http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XbBCDH5bWU&feature

Here is the extended version.

You had to grow up with the genius of Jay Ward who created Rocky and Bullwinkle to have a real feel for this one.
Video:

When nobody is looking the philadendron that lives at the front of my house grows fruit but this is not to be used as food or anything useful to anyone else, its a way for the plant to trick a particular type of moth from southern Brasil into sniffing around at the fruit it grows.

Now sad to say for the plant, Australia does not have this type of moth but it does not stop it from trying, when the time is right (it does not share the criterion for the selection) the shroud around the fruit opens and to humans it emits a faint sweet smell. Apparently this drives the moths of southern Brasil mad and the plant uses this technique to cross pollenate the species.

I actually thought I had a win after building a backup box out of the leftovers of my 3 main computers but it all came to nothing yesterday.

Turned it on to back up some data and the network would not start so I backed the data up on another computer.

Came back later in the day, turned it off and restarted it and it made that fatal sound, 3 beeps then stopped.

This is the Intel beep code for not being able to address the first 64k of memory. Diagnostic is simple, failed memory controller on the motherboard.

Now I can strip it for bits but WTF do you do with two more 320 gig disks, a gigabit ethernet PCIe card and a new sound card ? It had 2 gig of DDR400 memory but I have another 3 gig of that floating around so its not much use to me.

I now have 4 perfect 320 gig SATA2 hard disks that I don't know what to do with, a RAID controller costs more than a new 2 TB hard disk so they are not worth striping and I have run out of older computers to put them in.

1. Setting up your computer for the internet.

(a) If you are connected to the internet by DSL, make sure you router is set up correctly and this means a few different things.

  [1] Enable the built in firewall if it has one.

  [2] Ensure that NAT is enabled. (Network Address Translation)
      This means your own machine's local IP (address) is not routable from the internet.

  [3] Ensure that the SPI (stateful packet inspection) is working.

  [4] Do not allow any form of "tunnelling" as it leaves you computer vulnerable.

  [5] If you use a laptop or notebook and plug it into different networks for work, home or friends, install a software firewall to block anything you don't want from that network.

(b) Turn OFF services that you don't need. Most home users will never need remote management, HTTP or FTP services and by turning them off you reduce the exposure to risks. You must know what you are doing here but you can usually find a technical friend who can do this for you.

(c) If you must use anti-virus security software, stay away from free junk on the internet, use professional products like Kaspersky, Eset's NOD32 or any of the better known commercial products.

Something that is important, NEVER TRUST or RELY on anti-virus software, it is an imperfect art that criminals regularly try to get around. Read the following section on good habits.

If you are not a technical person, get the folks who set up your router in the first place to configure it for you.

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2. Developing good habits to reduce risks.

The greatest risk to a computer is YOU the user. Even with a well secured computer, if you make mistakes or download software that is dangerous, you can make a mess of it.

Here are a few pointers.
(a) Install software that allows you to scan your email on the email server BEFORE you download it. This allows you to look through the list and delete anything you don't trust. If you do not allow malicious software onto your computer, it cannot harm it.

(b) Disable any capacity with your email client to automatically run anything. Disable JAVA, ACTIVEX and similar so email cannot infect your computer automatically.

(c) Even if you have downloaded email that has anything attached to it, unless you know exactly what it is and where it came from, do not open or run the attachment, it is a normal way for criminals to infect your computer, scan it for your personal information, passwords and credit card details.

(d) NEVER EVER (not even once) allow anything from the internet to scan your computer. If a popup cannot be turned off, close down your web browser but do NOT allow anything from the internet to access your computer.

(e) Do not believe bullsh*t from some junk that pops up on your computer from the internet about your computer being infected. It is just a SCAM to scare you into letting their internet software scan your computer. If you allow it to proceed it will infect your computer and try and sell you software to get your credit card details.

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3. Fixing disasters after the event.

(a) You can try and repair the computer with patches or anti-virus software but it rarely ever works well and your computer will usually still be damaged.

(b) If you are using a recent version of Windows like XP or later, learn how to back up a safe configuration so that if your computer is damaged by malicious softare, you can go back to an earlier safe configuration.

(c) The most powerful method is to use a disk imaging software like "Norton Ghost", "Acronis True Image" or similar where you copy the entired disk to a file and at a later time restore the disk as it was when you wrote the disk image. It is a bit technical but this method cannot be beaten, if you restore a disk image, it overwrites any damage with a reliable copy.

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4. Some advice in dealing with people on the internet.

This mainly effects the girls. In real life if a person annoys you there is a way to deal with it at a person to person level but on the internet you can be contacted by people, mainly men who sometimes are bad mannered, rude and suggestive.

The approach to take is different to real life but if you do it firmly it will do the job and they will not bother you again.

(a) Don't be shy, tell them to "F*CK OFF" and never come back.

(b) If they persist, publish their names, email addresses on your blog and tell them to go away.

(c) If they still persist, contact the administrator of the blog server and ask them to ban the person who is bothering you.

(d) If all else fails and they still bother you, look them up in real life and give them a bashing around the ears.

It has been speculated from time to time that if the human race manages to exterminate itself that the bugs will inherit the earth but there are other contenders, the plant in the above photo is one of them.

It started life in the dreary depths of our national capitol Canberra and was brought to Sydney by friends of mine who live up the road. It languished in an undersized pot in their back yard for a few more years until its big chance came.

I was stuck with having to remove a plant of the same type that my mum has bought many years earlier that had gone mad and taken over the entire front yard, had grown through other pots and had more or less eaten the front fence. I looked around for another one but they had gone out of fashion and did not seem to be available any longer.

I mention this to some friends of mine and they told me about this one they had in their back yard that they did not really want so between myself and one of my friends we managed to carry it through their house and get it out the front where I put it on a trolley and took it down to my place.

I had prepared an old set of concrete washtubs by cutting out the divider and drilling some holes in the bottom so I filled it with a fortunes worth of expensive potting mix and plonked this thing into its new home at the front of the house.

I learned somethong about plants from its response, this is no lilly livered limp wristed decoration, it is a jungle plant from southern Brasil and it has all of the attributes necessary for its survival and proliferation, its poisonous if eaten by most things, bugs won't touch it and it emits an odour that either drives away most other plants or kills them and it very quickly adapts to its environment.


The next morning the fronds (leaves on the end of arms) had stood up and the leaves had re-angled towards to sun and it took off like a rocket. Its first couple of years in its new home were good but when it got big enough it had thrown aerial roots out past the concrete tubs and had grown into the soil through the old concrete below the tubs.

Now that it is sucking the life out of the planet it it has bloomed and now regularly grows fruit, a sign that it is a healthy mature plant at last. I doubt that the fruit is edible but it serves a purpose for the plant, in the early evening the shroud around the fruit opens and exposes a white core the emits a faint sweet smell which in its original jungle environment attracted a type of moth that cross pollenated the species.

If you have grown up with one of these plants they have a friendly feel to them, its a bold agressive plant with an interesting energy to it which is obvious when you are near it or bother to clean the dust of it from time to time.

Why refer to it as the nameless one ?

It has no need of a name from humans, it is an entity in its own right, the master/mistress of its own destiny and takes little notice of mere mortals but if you nod your approval to it on the way past it will spit out a new frond the next day just for you.


Its species common name is a philadendron, often referred to as a tree philadendron and if you can get your mouth around the following, its species name is Philodendron bipinnatifidum.