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  • Oh, of course

    Of course Washington State Nurses Board would have different approved educational assessment companies for nurses out of the USA than the one I’ve used before. So instead of being something in the region of $50 and happening straight away, I instead need to:

    – Register with a new company
    – Pay lots of fees
    – Submit the forms to UWE and Cardiff to get my transcripts mailed to North America (third time’s the charm)
    – Pay lots more fees
    – Wait forever
    – Answer lots of questions about why they’ve not turned up (because they never fricking turn up)
    – Be told my education isn’t good enough to be a nurse in the US
    – Pay lots more fees & do lots more courses
    – Take an exam…
    …hopefully then I can register.

    Argh.

  • Australia May Stop Providing Water and Power to Remote Aboriginal Communities | VICE News

    Australia May Stop Providing Water and Power to Remote Aboriginal Communities | VICE News

    evolvingmatter:

    The Australian government says it can no longer afford to provide basic services to many remote communities, meaning some residents could be forced to relocate.

    “Remote” being Aboriginal, of course. We can always fund remote  communities with white people, but budgetary reasons apparently make a great excuse for forcing Aboriginal people off their land by turning off the water and electricity. This is so appalling and it’s (still) happening on our watch.

  • ohcaptainmycaptain1918:

    gwheeler:

    My kind of comedy

    Funny story about Bill Nye: so a friend of mine back in Ottawa was at the Science and Tech Museum, and she didn’t know it, but apparently Bill Nye was guest appearing there that day. So she is waiting for the elevator and this guy walks up beside her to wait for it, too. She turns and looks at him and immediately recognizes him. Completely forgetting that she’s a grown adult, she points at him and exclaims, “BILL NYE!” He glances at her and gives her this really fucking weird look, and she thinks, Oh fuck, I completely just embarrassed myself in front of Bill Nye and now he probably thinks I’m some creepy stalker or something. So the elevator doors open and he walks in, and she’s just too stunned and mortified to get in behind him; she just stands there, staring. He’s in the elevator, alone, with his back to her.

    Just as the doors are closing, he whips around, points at her, and shouts, “SCIENCE!” and then the doors close. 

  • 18mr:

    fascinasians:

    Three Muslim students were killed tonight, with little to no media coverage.       Syrian American medical student Deah Barakat, his Palestinian American wife Yusor Abu-Salha and her sister Razan were shot and killed in a Chapel Hill condominium on February 10, 2015.

    I’d link to an article but I have yet to find one that goes past 7 sentences.

    Craig Hicks charged with 3 counts of first degree murder.

    Deah was 23.
    Yusor was 21.
    Razan was 19.

    Three lives ended in a second.

  • Oh, the hilarity.

    So, for years my media server ran Ubuntu 12.x. It ran it happily and despite the fact it was hideously out of date and painfully slow things were (broadly speaking) good. We had a cozy clunky duct-taped together feel, where bits occasionally dropped off at which point there were enormous amounts of swearing, weeping and coffee… I’d spend hours playing at the command line with my latent and semi-forgotten linux knowledge being pulled, dragged, screaming and wailing from the pits of hell in which it lurks and eventually through a series of cludges it’d always get back up and running.

    The new media server is sexy and fast and multi-core and more memory than my old machine would even consider supporting. It’s got 4 SATA ports on the motherboard. It’s quick and slinky. It runs Plex and I can stream music from my server as I go to work. I can share my media with my friends. Shiny shiny… It can actually transcode on the fly without falling over. Logitech media server seems to be happier, the little boxes haven’t fallen off the network yet.

    But despite that, it also doesn’t entirely work.

    See, I installed Ubuntu 14.x and whilst much of it is nice…after much internal (and remarkably chilled out) cursing*, and having trawled the internet, my VNC connection, and hence my desktop on the media server, looks like this:

    X11 Blankness

    Which is overly grey and underly useful. Delight in the minimalist asthetic of no icons, and no usable windows. No applications. It’s ‘sparse’. I’m sure that’s very in. It’s also quite irritating.

    After a lot of prodding and poking it turns out, I’m not alone.

    XRDP, which is the X-Remote-Desktop-Protocol, which appears to be responsible for allowing me to actually use my machine as a headless box (i.e. one that lives in a cupboard with no monitor) appears to be the subject of a honking great bug. Which is upsetting. Now I actually can and am use(ing) an alternative non-cludge to fire up applications and have them display on my laptop, because OSX is sufficiently UNIXy that with X-window server installed that bit of magic works. However, that doesn’t solve a couple of issues. There are graphical front-ended applications that I use on the Linux box that I like to leave up and running when I shut my Mac. That’s part of the purpose of the media server, I can use it to run various things that I might not leave running otherwise.

    So I’m not quite sure what to do about them at the moment.

    The other quirk which I’ve not yet managed to resolve is (I’m moderately sure) a permissions / remote user access / sharing issue. For some reason when I try and log in to copy files it won’t accept my password. I have yet to work out why. I can log in as a guest. I wondered if it had created some quirky username for me and I’d not noticed – but having checked that doesn’t seem to be the case. So I’ve had to resort to another cludge. I’ve got an application that can use SCP to copy stuff to the server.

    It’s filthy-dirty solution wise, but as far as I can tell the access privileges look right… so perhaps I need to look at it when I’m not ill.

    Incidentally, Pseudoephedrine is my favourite drug today. It made the whole day much more bearable, despite my cold persisting like a persisty** thing.

    IMG_20150211_150754

    * I spent lots of money on new music today. We have four new albums that are universally fan-fucking-tastic.

    ** Granted, 3 days only at the moment. But I’m slightly sensitive given how long it took me to actually get over the last cold.

