Toadfish Monastery

Yarrr, buggritt, now Oi 'ave ter make new pair o peg legs, jess when Oi were gettin the Mk4s werkin real good loike.

Oi managed ter buy a replacement Gold Pass at 'alf toime on Arrghh Bay, an it only cost me 3000 dubloons, so Oi'll be able ter maintain me match fitness!  Them gold passes be mighty rare, so Oi were lucky it came up jess after Oi 'ad me previous wun nicked.  'Ope it arrives in toime fer me Wensday session wi Francine...

...Garrilous Gertrude, one of Bart's many former girlfriends.  Bart had left her weeping at the alter and she had sworn a terrible curse on Bart that one day she would have her revenge.  As her skiff drew closer, a now terrified Bart began to...

Mr Miffed, you should not be visiting those sorts of web sites.

The "problem" you describe is an undocumented feature in Portholes XP which prevents your computer from being attacked by a virus and being damaged.  Unfortunately, there is a known problem in the code which causes the hard drive to be wiped and is fixed in Update ARGH12-49618-GOTCHA-4756098 which you can download from the Scumsoft security centre.

Scumsoft values its customers and prides itself on providing only the best for our pirate friends.  Please accept our offer of a free bug patch programme, Portoles Update which will automatically install all the latest bugs directly from the Scumsoft servers.

Have a nice day.

Quite true, especially home made (by me) lamb shank and vegetable soup with plenty of pearl barley in it - YUM!!!

On the other hand the sibling below me likes to go fishing, but usually only catches a cold.

I read something about this last week, went and found the article.

Last bandaleon Post

Happy birthday Chatty!

I knew there was something I liked about you - the first week of November is when all the best people have their birthdays. 



I guess that was not very humble, was it.  I better go and contemplate quitely over in the corner.

Anyway have a lovely day, eat all your favourite food, spoil your dog and make sure you get all the loving attention you deserve.

Bluenose

Ahoy there all modden pirates!

Iffen ye be 'avin trubble wiv yer Portholes XP or yer Great Cabin Suite, call our 'elpful, 'ighly traned and respeckful tecknishuns oo are eeger to 'elp ye owt.

YYYAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!

Arr, the only blokage ye'd be worrin 'bout after eatin some fish head stew would be in the plumbin.  That be why it be best served at sea - very hard ter block up the oggin (that be nautical talk loike fer the ocean).

Welcome Gloria, I think you will find most of the crew are here.

Bluenose

Edit: I hate it when I see an obvious typo just after I press the POST button.

Also I get confused when a mod has moved a post I am trying to correct while I'm editing it, but all is forgiven, I found it!

...of wot anywun orders an makin up th' diffrense wi' stuff that no-one would want.  Tony had started out as a...

Oh yes!

And lets make sure we let some of the roses go to seed, for I have an itch to make some rose jelly, at least in between testing the progress of the malt...

Bluenose

Actually, this reminds of some work I did on behalf of Native Fish Australia to help out the Platypus Conservancy with some netting surveys that started a few years ago in Melbourne.  They needed people who could identify fish for them that were caught in their nets as part of their permit to net the Yarra River and its tributaries around the suburbs.  This was where I met Dr Melody Serena an American who had been over in Oz for some years studying Platypus.

I remember talking with her over a cup of coffee in the wee small hours and asking how she came to be iin Australia studying our animals.  She said that once she had qualified she had to make a choice of what she whould study and as she put it she could work on some minor points of clarification of well know species in North America, or she could come over here and study anything whe wanted for the simple reason that so little of our wildlife has been studied that it is all virtually green-fields in research terms.

To bring it back to this topic, the same only more so applies to our fossils.  Hardly anything at all has been studied because this is a big country and we don't have many paleontologists here to do the work.  This continent has some of the oldest sediments on Earth and can no doubt shed light on the earliest life forms and recently some very inportant finds have been made.  However, overall we have literally only just begun to scratch the surface, who knows what lies out here to find?

Bluenose

Yup, the "one in a hundred year" storm, flood, drought (insert weather phenomenum of your choice) is simply the one that has a one in one hundred chance of occurring in any given year.  These are not the ones I worry about, I worry about the one in a thousand year, or one in ten thousand year events.

