounts of bullshit went into keeping control of what I finally
+put into the pack. My impending hospitalisation appears to have awakened
+some long dormant parental pack-yer-kid's-stuff-for-them genes which are
+usually only activated when preschoolers are notified of their first trip
+to the zoo and need their globites stuffed for the epic land and sea
+journey to the far flung gates of Taronga Park.
+
+As part of her melodramatic propensity, mum went on a pathological ironing
+frenzy and presented me with a load of razor-pressed tee shirts and shorts
+to wear in hospital - all of 'em are dad's, various pharmo company shit
+decked in advertising for such things as implantable contraceptives. I'm
+think I'm supposed to be grateful for the work she's done on these things,
+given as a gift from the concerned. No offense, but fuck off. I'm wearing
+what I usually wear, I pack my own shit, and if I had a religion it would
+prohibit ironing. It's all my stuff, 'cept for a dressing gown an
+acquaintance wore while they were having their guts chopped out last year,
+and gave me for the occasion on the grounds that it will bring me luck.
+Which is crap, of course, but it will bring me a better R (thermal
+transfer co-efficent) if I wear it. It is an unseasonally cold November.
+So I took it.
+
+Some strange concepts come out when the shit hits the fan. People ring up
+and wish me good luck, knowing nothing whatsoever about the treacherous
+mathematical randomness underlying such a wish. There is something sort of
+equivocal about a cancer patient saying luck isn't something they've had a
+lot of lately, since I did spot the thing, too, hopefully in time to chop
+it all out. Nobody seems to notice the contingent Markov chain: in order
+to `get lucky' and spot cancer in time to head it off, you have to `be
+unlucky' and contract the disease first. 
+
+Yea, verily, stochastic processes giveth, and stochastic processes taketh away.
+
+Three people rang me up this evening and said they'd pray for me, which
+I'm sure will make them feel better but otherwise be a waste of their
+perfectly good CNS activity.
+
+One gave me a couple of quotations from, if memory serves me correctly, a
+little tome called Life's Little Instruction Book, a million-selling
+publication which I recieved as a present over a decade ago and
+disgustedly flung in the garbage as a collection of meaningless, and in
+some cases self-contradictory aphorisms. 
+
+Someone else, a rello, rang up, concerned because their mum called them
+after my mum blabbed to their mum about my illness. We ended up having a
+long rant about oncogenic cervical viruses and tumor processes in general.
+She said she would worry about me, and I said that would have no impact on
+me, and she should just rock on down to BOC Gases, lug home a cylinder of
+nitrous oxide, crack open the reg' and just try and fuckin' relax. She
+thought that was kind of funny. I hope she doesn't light up a spliff at
+the same time, since NOX is known for its propensity to, uh, vigorously
+accelerate combustion.
+
+An old workmate of dad's rang up, and asked how I was, but I couldn't
+identify him by his voice on the phone, and I answered, `That depends on
+who you are. So who are you?' Eventually he coughed the beans. I knew he
+knew what I was in for. "I am up for a ghastly slashing - rad nephrectomy
+minus optional extras." This dude's a surgeon too, and he knows the
+outcomes are not down to luck either. 
+
+As confused and crazy as they all seem, being aware that people give a
+shit does feel good in an egocentric sort of way. But why do they do it?
+Do people feel bad if they don't tell me they're worried? I'd much prefer
+people just got on with their lives, heedless of my problem, not worried.
+I'll tell 'em the news when it's all over. 
+
+In a few hours I'll wake up, get over to the hossie, sign in and dump my
+junk. I'll be running a circulatory system increasingly full of
+catecholamines, and the cerebrospinal fluid sloshing around my ventricles
+will be sodden in home-grown neuropeptidyl trepidation. But fear is OK
+provided it can be kept under some sort of control, and I can do that.  
+Dad blocks all inquiries as to his state of mind, and appears unreadable,
+which is worrisome. Makes me feel like he's masking something.
+
+I don't know what to do about mum breathing her cigarette-flavoured,
+desperation-tinted, canned wisdom in my direction, borne aloft on a
+wheezily delivered aerosol of pathogens freshly exhaled from her
+disintegrating, tobacco-plundered alveoli. She's had some hellish bodily
+slashes too, in her life, but I know already what I'm in for and it isn't
+gonna help to have her dissolve in front of me. I feel for the poor thing,
+but I'll be glad to see the back of her weepy preoperative histrionics
+when the orderlies mercifully shoo her out of the ward. I'm not equipped
+to look at them, they're terribly contagious, and more than anything else,
+I don't want to catch the vibe they harbour within.
+
+
+At half-eight, they'll stick in a main line, get me into the drapery, get
+me onto a gurney and wheel me down to the OR. I'll be strongly inclined to
+sing this as I glide along the corridors:
+
+
+The angel of death hovers overhead. 
+My family come gather round my bed.
+Come my colleagues, come literate friends
+here is my life wish as my life ends -
+
+I wish I'd slept with more girls.
+I wish I'd done more drugs.
