Coredump

Latest version of my poster paper for presentation at the PhilRice 18th National R&D Conference on March 15.

Sounds like Mission: Impossible, huh?I have to get the critters up and running in time for our National R&D Conference on Monday. The thing is, I just got notice *today*. It would have been okay since I was banking on the Bayanihan Linux Project’s Thin Client Manager, which was launched about two weeks ago (I think). But when I went to their site — no downloads available yet. Aarrghhh!

So here I am, scrambling for quick-and-dirty installations to get one up and running. My eye is currently on Skolelinux, a Debian-based educational distro.

<Keeping fingers crossed.>

Flickr has another cool feature: a “Daily Zeitgeist”, a Flash thingie that, er, flashes my (or my contacts, mine and my contacts, everyone’s — you get the drift) recent photos in a sidebar button.

The 18th National R&D Conference is coming up, and the deadline for the poster paper is fast approaching (March 4).

I have yet to submit a draft. Well, I *do* have a draft but it’s not fleshed out yet. Plus the title looks geeky. How’s “The Pinoy Farmers’ Internet portal: A virtual gateway for the Philippine Agricultural Extension System“? Sound geeky enough?

There’s this local bookstore here in the province that sells real cheap books — is Php30 cheap enough for you? Okay, so they’re second-hand books, and Booksale prolly sells them for a lot less, but with the prices of brand new books nowadays — and paperbacks at that, not even the nifty (*and* hefty) cloth- or hardbound stuff — I’ll take whatever blessing comes my way.

But I digress: so there’s the cheap-book store and I rummaged through their stocks, which were in dusty boxes all over the place, and here are my finds:

• John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Saw a DVD of this on evilBay, starring Alec Guiness, I think.
• The Falcon and the Snowman. Spy-stuff yet again. And a book-to-movie, too.
• White Light by Rudy Rucker. One of his early “Transreality” novels. Trippy, this one.
• A collection of Thomas Mann’s stories, including Death in Venice. Heavy stuff: after The Magic Mountain, I dunno if I can take one more Mann. Heh.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. …

These now become part of my ever-growing reading list, included in which are O’Reilly’s Practical PostgreSQL, the IKEA 2005 Catalogue, and the UP Filipino-English Dictionary (for the localization stuff I’m working on).