All of these are far more likely than winning the lottery, although to be fair, each year we only get to sample the pot once for the "one in ..." events, whereas in the lottery there are enough people buying tickets (ie enough samples) that someone wins almost every time its drawn (at least with lotto type lotteries, other types may have a winner every time, but let us not be distracted.)

Getting back to lotteries if I sold you a ticket at the normal price and it had a one in ten thousand chance you would be pretty happy I would think, even more so with one in a thousand.  One in a hundred would be simply outstanding.  Probability is not something that most people seem to have a very good handle on.

WRT the weather it amuses me to hear people saying things like "well recent events like Hurricane Katrina or the drought in Australia prove that global warming is happening".  That global warming is occurring is not in dabate here (at least not by me) although I am far more skeptical that it is entirely or even at all anthropogenic.  However, its effects are far more subtle than most people seem to think and big storms and long severe droughts are part of the natural order of things and will continue to occur in irregular cycles global warming notwithstanding.

The danger of this sort of ill-informed debate is that when the cycle swings around, as it surely will, then all those who believed it because of these false arguments will turn around and say "we were lied to" and the reputation of honest scientists will be further damaged and continuing necessary work to prepare for the real effects of global warming will run into trouble (and you thought they were in trouble now - well, you ain't seen nothing yet!)

We owe it to our future to be honest in our assessments of the situation, let us not get carried away with the current fashion in climate science and be altogether more skeptical about the extreme claims that are being made.  The reality is we still do not really have a good handle on all the mechanisms involved and until then all our predictions are nothing more than guess work.  Indeed, given that the climate is almost certainly a non-linear system even fully understanding how it works does not mean that the behaviour of the system is at all predictable in the long run.  People who make claims that they have a model of the global climate and that they can confidentally predict anything with it about long-term climate are either ignorant of the basic math of non-linear systems (commonly called "chaos theory"), or they are telling porkies.

I think we should certainly be cautious and do what seems to be the best things to ameliorate any effects we may be having on the global climate, but lets be honest that we are only making as yet rather poorly educated guesses and admit that we may be wrong and in fact it is possible (if unlikely, at least on current knowledge) that these efforts may actually make things worse in the long run.  Let us also spend some serious dollars on basic research that is not tied to any particular point of view to find out what is really going on.

Hmmm...  enough of a rant for now, I guess.

Bluenose

Might I suggest we have a small part of the monastery set aside for a distillary.  I rather fancy the idea of some quiet contemplative monks watching over the maturation of some fine malt whisky, only occasionally testing the contents, of course. :toadfish:

Bluenose

I usually only buy tickets when the big draw is on, there's one on Saturday night for AUD$21 million and I've got me a ticket!

My wife and I like to day dream on occaision about what we would do if we ever did win it big.  We have no real expectation that it will happen, but it's fun to speculate.

What we have come up with is this, obviously first off we would pay out our mortgage.  We would give a sum to my sister, put some in trust for my wife's sister (she is intellectually disabled and suffers from bipolar disorder) we would give some to my wife's mother and my parents and we would do something similar for my kids (grown up), but maybe we would put it in trust until they are 30 or something like that.

Beyond that we would buy a decent 4WD and off road camper, put most of the money into a boring safe place (or several) and head off for a couple of years around Australia to give us time to digest what to do with the balance.  We would expect that our requirements are pretty modest and would end up with a large sum to play with, which can be used for a great deal of good.

What I expect I would do with that money would be things like establishing trust funds to provide funding fo scientific research on native fish (one of my favourite hobby horses) and set up a scheme to help people get a leg up.  Perhaps providing micro loans or something like that.  I like the idea of things that will work at the base level, right down among real people rather than larger more abstract things.

If it ever happened, I would not want to rush in too quickly, it would be so easy to do the first thing that pops up and then find out later you could have done something so much better.  That is the point of the time out.  Probably I would find things I could do while away that would make a real difference to people as we travel.  A few thousand buckazoids well spent helping establish some sort of community resource, for example, could easily make all the difference to some people.

The main thing is, I would not want my name all over everything.  I would want to find ways to help out quietly.

Oh well, it's only a dream, but it's a nice one...

Bluenose