Author Archives: Donncha

Our Family Cat, Puss

You know, we never named our cat. I like to think it’s because cats are always half wild and you’re never sure what they’ll do. That’s certainly true for Puss. One moment you’re rubbing her soft fur, or scratching behind her ear, she’s purring and you’re relaxed. The next moment she has her claws into your wrist and her jaws are going for the flesh between your thumb and first finger.. ah.
Come to think of it, that pain doesn’t compare to the time she got caught up a tree in a gale. Yours truely had to go up fetch her down. As I dropped her down to my brother on the ground she did not want to let go of my hand at all!
She was a damn lucky cat too. While holidaying with my aunt, my brother and sister found her in Co. Cork up the side of mountain trail. She was meowing and thin and looking for food. For some reason they took her the many miles home to Cork. In the late Summer of 1989 we didn’t have a pet, never had one, and weren’t going to have one. However despite that, it was clear from the start that she adopted us.
“I want food!” “Give me attention!” “Go away, I’m tired!”
Such is the life of a cat.
Did I say she was lucky? She’s had her scrapes. On St. Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) 1990 she jumped out of her box late at night. Unfortunately there was a fishing hook hanging down from the shelf above. She got caught in it and raced up the garden in great pain. When I heard the commotion, the meowing and the crying, I raced outside in pijamas, picked her up and cradled her as I took her indoors. The hook had lodged in her belly and her paw had stuck in the briars at the other end of the hook. I cradled her for what seemed like ages while my father rang a vet. I’m not sure at this stage did he call out to us, or did we call to his surgery, but he sorted her out. We continued to bring both Spring and Puss to the same vet for the last 14 years.
I rang home last Saturday to hear bad news. Unfortunately, Puss hadn’t been too well of late, she wasn’t eating, and was very lethargic. When I left for Chicago I guessed there might not be too much time left for her. I was right.
She was put to sleep last Wednesday. It must have been very hard on my father and brother to bring her to the vet, but it was the only humane thing to do.
Cats are known to be solitary creatures, they like their own company and shy away from human contact. Maybe that’s true in the wild, but I wouldn’t believe it for a moment when it comes to domesticated cats. Puss was part of the family, as was Spring.

Relaunching a website..

John points at a story about relaunching websites. I dunno, It doesn’t make sense to completely revamp your site, but it still happens. We’re in the middle of a relaunch, and while the site design is going to change, the basic contents and structure isn’t. Does that count as a redesign? Incremental changes happen all the time of course, without them the site would stagnate and glaring bugs wouldn’t be fixed!

QTParted – Partition Magic for Linux

Well, not quite. This is a Qt frontend to GNU parted. I have a spare 20GB hardrive here so I’ll see what it can do with that!
It’s also available as an RPM on apt-get, but I’m not sure which repository. Here’s the contents of my sources.list:

rpm ftp://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat/9/en/i386 os updates extra
rpm-src ftp://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat/9/en/i386 os updates extra

rpm http://ayo.freshrpms.net redhat/9/i386 os updates freshrpms
rpm-src http://ayo.freshrpms.net redhat/9/i386 os updates freshrpms

rpm http://utelsystems.dyndns.org/apt redhat/9/en/i386 utelsystems
rpm-src http://utelsystems.dyndns.org/apt redhat/9/en/i386 utelsystems

#newrpms.sunsite.dk
rpm http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/apt/ redhat/en/i386/9.0 newrpms
rpm-src http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/apt/ redhat/en/i386/9.0 newrpms

(via the ILUG!)

what a week…

Kicked off last week jet lagged by 8 or 9 hours in a plane… gah! Hostel was very nice, although I was glad when we got accomodation later in the week.
On Monday I think we went up The Sears Tower. The sky was overcast but it was still an amazing view – Mairead, sorry for ringing you from there, I know it was very later back home!
We spent Tuesday looking for an appartment. I called into the office, met Ed, Jim and others. We got to use a PC to browse appartments.com and found a few nice ones – we arranged an appointment with Carrie in Printers Square for 3pm. Unfortunately all their appartments were simply way beond our budget however.
While we mulled over our accomodation options (live in a cardboard box or an expensive studio!) back at the hostel that night we were given tickets to a baseball game that night. It was on at 7pm, we had 30 minutes to get to Wrigglyville so we rushed! I thought the tickets would be among the cheaper seats, but no, they were for a suite! We joined a line of well dressed people, and stopped outside the Fox Corporate Suite. 🙂 Opening the door, I asked, “Are we in the right place?” We were, and Brett, a marketing executive for Fox made us feel very welcome! It was the first baseball game I’ve been to, and it was brilliant! It’s the infamous one where Sammy Sousa used a corked bat and was discovered when the bat split. It’s been all over the news the past few days. I’ll post pics here tomorrow!
The John Hancock Center is amazing too, although the elevator up hurt my ears no end, and swallowing or breathing deeply never helped. Does the elevator in that building go faster than in Sears?
Finally we managed to find an appartment. It’s up north between Irving Park and Montrose and we’re sharing with 2 Irish girls and an English girl. Thankfully, they aren’t TV Soap fans!
First impressions of Chicago? It’s a great city, and I think I’m going to enjoy my time here! I’m not looking forward to the summer heat and humidity, but as long as I’m in an air conditioned office or appartment I won’t mind too much!
Oh yeah, Owen – Dream Theatre are playing here on July 19th AFAIR, I’ll let you know for sure by email!