+I wish you'd all go and get fucked.
+
+(Professor Derrida Deconstructs - TISM "Faulty Pressing Do Not Manufacture")
+
+provided, of course, I can stop laughing long enough to get the words out.
+Stuck in the circumstance, it will hit me as astoundingly silly that the
+last thing a considerable proportion of the community sees before they die
+is hospital ceiling tiles. It's also the first thing they see again if
+they survive their surgery. You are on a planet of pressed, painted,
+rectangles of suspended bagasse. What a reason to bother to regain
+consciousness. I'll be glad to see them again. Who'da thunk it. 
+
+
+I won't need to pack the texta: from my {umops apisdn} perspective with
+respect to the intended audience, I got it right on the first go. Since
+dad's on a medical tribunal which hears cases in which doctors are
+dismissed for rank incompetance, I've been exposed to too many shocking
+stories of instruments left in, wrong organs removed, wrong ops performed,
+to not try and help out all I can. So on my right abdomen is inscribed a
+morbid joke so bad it could almost serve as an epitaph, but if it works,
+it won't need to. Hopefully they'll see it after I lose consciousness.
+
+
+ . .
+  .
+ \_/
+
+PLEASE
+OPEN
+OTHER 
+SIDE 
+ --> 
+
+(I had to do it like this 'cos it wouldn't all fit across my abdomen).
+
+Gimme the succinyl choline, Captain Snooze, let's get it fuckin' over with 
+while I can still maintain the delusion that I'm really not scared shitless.
+
+
+
+<predator>
+
+
+(next in the series is conway.cat.org.au/~predator/gutted.txt)

index.html

@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
+  <html>
+<head>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+This is predator's elcheapo minimum effort web page. No, I don't care what
+you think.
+
+<ul>
+
+
+<li>
+<li><a href="glebe.zip">glebe.zip</a>
+<li><a href="approach.htm"> The approach.txt on drain exploration </a>
+<li><a href="barron.txt"> The Barron Falls Power Station expedition </a>
+<li><a href="tennyson.txt"> The Tennyson Power Station expedition </a>
+<li><a href="aquacave.txt"> Aquacave - probably the best drain in
+Brisbane</A>
+<li><a href="bentcops.txt">A commentry on police corruption from an
+acquaitance of mine
+</a>
+<li><a href="pestlock.txt"> Why nature's large complex pesticides are less
+likely to engender resistance in target organisms than the simple ones we
+humans manufacture.</a>
+<li><a href="mol.html"> Thoughts on molecular genetics </a>
+<li> <A HREF="ADSL.txt"> Building a Linux router / firewall / gateway for
+a Telstra
+Bigpond ADSL connection </a></li>
+<li><a href="realcrak.htm"> Thoughts on the information-systemic nature of
+reality </a>
+<li><a href="getlaid.html"> The catalyst microwave LAN project (Which I
+built, almost) </a>
+<li><a href="ROBO-608.jpg"> My whacky industrial robot motherboard. Runs
+Debian/GNU Linux </a> </ul>
+<li><A href="latitude.txt"> Wanted: parts/spares/discard Dell Latitude XPi
+P75 notebooks / laptops </a> 
+<li><A
+href="virus/index.html">Tropism-shaping: a
+way out from the therapeutic dead
+end of antiviral resistance</A></ul>
+<P>
+<P>
+<P><BR> Code snippets in C to calculate some stuff (thanks to
+Andy Nicholson for guidance and bugfixes)<UL><LI> <A
+HREF="benfords.c"> 
+benfords.c </A> Calculates Benford's Law probability for a given symbol in
+an N-
+symbol set. <LI> <A HREF="channelz.c"> channelz.c </A> calculates  
+Shannon's Channel Capacity for
+N channels in bits per second, given bandwidth and Signal-to-noise
+ratio. <LI> <A HREF="bits_per.c"> bits_per.c </A> which, for a set
+of N symbols, tells you how many bits is intrinsic to each symbol.
+
+</li>
+<P><p>
+
+Click on the links below for approx 3Mb .PNG schematics for the (very old)
+Kikusui 555 oscilloscope.
+
+<P>
+<A href="kikusui555ext_horiz_amplif.png">External horizontal amp</A>
+<BR>
+<A href="kikusui555highvoltrectifier.png">High voltage rectifier</A>
+<BR>
+<A href="kikusui555horizontalamp.png">Horizontal Amplifier</A>
+<BR>
+<A href="kikusui555powersupplyandcrt.png">Power 
+Supply and CRT stage</A> <BR>
+<A
+href="kikusui555timebasegenerator.png">Timebase
+generator</A>
+<BR>
+<A
+href="kikusui555timebasetimingsw.png">Timebase
+Timing Switch</A>
+<BR>
+<A
+href="kikusui555timebasetrigger.png">Timebase
+Trigger</A>
+<BR>
+<A
+href="kikusui555verticalamplifier.png">Vertical Amplifier</A>
+<BR>
+
+<A
+href="kikusui555voltagecalibrator.png">Voltage
+Calibrator</A>
+
+Last updated March 29 2003</ul>
+
+</body>
+</html>

latitude.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+My dear old laptop - restored after being given to me initially with the
+screen hanging off by its data connector - is becoming hard to maintain,
+so I'll eventually need spare bits for it, and since it's many years old,
+crucial spares - like the power adaptor, and the drive module for the
+display - are a bit hard to obtain. Hence I wish to build up a stock of
+replacement guts for it. Redundant parts mean reliability.