  • Reblog if you can speak, read, or at least kinda communicate in more than one language.

    Reblog if you can speak, read, or at least kinda communicate in more than one language.

    solarbird:

    werpiper:

    i can fumble my way through mutual comprehension without much of anything really, but linguistically i’m fluent in english, and flailing at french, german, hebrew, icelandic, a little latin and aramaic, and even less asl.

    “it’s better to speak any language poorly than…

    I can kinda stagger around upsetting the French. Essentially I attempt French and they plead with me to stop. But usually sufficiently to find places, order food, buy tickets, etc. That said, I managed to explain, in French, that I had hideous allergies and please could I have some eyedrops so I could avoid scratching my eyes out to a pharmacist, and she understood.

    Either that or the pained screaming and the red raw eyes were enough of a clue and she just guessed that the yammering idiot must want drugs of some sort.

  • gojikas:

    New Orleans trans advocates say they have been left stunned by the death of Penny Proud, one of their city’s young, black trans residents, the latest casualty in the ongoing national trend of antitrans violence that has seen five trans women of color killed within the first five weeks of 2015.

    Proud, 21, was fatally shot multiple times at 1:30 a.m. on February 10, according to local news report from NOLA that the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs has linked to Proud. Few other details are currently available, but the first press release to address the situation, from New Orleans LGBT youth of color activist group BreakOUT!, condemned NOLA’s report for misgendering Proud.

    In announcing her death, BreakOUT! has urged media to cover Proud’s story, as well as those of all trans victims, with respect for her preferred identity, name, and pronoun, which also accords with journalistic standards endorsed by the Associated Press and GLAAD. The youth group had already been writing a press release concerning the recent deaths of Yazmin Vash Payne, 33, in Los Angeles; Ty Underwood, 24, in North Tyler, Texas; Lamia Beard, 30, in Norfolk, Va.; and Lamar Edwards, 20, in Lousville, Ky., when news of Proud’s murder emerged from local sources. San Francisco resident Taja DeJesus was also discovered fatally stabbed this week.

    “These deaths had little to no mainstream media attention,” BreakOUT! stated. “The silence and lack of action from media on behalf of the Black transgender community sends a strong message that Black Trans Lives, in fact, do not matter.”

    The NCAVP, of which BreakOUT! is a member, concurred. “2015 has begun in absolute tragedy, with the loss of four black transgender women and one Latina transgender woman,” stated Chai Jinduraswat, codirector of community organizing and public advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project. “We all must take immediate action by supporting the leadership of transgender women of color, public awareness and respect campaigns, speaking out against this violence, and protecting transgender people from harassment and discrimination. This is an epidemic and an outrage, and we all have to commit as a nation to ending this violence.”

    A candlelight vigil for Proud will be held tonight 7 p.m. at the site of her death, on the 1100 Block of North Claiborne Ave., in the Treme district of New Orleans, according to the Transgender Law Center.

    Anyone with information about Proud’s murder is asked to contact Homicide Detective Robert Barrere at 504-658-5300, or contact Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or www.crimestoppersgno.org.
    [source]

  • Pre-planning

    Irritatingly*, I’ve managed to catch another cold just in time for another holiday. Last time I was so thoroughly ill I actually claimed back my holiday, this time it is, so far, just a tedious cold; but it kept me up half of last night (and by extension kept Kathryn awake) as I hacked and coughed and sneezed and woke-up repeatedly with my head filled with sinus-cement.

    TMI?

    Anyhow, whilst I have pretty much just dinked on the internet all day (interspersed with more episodes of A Chef’s Life**) I have also spent some time pondering the massive concept of ‘our house in the US lands’. See, whilst we don’t intend to rock up in our chosen town and go “Hey, I’m buyinig that”, instead opting for the more sensible rent for a bit, see if we like it, and see if we can survive running our business, and then buy plan.

    But that doesn’t mean I can’t toy with ideas or try and fathom how things might work.

    So I’ve found a US company that makes biodigestors, I’m quite fond of the idea of having a biodigestor having seen Kevin McCloud’s . Not for the purpose of making electricity, but for the purpose of making gas to cook on. Which is, interestingly, exactly what this biodigestor is for.

    Mainly because I don’t like the idea of using fossil-fuel gas.

    Secondly I’ve found a Washington based COOP that hopefully will reduce the cost of getting Solar panels…if we can get a few others on board at the same time. And there is an equivalent for what I call a Feed In tariff, and it turns out we can sell the carbon credits, too.

    All of this is good stuff.

    I’ve found books on building straw bale homes, at least one of which I will have to obtain (although I might leave that until we’re a bit further along)…

    …and I’m really interested in the polystyrene / rebar / cement foundations system – although Kathryn’s not so fond, so we may be doing something else there.

    Anyhow. It’s kept me from going insane with my cold.

    * to put it mildly.
    ** So we were at Mockingbird cafe who were very nice, although we both agree that they’ve slightly overstated their southernness, and the experience of service from people who are clearly proper hipsters was interesting. But yes, it’s very nice food and we definitely enjoyed it and intend to go back. Anyhow, they mentioned A Chef’s Life, which it turns out is a pleasantly entertaining and interesting PBS show (particularly if you’re a food/cooking geek as we both are), and it also turns out (on the turning front) that there’s a blugin (which is how I’m saying ‘plugin’ at the moment. I actually typed that typo without thinking, which is a bit concerning) for XBMC (Kodi) that allows you to watch PBS’s archives. Ace.

  • beldaran:

    jumpingjacktrash:

    you go, you beautiful person. you fuckin go.

    YES FUCK YES

  • Constellation on Flickr.

    Constellation