smart computer or what?

After my problems caused by my injudicious running of Computer Janitor that removed OpenOffice and I don't know what else, I have been having problems getting my old parallel printer reinstated. I have installed hplip, uninstalled it, installed an earlier version, and finally managed to do a manual install that gave me the capability of adding parallel devices. Then I had the problem that the program couldn't find any printers to install, even though the printer database was there. It wouldn't give me any printers to select. That's taken me a week of my free time.

Finally I gave up and from the Hplip pages, decided to install cups. Did that – apt-get install cups. And then to configure a printer via cups I had to browse to localhost:631, where I found the printer already existing. What the heck?

I went back to the hp-setup program and lo-and-behold, The printer showed up. It was there!

I wondered how to get back the capability of printing to a PDF, so googled that and then installed cups-pdf. Didn't bother with the remaining command to install this as a printer device, but went to the document where I was logging my notes, and vazoom- I had both printers, the Laserjet and the pdf.

Is this intelligent computing? Or just that computer janitor did not clean up everything when it deleted stuff?

I don't care. I have it back.

Timmy Harris

It's the kind of thing that every parent will hate. Just over two weeks ago I got a message from an old friend from university who is holidaying in Europe, to say that his son had been in an accident. Timmy is 22, had just finished 5 years of an engineering degree, and had fallen 6 metres from some scaffolding. Since then we have been getting updates on Timmy's condition from Gordy, and from Timmy's sister. Gordy has returned to Canada and is now in Victoria. Timmy has been kept in a coma and we wait everyday. Our prayers are with the family.

It once again shows how young men think they are superhuman and invulnerable, and in many cases they will get away with it. Alcohol was involved as this was after a university sponsored pub crawl.

I hope that nothing like this ever happens in my family. I feel worried enough about Gordy and his family. His daughter was at the bedside for most of the time as far as I know. What a thing for a young girl to go through.

We were looking forward to seeing Gordy again, but that is so trivial. Now we hope that Timmy recovers, and this keeps me awake at night.

Our prayers are with you all.