+
+Therefore, kind reader, if you're tossing your old, used, beloved and
+recently upgraded, Dell Latitude XPi P75D (or in fact any in that series,
+with or without cdrom included, so we're talking Latitudes up to P166 I
+guess) - regardless of its condition (though it helps if the display
+works, the processor hasn't been pulled out, etc etc), - then please
+consider the possibility of being paid a little by me to take it off your
+hands. It would naturally be more convenient if you were somewhere in
+Sydney, Australia, because this is where I live. If course if you just
+want to be rid of the thing and know it's going elsewhere than landfill,
+and feel like posting it to me, well, that's fine too. I'm not comfortably
+wealthy. I do not use Windows, or possess a license for it, so I will
+delete that off the harddisk if you donate it.
+
+If it happens that I eventually obtain a huge stock of these parts then
+they will become a source for other people with dying Latitudes, who find
+themselves in a similar situation. Spares help us all. Landfill doesn't
+help anyone.
+
+Please email me at predator at cat dot org dot au, and we'll see if we
+can't come to an arrangement.
+ 
+
+Live long and prosper!
+
+<predator>

pestlock.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,462 @@
+file: pestlock.doc
+Derived from File: Azadirac.doc (alpha version)
+<modified 20/11/1999>
+
+
+Bigger IS better : why it is harder to evolve resistance against a complex 
+poison molecule than it is to evolve resistance against a simple one.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Since before the start of the 20th century, there's been an "arms race" 
+between pesticide manufacturers and their new killer chemicals, and the 
+target pests who eventually learn how to tolerate them. It always seems to be 
+that these synthetics are hailed as a silver bullet, but soon enough the 
+target organism learns to dodge it. Why might this be the case? And more 
+pertinently what might be the solution?
+
+This doesn't just happen down on the farm, either. It occurs at all biological 
+scales. The physical size of the pest animal is irrelevant, since the war is 
+fought at a molecular level. The wars are being lost : there's plenty of 
+antivirals to which viruses are now resistant, bacteria which eat multiple 
+antibiotics for breakfast and survive, fungi which are not killed by 
+antifungal agents, insects which can happily metabolise insecticides all day 
+long, and plants which manage to survive despite an onslaught of herbicides. 
+
+(It is important that this happens. Some of the things we kill with our 
+ nonspecific poisons are actually our allies, and we need every ally we 
+ can get, but that's another issue.)
+
+Many of the agents employed in the quest to kill various organisms are 
+extremely effective in their initial application, but less effective with 
+repeated use. All those drums of "Kill-O" in the shed which did great work
+last year will underperform next year and be useless the year after that. 
+Why? The pests literally engineer a way out. But how do they do it? Why
+can they do it? How do we stop them?
+
+To define this problem further we will have to go down to the molecular
+arena where these battles are fought out, and first gain an understanding 
+of what a poison actually does.
+
+Enzymes, poisons, and the art of the evolutionary molecular locksmithing
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+A useful aid to understanding the toxicological concepts without having to 
+drown oneself in the agonies of biochemistry is to use an analogy. Most of us
+have a bit of a familiarity with locks, and although the analogy isn't exact  
+it can give you a good idea of what's going on.
+
+Locks permit gates to be opened and closed by specific keys. In biochemistry
+the gates have to open and close at specific times or, amongst other things, 
+nutrients and raw materials can't get where they need to go. As in real life 
+the the keys control the state of the locks, and the locks control the state 
+of the gates. Enzymes often combine the "lock" and "gate" in the one, 
+dual functional package. 
+
+As with locks, in biochemistry, you can have the locks and keys set up in 
+particular ways. If you have one gate and two locks in tandem, opening one
+lock will open your gate even if the other lock is still locked. On the
+other hand, you can have a gate with two locks in parallel, each on separate 
+hasps, so you need to unlock both locks at the same time to open the gate.
+
+In nature, although you will occasionally find a setup where only one lock in
+several needs to work for the gates to open and close appropriately, the 
+set-up is usually parallel, in the sense that all the locks must work or
+the gate can't be opened and closed at the right times. 
+
+There is one significant difference in biochemistry: you CAN'T change the 
+keys, because the keys also happen to be very same nutrients and raw 
+materials that the gate will permit through it! 
+
+Locks are constructed a particular way, and will admit only certain types of
+key - round keys on vending machine locks, U-shaped keys on Bi-lock locks,
+your front-door lock takes a familiar brass Yale key into its keyhole. 
+Then, of the keys that fit, then only the one with the right wiggles on it 
+will open the lock. 
