Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Homesick Mouse

by Rebecca Styles


Hurry up Yulia!” shouted my Mum. She’s always like that, rush, rush, rush. ‘We-have-to-be-on-time-otherwise-everyone-will-think-we’re-not-organised’ sort of thing. While I’m quite relaxed, I get it from my Dad.

I hate going to family reunions, I don’t get along with my cousins, they think I’m weird.

I hopped in the back seat of the car and Dad drove us to my Grandmas house. I love my Grandma; she is the only person who really understands me. I usually go to her house on the weekends; we paint, cook and do some other stuff. But with all the cousins there it’s not going to be good.

Once we got there I said ‘hello’ to everyone, then snuck off to the back garden, which is practically like a forest. I make up games there, I even have my own imaginary friend, but she stays in the forest. I ran over to my hut and opened the door. There, in the middle of the floor, eating a centipede was a little brown mouse. He flicked his head around as quickly as a possum does it’s on the road and a car comes. He sprinted over to the corner of the hut and sat as still as if he was dead. I picked him up and he started squirming. So I hugged him to my chest, I don’t how I did it, but he calmed down. I played with him for what seemed like minutes and when I looked at my watch hours had gone by. I decided to call him Quiver, because when I first saw him he was shaking so much. I put him in my pocket and headed back to the house.


When I went into the lounge only my parents and my Grandma were there.

Finally, you’re back. Now lets get back home, it’s nearly your bed time.” Mum said. I ran over to Grandma and gave her a big hug and kiss that said ‘goodbye’.


Once we got home I made Quiver a little house in a shoe box, then went to bed. The next day Quiver was looking really bad, he was just lying on the ground shaking. “What’s wrong with you?” I said to him, but he just looked at me with those big brown eyes. ‘Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to bring you home with me.’ I thought to myself.

That day my Dad took me back to Grandmas house because I said that I’d forgotten my bracelet, but I was actually going to put Quiver back in the forest.

While Dad was talking to Grandma, I ran to the forest and set Quiver down. I watched him until he scuttled under the big leaves. I walked happily back to the house knowing that I had done Quiver good and I might see him again someday.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

An Introduction to OpenSSL, Part Three: PKI- Public Key Infrastructure

An Introduction to OpenSSL, Part Three: PKI- Public Key Infrastructure: "A certificate is the signature of a public key and information that describes the holder of the public key. The signature is created using an asymmetric cipher and a private key held by a CA. The CA's private key has a corresponding public key that is part of a root certificate. A root certificate is a public key and its corresponding information that has been signed by the private key that corresponds to the aforementioned public key. A root certificate is also called a self-signed certificate because the private key in a key pair is used to sign the public key and identifying information, instead using a private key from a different key pair to sign the public key and its identifying information."

what a load of crap!!!! you try and explain it????

Monday, March 10, 2008

Air Show tickets valid for Ohakea


just a small detail of driving/flying to ohakea. takes forever. last time i was there was wings and wheels, 1990 i think and i was running late . jim the xjs never was scared of catching up time, so pedal to the metal it was. 200 and then some and we were making up loads of time. then i get a sniff of anti freeze - and pull over to have a check - and a huge cloud of steam erupts from under the bonnet. Luck would have it i had a spare bit of hose and 5 trips over to a house with my 4 litre container to fill it up again and i was off. pommie crap.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

stairs that work

My mate across the road is an architect, and he has this cool formula for calculating the riser and tread so that humans can easily walk up and down stairs. The theory is that our legs are approximately the same length, and should a stair be steep or gentle, you adjust the riser and tread lengths so that its easy for us to climb. So the formula is thus:
2X riser + tread = 23 inches.

So if a stair is steep, the tread get progressively shorter, and the stairs are just as easy to climb.

You can always just go to a stair calculator site like this one.
how a stair "works"

2X the riser + the tread = 23 inches