The Pal Diet

Posted by an Anonymous Coward in an unrelated discussion on Slashdot: I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out. A woman behind me asked if I had a dog. On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms.

LCD DHL IBM JFS KDE USB HID

The excitement started a week or two ago when I discovered that my ThinkPad laptop’s internal cooling fan had stopped working. As soon as I did something graphically intense for more than a minute or two, the system would overheat and perform an emergency shutdown. Fortunately, I have a backup laptop. Unfortunately, the backup ThinkPad laptop had also developed a fault. The fluorescent backlight for the display was failing. The screen was a curious reddish-purple color, and very dim—unless I turned the brightness up, in which case the backlight stopped working entirely, and everything went black.