+
+It's a similar thing with the enzymes which run living things. They are 
+shaped a particular, specific way, will only let particular substances into 
+their gaps and crevices, and they are very choosy. Just as you can't fit a 
+round key into a lock with a U-shaped keyhole, you can't fit molecules into a 
+given enzyme unless they are shaped just right.
+
+Nature would prefer that she could open and close her molecular locks and 
+biochemical gates as she sees fit. If she can't do it, certain gates are shut 
+or open when they shouldn't be, so valuable things escape, or nutrients can't 
+come in. Things die, simple as that.
+
+It is useful to think of poisons as a kind of a dud key. Whereas normal keys 
+enable you to open or close a door by unlocking or locking a lock, the poison 
+key still fits the lock, but has to gum up the lock's working somehow so the 
+gate can't be opened ever again, or is locked open when it should be shut, 
+or whatever. 
+
+Poisons look similar to the usual stuff a protein interacts with, but are 
+different in some critical way which happens to ruin the protein. There are
+many different interactions. To continue with our lock and key analogy,
+it's as if a key has been filed in such a way that it jams against the pins 
+and won't come out, kind of like a dynabolt: it changes once it is inserted 
+so you can't pull it out again. This consequently means you lose control of
+your gate - it is open or closed at inappropriate moments.
+
+This sort of stuff happens when poisons interact with biochemical systems,
+but nature can't change the keys!
+
+It's worth noting that historically some locks were made with detector levers 
+in them... enabling them to be easily `poisoned' or made unopenable. If you 
+tried the wrong key, relockers were engaged and then NO key would open the 
+lock, including the correct one. 
+
+It seems now that a lot of our dud keys are in fact no longer jamming the
+targetted locks. How do bugs get resistant to our dud chemical keys? 
+
+Nature changes the locks.
+-------------------------
+Nature isn't conscious in the conventional sense. It doesn't say, "Hmmm,
+yeah, if I rip off a chlorine atom here I can neutralise this poison."
+
+Instead, routinely, nature's organisms make hundreds of slightly different 
+versions of their locks - in this case, many versions of target enzymes in a 
+pest's biochemistry. All of these will still perform their usual biochemical  
+job, and most of these versions are messed-up by poison. However, because 
+organisms have twenty different types of amino acids to play with, in each of 
+several hundred positions in the target protein, they have an amazing range of 
+lock versions to potentially construct, and chances are that they can come up 
+with one which will still work with the original key, but which now won't 
+admit the dud key (poison) which jams up the lock.  
+
+The rate at which an organism comes up with a solution is related to a couple 
+of things, mainly how flexible the organism's improvisational locksmithing is, 
+and also how often the organism reproduces. Each member of the target 
+species has a slightly different plan for their own personal locks, which 
+still use the original key but varies in some other way, which might happen
+to make it un-poisonable. Each new member gets a crack at accidentally 
+inheriting the lucky new lock variety, which still uses the original key
+but which won't be wrecked by the dud one. What this means is that the more 
+often the bug species reproduces, the more bugs there are trying to figure
+out what the work-around lock version should be, with each generation of 
+surviving bugs. 
+
+When this biochemical locksmithing problem is solved, the bug that solves it 
+reaps an enormous benefit. It not only is it now immune to the poison key but 
+almost all of its progeny have the design for the new locks encoded in their 
+DNA - resistance is hereditary - so they are immune too. 
+
+It all sounds wonderful, but there is a caveat. 
+
+If the dud key is complex, and very subtly made to simultaneously interact 
+with many parts of the lock, or worse still, interacts with many different 
+kinds of locks at the same time, nature has a much harder time of it and has 
+to devote serious, often unaffordable resources to build the new locks so it 
+can run its biochemistry again. It is then that other approaches tend to be 
+tried, such as systems which recognise dud keys and chop'em up, or which 
+pump the dud keys out of the organism. 
+
+It is here that the lock analogy breaks down a bit and we have to return 
+into the real world for a little while. There is another analogy which will
+be useful, but I'll get to that when I come to it.
+
+Humans make simple poisons, nature makes complex ones. 
+-------------------------------------------------------
+So back to the molecular machinery of resistance in insects. Insects have
+been under attack from many organisms for millennia, the most recent being 
+h.sapiens, which fancies itself a bit of an organic chemist, but we're nowhere
+near as clever as Nature at this molecular art. Humans have synthesised and 
+sprayed all sorts of stuff around to kill insects, and other things. 
+
+Maybe some of the names will be familiar... alachlor, aldicarb, aldrin, 
+atrazine, benomyl, amitrole, 2,4-D, chlordimethiform, carbaryl, carbofuran,
+chlordane, chlordimethiform, chlorvenifos, chlorpyrifos, chlorotoluron, 
+cyclodiene, DBCP, DDT, dicamba, dieldrin, dicrotophos, dimethoate, disulfoton,
+endothall, fenthion, glyphos, heptachlor, hexazinone, lindane, malathion,
+mancozeb, monocrotophos, oxychlordane, paraquat, permethrin, primicarb,
+simazine, thiocarb, trifluralin, zineb. 
