Our daughter became engaged to her Scottish partner today. He is a fine young man, and we are very happy for them both. It is three years today since they met in Inverness, Scotland. They came to Toowoomba last April, and plan to make their future home here. We had planned a BBQ for tomorrow night. I wonder if her partner and I will be dancing together like we were at the wedding we attended in Manchester last year. Better not, I suppose. I don't want to make our daughter jealous...

Indian with a hatchet

Artefacts are a major portion of an American-Indian reservation's economy. Annually, thousands of tourists visit reservations and most will not leave without purchasing at least one memento of the traditional Indian culture.

One enterprising Indian was able to outsell his competitors in the sale of wooden dolls by selling them at only a fraction of the cost others had to charge. On examination of his dolls they found that where traditionally hard wood was used, this Indian would use cheap pine on which he glued thin pieces of fine mahogany, thus being able to produce the dolls at only a fraction of the cost.

While he claimed his dolls were still authentic, his competitors complained that it was only a cheap Sioux Veneer.

PhotoRec & TestDisk file recovery and FAT, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS undelete programs allow you recover accidentally deleted photos, videos or other files on SD cards and most other digital camera media and memory.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery program! It was primarily designed to recover lost partitions, repair FAT/NTFS boot sector, NTFS MFT and Ext2/Ext3 superblock and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table).

Screenshots

See also

• http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/DOS_BootDisk
  
• http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd
• http://git.cgsecurity.org/cgit/testdisk/

The other day, I hopped into a B or D (can't remember which) at 7av/53rd Street and seated myself. A guy plonked himself next to me at Rockefeller Center and immediately reached out into his backpack and pulled out his Dell notebook. Nothing unusual, except that he fired up Ubuntu, brought up some IDE and started coding away. He certainly wasn't tinkering with his machine or manipulating a spreadsheet - this was serious Java code. Now, if he was a consultant working on code in the subway, he would surely bill for it? Many other such people could want (and be ready to pay) to access the internet or at least get their cell phones working. Now, I know our cash-strapped MTA is piloting cellphone access in a few stations (14st?). So maybe here is a chance to get a few bucks while silencing a few critics as well. Instead of the "Holland Tunnel" model of cellphone access where carriers have been allowed to make their phones work (presumably for free - i.e. Port Authority isn't getting paid), they could use the airline model - where net and phone access are a paid service. That could earn revenue and keep the number of users down to a tolerable number. I should think this is technically feasible. Commercially viable?

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26512112-5003402,00.html

Books prove prayer can cure cancer, says archbishop

TERMINAL illness such as cancer can be cured by prayer, the head of the Catholic Church in Australia said.

See you later people.

We leave soon to go to Sydney for the night then fly away in the morning.

Fun will be had, cocktails will be had, massages will also be had. And by the look of my glowing white legs I'd say a dose of sunburn may be had.

And I'm thinking by the look of my crazy hair I might come back with dreadlocks. Because I'm not taking a hair straightener and I'm not even going to dry it with the dryer. It can just go wild for the next week or so. Will pack plenty of hair elastics.

Me

So I wish all my friends and neighbours here on vox a very merry christmas. I'l think of you lot over there in the snow and sleet while I'm lying on my sun lounge soaking up some rays. And to all my aussie neighbours I hope the weather gods treat you well and you don't get a real scorcher for christmas day.

I think this is the first christmas, or even December, of my life that I haven't eaten ham. Can't say I'm missing it either.

Catch you on the flip side guys.