Beyond the looking-glass...

From the UK Daily Telegraph:

A businesswoman who accused three men of gang rape has been arrested in Dubai and faces trial on charges of adultery.

Touria Tiouli, 39, from Limoges, in France, has had her passport confiscated and cannot leave Dubai after being charged under the emirate's Sharia law.

This declares any sexual relationship outside marriage to be illegal.

Mme Tiouli was on a business trip last October when, she alleges, she was raped by three men who offered her a lift home from a nightclub.

She reported the attack immediately to the Dubai police, who after investigating her claim arrested her rather than those she accused.

One of the men admitted to having "consensual sex" with Mme Tiouli, which made her, in the eyes of Dubai's judiciary, guilty of both adultery and making a false rape accusation. She could face up to 18 months in prison. None of the men has been charged.

<sarcasm>
Dif'rent strokes for dif'rent folks, I guess.
</sarcasm>

Cheers...

Overdue clarification...

Back in October, I posted a couple of the "finalists" from a two-year British study on humor.

The joke that most Canadians found funny contrasted how the U.S. and Russian technical communities go about solving problems. In general, the anecdote is pretty accurate: Americans tend to be very "process" oriented in solving technical problems, while the Russians tend toward practicality.

However, in the particular case of a device that can write in free fall, I seemed to recall that the U.S. "space pen" was not the big deal the joke made it out to be, and my recollection fell short of the facts.

Herewith, a clarification:

The space pen that was invented in 1965 by Paul Fisher was developed at no cost to the government, and eventually found its way aboard Russian spacecraft, too. (You don't really want to use a pencil on orbit, as the material used for writing - commonly called "lead" - is a soft form of carbon called graphite. Between sharpening the pencil and using it, you'd inevitably end up with small graphite particles flying around the atmosphere of a spacecraft, which is not a Good Thing™, for a variety of reasons.)

* * *The Laserjet I repaired a while back at the shop seems to be deteriorating rapidly. A couple of weeks ago, it began experiencing a series of paper jams that - according to the information I found on the Web - was the result of a worn front roller assembly that can no longer "grab" a sheet of paper from the tray, which forces the logic of the machine to conclude there is something impeding the paper. The price to fix it was... $70. I've kept the unit more or less alive by cleaning that roller with alcohol on a regular basis. The alcohol tends to "roughen up" the rubber surface of the roller for a while.

Lately, the printer has developed a streak along the right-hand edge of (and on both sides of) any paper going through the unit. I have not investigated this problem yet, so it may be as innocuous as buying a new toner cartridge, or it may indicate that another repair is needed.

The printer came as part of a lot of stuff I bought at the county property sale last year, so it's hard to judge how much I paid for it (I paid $60 for everything, including two chairs, a cell phone, a rolling file, and the printer), but for sure I've already sunk $70 into repairing the fuser power supply. Assuming the printer is "free," all I need is another couple of repairs and I shall have spent enough money to have made it worthwhile to buy a new printer. (Moreover, the LaserJet is glacially slow, for whatever reason.)

For the short term, I've packed up my Epson ActionLaser 1000, which I've been using since 1991 (if memory serves), to use at the store now that all of our UPS has to be processed on a separate computer. In its place, I've bought an el cheapo HP 550C at the Humane Society Thrift Shop.

The unit was cheap, the cartridges were not. Unless I can find a source of very cheap cartridges on the Internet, the 550C will probably be only a short term solution to my printing needs.

* * *When we moved to our house in "the Meadows," as our area is called, we could not help but notice a huge yagi antenna array on the ridgeline as we approached the turnoff for our house. We were told the antenna (and the house, natch) belonged to a doctor from Albuquerque.

Of course, the only type of person who might find use for a yagi antenna is a radio amateur, and sure enough, the doctor (a retired cardiologist) and his wife are generally at the ham breakfast on Friday mornings, when they're in town.

Galina and I (along with the rest of the ham crowd) have been invited to their house for a small post-New-Year's celebration, featuring pot luck and a white elephant "auction." I still have yet to put together my "white elephant" gift, or cook something for the pot luck. My progress with translation has been pretty poor for the day, seeing as how I got back from the store only at about noon, and I've been... well, either "installing a printer and cleaning around the place" or "procrastinating" (depending on how you look at it).

Enough chatter. Time to get something done around here.

Cheers...

Trying out a new client...

So here I am, just minding my own business, having compiled something called 'clive'. It is a console program that appears to let me post to LJ from a Linux command line, without requiring me to fire up an XWindow session.

Cool.

* * *Galina got back from the store around 3:40 pm. I had our "white elephant" gift and a pot luck dish ready.

We had a very good time. Jack and Carol are excellent hosts, and fine conversationalists. I hope we can develop a friendship, especially considering how we are very nearly neighbors (we are certainly line-of-sight to each other).

It's been a fairly long day, and I have pretty much a full day of work ahead of me tomorrow. Ciao.

Cheers...