Yay, me. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong when I was trying to change the laptop’s screen brightness. Spicctrl is there and works just as it should, but only if you use it correctly. I had to chown to give the file to my username, then decide upon the setting, then give it back to root and set the default. An “aha!” moment–I’d been trying to do it as me, not root, even though I know full well that users don’t have access to system files, only settings that affect that one user. Oops. 🙂
Alles Oder Nicht
If my poor, rusty German serves (not that it ever was really good), the title means “All Or Nothing”. Very bouncy and happy. Otherwise, all I can understand is a word here and there, but Herr Frank is “pop-y Eurodance”, and combined with a bright, sunny almost-spring day and warm temperatures (it’s going to be 77F today and I’m wearing shorts), it’s most energising. I’m just about finished the ironing, which I often don’t even start until nearly noon, so I must be doing something right! 🙂
Oh fachrissake! If English is your first language and you are more than eight years old with an IQ above average room temperature, you have no excuse whatsoever for not learning its vocabulary. I refer to the idiotic email you forwarded, titled, “Dumb animals? I think not!”
“Dumb” as in the phrase “dumb animals” has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence, it simply refers to an animal’s inability to speak. Just as “deaf and dumb” never meant “can’t hear, and stupid to boot”, “dumb animal” never meant it wasn’t intelligent. Dumb has come to mean “unintelligent”, at least in casual speech**, but in this respect, it means only “speechless”, as in, “I was struck dumb by the magnitude of your stupidity and illiteracy.” Animals cannot speak English, and apparently, neither can you. The word “dumbass”, however, does refer to intelligence, or rather to a lack thereof. That one should be more than familiar to you.
**The original word “dumb” comes from Middle English and means “speechless” or “incapable of speech”. We get “dumb” to mean “stupid” thanks to German immigrants, and the similarity of “dumb” to their word “dumm”, which does mean stupid (as in “dummkopf”).
Heh. The only thing better than someone who really, really knows his stuff is someone who’s so nerdy about it that a compliment or two will have him spilling information like Niagara Falls. You can spot them a mile away–they’re guys, and they always sign message board posts with their full names, usually including middle initial. If ’tis information you want, make sure they know you’re female, and toss in a “Wow!” or two. No matter how busy they are, or how many questions (intelligent questions, of course) you ask, they won’t get tired of showing off for a very, very long time. You couldn’t buy a better resource than a nerd.
There…you ill-mannered, overbearing, ill-informed, illiterate dumbass. Couldn’t be arsed to take the time to find out exactly what was in the product you were so quick to dismiss? Well, research says you were wrong…and now you look like the backwards, backwoods, right-wing, narrow-minded jump-to-uninformed-conclusions fool that you are. HAH!
Oh JUST what the world needs. The dumbass who couldn’t keep a hardy cichlid alive has…a cockatoo. Thank (G/g)od(s)/deity or non-deity of choice that it’s not a U2 or M2 (with his “thing” about big fish, I’m actually surprised at that), but the poor creature looks like it’s been to hell and back (WTF kind of feed store keeps a ‘too with the goddamned CHICKENS??), and I don’t imagine it’ll get any better living with this idiot. He should probably just save himself the trouble (and us the headache of listening to him whine) and get it euthanised right now. He’d die rather than sell/give it to someone who knows how to properly care for a ‘too, and if he doesn’t kill it, you’ll be able to knock me over with a feather. He’s got a “reverse Midas touch”; everything he touches turns to shit, and animals in his care are doing well to survive, much less thrive.
How cool is that? An upgrade to Feisty was available tonight, so I did it. It took away that horrible Control Centre thingie that I hated (shades of Windows), and as I was looking in the Preferences, I noticed “Desktop Effects”. Being the nosy sort that I am, I opened it and saw two checkboxes: wobbly windows and desktop cube! Yaaaay! It’s Compiz, not Beryl, so settings are in gconf-editor instead of a separate app like beryl-manager, and I can’t use Emerald themes, but it’s close enough for me! It has everything that I use, and all I had to do was check two boxes and change one number 1 (default) to 4. Not that Beryl was difficult, but this was ridiculously easy, and I didn’t even know it was an available option until tonight. Cool!
A poll to name your fish. Jesus wept. Here’s a fantastic name for him…Betta I’m Actually Not Going To Kill (For Once).
Stop naming your fish after stupid half-arsed celebrities. Those who know who these people are might care, but the rest of us don’t, so don’t waste electrons to tell us. You’ve got a lifetime subscription to Hello!…we get it, STFU, GFY, DIAF. Never mind what the poor things are named, just stop killing them.
I know where I belong. It’s sure as hell not fixing computers in the Armpit of America, and it’s not even in Canada’s Ocean Playground. Nope, I belong on a riverbank in some jungle in Borneo, alternately chasing wild and wonderful aquatic critters and strange forest fauna. Chasing swimming things and crawling things anywhere is fun, but chasing them in an ecosystem so diverse as Borneo’s would be heaven. I’m watching some bug guy who’s got a light set up behind a sheet to attract nocturnal insects for observation. There are literally thousands of crawlies, including a gorgeous moth, some kind of huge ground beetle and a cicada as big as his hand. He looks like a cool enough old guy, and seems to love bugs, but that should be ME watching them, not him! 🙂