+
+You might notice a few sounds repeated. For example, chlor- means there
+is one or more chlorine atoms in the stuff. It is interesting that halogens
+don't show up very often in plant toxins. Phos- and fos- suggest a phosphorus
+which is another atom which doesn't tend to show up in natural poisons either. 
+
+You might notice a few sounds are repeated frequently. For example, 
+chlor- appears several times. So does -phos, -azi, -thio/sulf. Thio and sulf 
+imply a sulfur, which is another uncommon atom in plant poisons, unless you 
+look at relatives of the onion and garlic familes which tend to use 
+non-protein sulfur compounds a lot.  Pyr- suggests one of several rings with 
+nitrogen and carbon in them. Carb- suggests a member of a family of the 
+carbamate family. 
+
+A lot of these chemical "Leggo-blocks" show up time and again in humanity's
+artificial synthetic pesticides. 
+
+There are others, but it doesn't matter that I omit them. I'm using the 
+phonetic similarity in the names to illustrate a structural similarity in the 
+pesticide molecules. If you looked at structural drawings of them, or even 
+had to wrestle with their special chemical names, you'd see similarities 
+there too.
+
+The "dud" keys we use to jam nature's molecular locks have some commonalities.
+
+They're simple, small and structurally fairly similar. Firstly, they 
+generally aren't very big, as far as molecules go. Also, since they are made 
+of heavy atoms, weight for weight, they aren't very complex compared to 
+equivalently heavy molecules made of lighter atoms. Look at something like 
+heptachlor - it's basically a loop of carbon atoms where molecular weight 
+is gained by bolting on a few fat chlorine atoms. The molecule has a lot
+of similar and simple branches on it. Which raises a third point: synthetics
+often they tend to have similar and simple structural backbones. Our 
+synthetic pesticides are all simple variations on the same themes, childish 
+molecular Leggo structures compared with the amazingly complex pesticidal 
+sculptures nature comes up with.
+
+Complexity is determined by how much stuff you have to build with, and 
+also how configurable all the bits are. You can only build so much with five
+bits of leggo, but nature dictates that by doubling the pieces of leggo, you
+get far far more than double the number of ways of putting them all together.
+You can, weight for weight, get many more permutations and combinations out
+of a given mass of "light" C, O, H and N atoms than you can out of the same 
+mass of atoms like S, P, Cl and related "heavies". The total mass of the 
+leggo is not the issue - it is the complexity of its configuration.
+
+Some of the reasons for this are that humans simply haven't been doing 
+chemistry for several million years and simply cannot cheaply make these
+complex backbones which nature seems to do so easily and cheaply. So our 
+approach is, yeah, let's synth this, then drown it in nitriles or halogens or
+something else amenable to synthesis by the bulk chemical synthetic methods 
+we humans tend to use.
+
+In contrast, poisons plants make and use against bug attack are made naturally
+and most of them are made out entirely of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and 
+to a lesser extent nitrogen. These elements are also the main ingredients in 
+plant toxins with other atoms in them, like sulfur or bromine.
+
+The reason for this is that probably N, P and S are environmentally scarce 
+and metabolically not worth the price of manufacture for defense purposes.
+Phosphorus is so rare and presumably so precious to the organism's energy 
+(ATP) and information (DNA) metabolism, that it will not be allocated to 
+other tasks, because these energy and information metabolism functions are 
+so critical to the system that there would be a selection pressure against 
+an organism that didn't allocate P only to these critical tasks. Same for 
+sulfur, which is a critical component of many proteins but which is 
+relatively rare in the environment. From a plant's point of view, compared 
+to N, P and halogens, there's a stack of "cheap" carbon and oxygen around 
+with which to build complex stuff, so the plant making a toxin to defend 
+against attack is less pressured not to deplete these elements by using them 
+to make defensive chemicals. 
+
+On the other hand nature might just be better at complex carbon oxygen and 
+hydrogen chemistry than she is at complex sulfur phosphorus and nitrogen 
+chemistry. But that's not really central to the issue. The central issue is 
+the complexity. 
+
+Nature seems to rely more on taking whatever is lying around and building a 
+really complicated pest-repellent molecule, instead of building heavy, but 
+simple, molecule. The molecules which nature uses as pest repellents, if they 
+are heavy, get this way by being complicated artworks of light atoms, rather 
+than being structurally simple molecules with heavy atoms attached to them.
+
+Simple vs Complex Dud Keys
+--------------------------
+So what? Why should the complexity of a poison matter? It's the interactions.
+
+A large, complex poison molecule will necessarily interact with many parts
+of its target enzyme at once. The ultimate poison key is something which 
+interacts with a lot of the lock components and renders them useless, e.g. a
+squirt of adhesive from a hot glue gun, all the way up the inside of the lock, 
+will jam up that lock in a much more irreparable way, than will a wad of 
+chewing gum stuck shallowly in the keyhole. 
