"That wasn't bad, that was a miscommunication."

I really love this photo, but it's possible that the reason I took the picture is because "spinx" sounds like a cockney epithet or an embarrassing bodily noise or something.

NOTE: The Finnish word for a supernatural riddle-telling winged cat/woman is "sfinksi", not "spinx". Finns don't really understand the concept of the ph.

Linux woes.

My computer is suffering from a soft lockup in the CPU on every single bootup and shutdown, which some poeple think is the fault either of a wireless card (I don't have it) or of usplash, which I tried to disable just now. It's also, in another error message, apparently mistaking an ATA hdd for an SCI, which is probably due to an ATA bus error, which might be due to a timeout of some kind. I haven't gotten very far with that route.

This is all the result of excavations after Brother Windows said my problems sounded more like a harddrive problem than like a motherboard problem. Unless it's a problem with the ATA bus in actuality, which would be the harddrive's connection to the motherboard (as I understand it), making both him and Wax correct. The sad thing is that Wax knows only a little more about Linux and computers than I do and neither one of us are really qualified for more than the most elementary troubleshooting by poking around the Ubuntu forums and Google. Another visit from Brother Linux may be called for.

Ciara & Leon at dinnertime

I shall call them Pikkulillan and Squishy. (And Loke shall I call Gubben, for lo, he looks like a little old man, somber of eye and pouty of mouth, and he doth bear the eyebrow-wrinkle of Deep Thoughts, and he shall probably learn English from the Internet because he will sit silently on Brother Windows's lap for hours at a time while he plays around with the computer.)