OneAndOneIs2

...without fear of contradiction, that I'm just about ready for this bloody winter to end.

I swear it's lasted for over a year. I can't remember a time when I woke up and it wasn't dark outside. And this morning it was raining as well. Miserable bloody weather, depressing bloody mornings. . . bleh.

On the plus side, I had a lot of automated emails from various places on the Internet wishing me a happy birthday. I feel loved.

;o)

A few days ago.. Wednesday, I think... I spilled some water.

Salt water.

On my keyboard.

I don't usually buy particularly expensive or high-end computer parts. I prefer the good mid-range stuff: No fancy, cutting-edge stuff that hardly ever works. Just tried & tested and reliable.

A while ago, I made an exception. I needed a new keyboard, and I bought a Logitech G15.

It's a great keyboard. It has lots of extra buttons, it has USB sockets, it has backlit keys. It's a superb keyboard.

Or it was, before I spilt salt water over it.

I know the drill for keyboard spillages. Rinse with water, leave to dry. But this keyboard has more gadgetry than most, I wasn't sure this would work. But I tried anyway. A quick rinse, leave to stand.

Plug it in next day, the lights flash on and off, and nothing works.

Bugger. It's dead.

"Kill or cure" time, I give it a really thorough rinse, then start in on it with a screwdriver. If any water got into the innards, it's going to take a while for it to get out, so I wanted to open it up to help out.

Plug it in the next day, and it seems to work. Then I try typing, and about half the keys do something they shouldn't. Improved, but still not fixed.

Last resort: Praying it's only surplus water STILL in the workings, I re-assemble the whole thing and leave it on a radiator overnight.

Plugged it in just now, and tried typing the alphabet.

And it worked!

The water has been purged, and there seem to be no lasting ill-effects.

That's a big relief, as although it's my birthday next week, it's too late to ask for a new keyboard. And I can't easily afford to replace one as expensive as the G15 is...

The modern world is full of contradictions. As previously-fatal diseases such as diabetes becomes easily treatable, there is no longer any 'selection pressure' removing carriers of genetic susceptibility to diseases from the gene pool.

The upshot of this is that the diseases will increase in number. Great for the people who manufacture the cure, but less great for the population as a whole. By finding a treatment for a condition, you actually make it afflict more people.

A possible solution is to use genetic engineering to remove 'faulty' genes so that inherited disorders are not passed on. But there are so many issues that arise when you start thinking about tampering with human genes.

So what about an alternative way of using GE to improve human health?

As we all know, the typical western diet is far too high in carbohydrates, particularly sugars; and fats, particularly saturated fats.

So here's an idea. We've all seen "friendly bacteria" yoghurt advertised - at least, I have, and with the miniscule amount of TV I watch, if I've seen it the whole world has.

What if you were to GE these bacteria to be even more friendly?

It doesn't actually matter how much sugar you eat. Seriously, it doesn't. What matters is how much gets through your gut and into the bloodstream.

So if you had a whole load of bacteria that got there first...

Some bacteria can polymerise sugars into cellulose - which we can't digest. If the bacteria in our stomachs could be engineered to "soak up" the excess sugar and convert it in this manner, they would eliminate one of the big excesses from our diet, and also provide us with both extra fiber, and water - both of which we could mostly do with more of.

And if those bacteria used the cellulose to put a wall around themselves, like plant cells do, and then absorbed all the fat they could find.. well, then all that sugary fatty food would be turned into millions of tiny balls of indigestible, fat-filled grains of fiber.

Sure, it wouldn't solve every problem. But if bacteria COULD be engineered to do this, it could stop an awful lot of diet-related health problems at a stroke.

No pun intended ;o)

I don't often get them. I've had so many I'm mostly immune now. But every now and again, one slips through. I escaped them at my first school but now at my second, one got me.

The thing that really annoys me about them is the snot.

You make so much of it that you can't breathe. If you try and get rid of it to the point that you can, you (a) dehydrate and (b) get inflamed nasal tissues that struggle to cope with the demand, so even if there's no snot there's still no option of breathing through your nose.

Eventually, I usually cave in and take decongestants. And sure enough, they do stop the vicious cycle of snot production.

Totally.

So your sinuses start to feel like they're being sandpapered as dry air flows over their unprotected-by-mucous surface.

The only time you feel halfway human is when you take a long shower and inhale warm steamy air for a while. But that only lasts so long.

Yesterday, I couldn't take any more. I have a small kettle in my room, bought when I needed hot water to shave in. Redundant ever since. I took the lid off, filled it with water, and turned it on.

Lid stayed off.

Every so often, I added a drop of olbas oil and topped it up with more water. (Olbas oil is, by the way, a really good thing to apply to animal ticks. Even better than white spirit!) The room was warmed just by the steam, and my breathing eased a bit. I thought after a while tho that it had evaporated away.

Then I left the room for a minute. Came back in with dry sinuses and inhaled a mercifully humid, warm lungful of olbas-scented air.

First decent night's sleep I've had in days...

Sick of the problems of being constantly on the wrong PC, or stuck behind a firewall, I've bought myself a virtual server. Somewhere to SSH-tunnel to and to rsync my files to, etc.

I've used Putty and Firefox to connect to the web via a remote server before - I wrote a guide on it, in fact... But I could not get it working on Vista. It just insisted that the proxy server was refusing connections, try as I might.

It worked fine from my other PC, and from the laptop when booted into Ubuntu, so I knew it wasn't the connection itself.

I even resorted into installing Cygwin just so that I could run openSSH itself. No joy. Even turning on the "verbose" switch, there was not a single connection to the SSH tunnel happening.

So that made it the Vista version of Firefox that was the problem. It was configured to connect to "localhost" port "5678" just as the Ubuntu and other PC versions were. I was using the same SSH command. What was the problem?

It finally occurred to me to try "127.0.0.1" instead of "localhost" and suddenly, it works flawlessly. Vista, it appears, doesn't know the meaning of "localhost"

Useless bloody OS. It took me over an hour to work out that one stupid error. What moron came up with THAT idea?

I'm still on the mailing list from the science department from the school I was at last year. Yesterday afternoon, I got an email with a link to a useful website - Planet Scicast

I had a quick look through the videos, and saw this one which shows a rather beautiful flame in a bottle.

And the trouble is, whereas you might watch it and say "That looks cool"... I was in a science classroom. With several other budding science teachers. And our response was to yell "Claire? Do we have any big bottles, and where've you put the ethanol??"

Science teachers... possibly the worst people to be given access to a science department prep. room...

We didn't get quite the same flame - I think we needed more ethanol to get more of the air out. Our flame lasted about a millisecond and I was very glad I'd lit it at arm's length with a long splint. Had the bottle been pointed downward, it would have taken out a roof tile or two :o)

Apparently, science teachers are very high on such things as the Piaget scale and are thus likely to have enquiring minds.. but why is it that this seems to mostly find an outing in a fascination with making interesting things happen with fire?

Ever seen what happens when a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and ethanol is ignited and then has potassium permanganate added to it..?