+
+Putting a bubble-gum shield on keyhole is easy: add-on a strip of teflon, and 
+the gum can't stick to the lock, but you can still use the original keys. 
+
+Compare this simple bubble-gum-repulsion problem, to the problem of 
+redesigning a lock to keep liquid epoxy out of the keyhole, the broach, all 
+the little pins and springs, and out of the surface where the lock barrel 
+turns inside the lock  body- it's a screaming nightmare if you need to 
+continue to use the existing keys, which demands that there remains a open 
+hole in the lock through which the existing key (or the deadly hot glue) can 
+be inserted. 
+
+Hot glue is a hell of a poison for locks, because it gets intimate with so 
+much of the guts of just about any mechanical lock you can build. Once inside
+it forms a complex shape which happens to match all the inner surfaces of the
+lock guts. To get around this, the design of the locks must be radically 
+changed to keep the glue out. This change is so radical, it means you also 
+need a kind of key which you don't have to actually insert into the lock. 
+
+There are locks immune to hot glue. They lack keyholes and their key is a 
+specially constructed blade of plastic, which contains embedded magnets.
+The magnetic field passes through the wall of the lock directly, and needs no
+keyhole. You can drown the magnetic lock in as much glue as you want but it
+will still work. Magnetic locks are immune to destruction by hot glue guns.
+
+The price we paid for locks immune to a hot-glue poisons, was thet we had to 
+change not only the lock, but also change all the keys too, because all the 
+old brass keys don't work in the new locks. When locksmiths first made 
+magnetic locks they had to start using unfamiliar materials like plastics 
+(they used to work with metals and ceramics) and they had to learn about 
+magnetism, which was a considerable lot of new stuff to learn. The magnetic 
+locks were expensive to construct because the tools needed to make them were
+very different to the tools via which the usual metal locks were made. 
+Of course, the new magnetic locks didn't work with all the old brass keys so 
+they keys all had to be changed too.
+
+But nature can't change keys, she is constrained to continue to build
+locks which are susceptible to ruin by complex poisons. The very nature of 
+the existing keys render the locks vulnerable to a complex attack.
+
+This means, from an evolutionary point of view, that to get around a complex 
+poison, MANY changes need to be made to the target enzyme, all at once. On 
+top of this is the need to maintain the ability to use the existing key. This 
+is a much bigger ask, just like the design of a lock immune to hot glue.
+
+Each interaction adds itself to the list of problems which need to be solved
+to enable the lock to work again, and they *ALL* need to be solved together.
+
+It can take the target insects or plants (or whatever) decades, even 
+centuries to solve such a problem - sometimes they don't ever solve the 
+problem (basically they run out of time) and slide into extiction.
+
+[An alternative strategy is the messing-up of more than one lock at the same 
+ time. Sure enough, you find multiple toxins in the same plants. This is an 
+ even bigger ask, because the pest has to evolve several new locks all at 
+ once. Look at plants like barley, onions, horseradish, carrots, tomatos. 
+ They have at least four phytotoxins in them. Look at the common spud, got 
+ about 9 of them too. We usually get around them by cooking the food or 
+ otherwise destroying the toxicity. Most pests don't do this.]
+
+Well if nature is so smart, it probably knows that complex poisons are more
+useful and give a better return on the biological resources used in their 
+development. Does nature tend to use simple or complex poisons? What sort of 
+pesticides do plants use against the bugs which suck their sap and eat their 
+leaves?
+
+Nature makes complex poisons
+-----------------------------
+The hypothesis that the pesticide companies would need be unable to falsify, 
+in order to prove that their stuff is as difficult to get resistant 
+to as the sort of complex agents nature has taken millions of years to 
+patiently evolve, is that 
+
+"natural complex pesticides exhibit the same resistance problems as our 
+ simple synthetic ones."
+
+I think the hypothesis has already been falsified anyway, however, in the
+course of Nature's ordinary problem-solving. Nature presumably knows about 
+resistance, after all, various organisms have been fighting chemical wars 
+against each other long before we ever came down from the trees. The bacteria 
+and fungi have, particularly, been fighting for aeons - we use the weapons 
+that the fungi provide in our wars against bacteria, most of our antibiotics 
+are derived from moulds and other organisms in the fungal realm.
+
+If nature "thinks" big molecules are harder to get resistance too, then they
+should be more common in her armament of poisons, than small and simple 
+molecules. The payoff for designing a poison is then greater, because it
+defends the designer for a longer period in evolutionary time. The payoff is
+greater than the cost of developing it.
+
+Nature also knows that it takes considerable effort to evolve these things, 
+and tends to not go over the top by simply bolting on more complexity than
+is absolutely warranted in keeping the pests guessing.
+
+So what to expect? Well, few simple poisons, many complex poisons, and a few
+really complex nightmares. Such a profile will reflect two things ... 
+
+ 1) nature CAN synthesise complex poisons against pests, when it is worth the 
+    effort to prevent resistance over evolutionary time, and 
+ 2) will reach a plateau of complexity when the chemistry becomes too 
+    metabolically expensive or synthetically intractable. 
