Author: Paul Tomblin

Sandbaggers

The New York Times has an article about my very favourite TV series of all times.

Spies Who Were Cool and Very, Very Cold

My Series 3 DVDs just arrived a few days ago, and I’ve already watched all of the episodes. Before that, I had a bunch of 3rd or 4th generation video tapes that were barely watchable. It’s sure nice to have them on DVD now.

Interestingly enough, the reason it’s taken until now for DVDs of the third series to come out is that there was some confusion about who owned the copyright. It was more convoluted than the whole SCO versus Linux thing.

There’s a fan site for the series. It’s pretty well done.

US and its neighbours

I just read this article about the US and how they keep slighting if not deliberately rebuffing Canada and Mexico.

U.N. Wire | 2003.10.14 | Crossette

One thing the article doesn’t mention, but something that my parents and other Canadians mention a lot is that with 60,000 Americans being given extremely generous hospitality on Canadian soil when their planes were grounded on 11Sep01, Canadian police, firefighters and avalance rescue workers pouring across the border in any transportation they could scrounge (often paid out of their own pocket), the Canadian government offering troops and financial aid, George Bush gave a speech at Ground Zero praising the nations that had rushed to aid the US, but didn’t mention Canada even once.

And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is still beating the drums about how lax Canadian borders let the terrorists in, in spite of the fact that not one of the terrorists did come through Canada, and that cross border trade should be stopped or curtailed until Canada beefs up her border security.

Upgrades suck

I’ve been putting off upgrading my home machine from RedHat 7.3 for years, it seems. RedHat is making noises about end-of-lifing 7.3, so I knew if I wanted the latest security patches, I was going to have to upgrade soon. This weekend was it.

What a royal pain.

I’ll probably post later about the joys and sorrows of upgrading, but for now let me just say that if I could have postponed it another year, I would have.

This post will also serve as a test to make sure I’ve finally got all the bits re-installed. Thank you CPAN.

Pain

I suffer from chronic pain. I have been since 1975 or so. Yup, 28 years of chronic pain out of 42 years of life. And much of the rest of it was no picnic either. I’ve tried just about every possible treatment or cure in that time. In actual fact, the doctors are baffled by what’s causing it.

The best article I ever read about it is here but unfortunately it will cost you $3 to read it.

One of the big problems I have is that every time I try a new avenue of treatment, I tell myself over and over again not to get my hopes up. But I do, and then when it doesn’t help I get extremely depressed. As well as conventional treatments, I also get my hopes up from reading about experimental treatments, even though I know that the god damned insurance companies will never pay for any of those.

Here’s another highly experimental treatment that will probably never see the light of day. But I’m going to get my hopes up about it anyway.

Wired News: Saving Pvt. Ryan … From Pain