+    
+It also has to be remembered that it does the defending organism no good to 
+get poisoned by its own defensive chemicals, which further constrains its 
+scope for engineering poisons against pests.
+
+A rough guide, a fingerprint to look for, is the preponderance of carbon in 
+the sorts of molecules which plants tend to use as poisons against various 
+pests.
+
+I happened to pick up an expensive book at a half price sale some years ago,
+called the Dictionary of Plant Toxins. It happens to list in the back the 
+molecular formulas of the molecules in the whole dictionary, in increasing 
+numerical order, starting with the number of carbon atoms in the poison. 
+
+Some of the molecules in this count are not toxic to things against which the
+plant has had to compete - for example, there are plant toxins here which 
+kill tumor cells in mice, and plants don't have to compete against mouse 
+tumor cells. But most of these are toxins made to help the plant survive 
+attacks by insects, fungi, parasites, plant viruses, bacteria, grazing 
+animals, and even nearby competing plants.
+
+I counted 'em up. What do we see?
+
+# of Carbons : 1 2 3 4 5 6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14  15 16 17 18 19 20
+Listed toxins: 2 5 2 9 6 16 14 25 15 51 51 36 34 51 169 80 78 52 66 114
+
+# of Carbons : 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
+Listed toxins: 75 68 28 21 17 16 35 10 34 32 17 25  8 13 19 21 10 12 5  9
+
+# of Carbons : 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
+Listed toxins: 19  7  4  1  8 10  9  7  3  3  2  0  1  1  3  1  1  1  1  2
+
+Summary: a number moderately simple toxins (less than 10 carbon atoms) 
+   A hell of a lot of complex toxins (Between ten and forty carbon atoms) 
+  Very few extremely complex toxins (more than forty carbon atoms)        
+
+Pretty much what you might expect. It's a trade-off between effectiveness and
+the molecular engineering difficulty associated with making a really complex
+poison. Hey, YOU try and synthesise a complex molecule with 40 carbon atoms
+in it, starting with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide! There is a bit of
+bias in the low end, you just can't make much complex stuff with three carbon 
+atoms. You can make plenty of things with five, and more with oxygen and 
+nitrogen 
+thrown in.
+
+The data has been available for years for anyone to look. It probably has 
+some sample biases (like, protein poisons are very complex but not hard to 
+make) but I don't think this matters : it was just a bunch of plant poisons  
+listed in a toxicological dictionary. It happens to fit what we might have 
+expected if the evolutionary economics of natural synthesis of plant 
+pesticides were subject to the sorts of trade-offs 1) and 2) outlined a few 
+paragraphs above.
+
+Ag-pesticide companies tell us they know their chemistry, we know they have 
+business acumen. You might want accuse the pesticide companies of knowing 
+this trend and deliberately only designing simple poisons so you have to go 
+and buy another one when the last simple one you got became worthless due to 
+the appearance of resistance. 
+
+It's a kind of inbuilt obsolescence at the molecular level. It happens to 
+benefit the chem companies that this is the case. But I never attribute to 
+malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity. In this case, it's
+stupidity. We just don't yet know how to cheaply make really complex 
+pesticides to which it is hard for the target organisms to get resistant.
+
+Nature has, incidentally, solved the complexity-of-synthesis issue in a 
+novel way : modularity. It knows how to synthesise twenty or so amino acids;
+but since these amino acids can be daisy-chained by a single, uniform   
+mechanism, it can make an unlimted number of possible proteins simply by 
+bolting the amino acids together in different sequences. There is no need to
+come up with new chemistry for each new protein, it is simply a matter of 
+changing the order in which the well-known reactions occur. Like a Rubik's
+Cube, you only have six colours to choose from, but depending on the way
+you configure the cube you can have billions of combinations of colours, and
+getting them is a simple matter of twisting the faces - any child can do it.
+Protein synthesis still remains a fairly tricky feat of peptide biochemistry,
+we generally employ recombinant bacteria to do it for us because it's 
+something we humans just can't very easily or successfully do in a test tube.
+
+I'm a synthetic organic chemist, and I know it is terribly, terribly hard 
+to synthesise complex molecules. Its possible, but the cost in unwanted  
+byproducts is just too much to make the final pesticide affordable. There is
+another advantage. Biological poisons generally biodegrade, and don't 
+become long term stable environmental contaminants like most of the 
+organochlorines and organophosphates used in the last five decades. Throw in 
+the requirement for biodegradeability and we're synthetically and 
+economically pretty well sunk. By comparison, all of nature's poisons are 
+ultimately biodegradeable.
+
+So what to do? Use nature's chemicals against pests
+----------------------------------------------------
+
+I think the way of the future is clear - stop using simple synthetics and 
+instead, extract complex pesticides from natural sources. Nature is a much 
+better pesticide chemist than humanity, after all.
+
+-Mike Carlton

tennyson.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
+File: Tennyson.txt
+Cont: The report on the infiltration of the disused Tennyson power station
+      in Brisbane, by Sydney Clan member <predator> 14 May 1999
+See:  Il Draino 50th Edition      
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
+
+Tennyson Power Station - Another Northern Cave Clan Triumph
+
+During a meeting at an elegant Sydney yacht club with retired Brisbane Cave
+Clan member Sheep Feet, <predator> was given a clue to the whereabouts of yet
+another chunk of the national grid. Sheep Feet mentioned that, during his 
+employment in a REAL JOB, he became aware that there was a disused power 
+station not ten minutes by train from the Brisbane CBD. Since <pred> was 
+en-route to the abandoned Hydro Power Station at Kuranda (via the disused 
+gas-turnine at Rockhampton), he decided he'd have a go at the local offering.
+ 
+Entry is via a short walk from Yeerongpilly station to the northeast side of
+Softstone St (UBD map 179 F-5) where one climbs over the fence and walks 
+east along the grassy riverbank towards the riverside edge of the old 
+brick building,  until one hears the loud 50Hz hum of lots of big 
+transformers. These throbbing juggernauts are behind prison-bar gates, 
+some of which are warped to permit entry to slimmer Clan members... 
+larger persons will need to get down and dirty by getting in through the 
+old coolant pipes which exit into a canal near the river, but this route 
+is not recommended since this requires mud immersion, and some of these 
+pipes are meshed to prevent access. These bars could be jacked or pried 
+by the usual means but be quick, there is not a lot of cover. There is 
+security on site but it is fairly inactive. There was notification of an 
+intruder alarm but it doesnt seem to be active in the bulk of the station.
+
+Once inside, ascend the stairs to what used to be the generator floor. 
+The six 150 Megawatt generators were similar to, but larger than, the 
+green giants in the Melbourne station, but they have been removed. Old 
+tanks, oxy-cut beams, concrete mountains which once cradled massive pumps 
+and motors adorn the floor. The walls have rails for a 120-ton crane 
+parked at the west end of the generator hall. All is quiet except for the 
+occasional pigeon. The understory is dark and and also denuded of 
+machinery. It's as if the Borg have come and scooped all the machine 
+elements out of the guts of the building. Eerie that the place should 
+seem so dead. The offices where the control systems were housed have also 
+been cleaned out, only the lino remains. The most amazing visage exists 
+where all the boilers and heat-exchangers have been removed, eight 
+stories of girders and beams jut and grasp into empty space as if trying 
+to avoid the rigor mortis which has already overtaken them; industrial 
+death-throes frozen in time... and it's so VAST.
+ 
+Tennyson has not been entirely gutted. Some small areas, clothed in 
+additional layers of locks, fence mesh, ominous warning signs and coils 
+of razor wire. remain connected to the grid, and highly energised with 
+the squillions of kilovolts which run Brisbane. Tennyson is now merely a 
+switchyard for the juice which comes from the rest of SEQEB's network. I 
+assumed that any intruder detection system would be focussed on these 
+spots, so I avoided them and headded up ladders towards the roof.
+ 
+Three floors up, what appears to have been the administration area is 
+locked off with shiny, newly installed steel-bar doors but there didn't 
+appear to be much of interest beyond them. I lacked lock-picks or a 
+hacksaw so I used more staircases and reached the lower roof. This level 
+has amusing doors which, if you walk through them, permit you a six story 
+plunge to your impact-related death below, but otherwise the entertainment
+value is a bit thin. More stairs and ladders take you to the middle roof, 
+which has the footings to long-removed smokestacks, and holes which look 
+ten stories down to the sub-basement. From this level one can also access 
+the elevator shaft motors and also the conveyor belts and hoppers for the 
+coal loader system, which is now mainly a gigantic pigeon-shit collector.
+
+Cages ladders lead to the topmost roofs, from where one can see the 
+Brisbane CBD skyline. You can also see huge alien crop rectangles where 
+the main smokestacks used to be and, if you're lucky, you can see the 
+bloody enormous Rottweiler inside the fenced-off compound where the 
+security guard lives in his caravan. If it isn't inside, be quick and 
+careful when you leave.
+
+I tagged-up discretely and left the plant by the same tight squeeze 
+through which I had come in. Walking east takes you to the electric fence 
+operated by the DPIE, and walking south along this fence takes you to a 
+convenient hole where it meets the fence for the railway line. The rottie 
+has about 500 metres to run from the security compound to this hole and 
+it will leave you more than enough time to get off the substation campus 
+before it arrives. There is probably plenty more to explore at this place 
+before it gets converted to yuppie hi-rise. In all, it's a nice bit of 
+real estate, well worth the effort of fighting with the Queensland Rail 
+system to get to it.
+
+Next issue I'll write about the disused power station at Kuranda. 
+<predator> would like to thank Brisbane Cave Clan man Sheep Feet for his 
+tip-off. In a business where everyone knows some secret hole in the 
+ground, but can't tell you where it is, accurate intelligence is always 
+welcome.
+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+<predator> Cave Clan Sydney : December 23 1999
+
+