As some bits of poetry are causing mystification (but fortunately not slowing the rate of plasma development) here is the full disclosure. The lines are by Shel Silverstein, author and musician. They are quoted from his book Where The Sidewalk Ends (or perhaps one of his other children’s books), which has left an indelible imprint on my soul for being both silly and deep. Here is the complete poem as I remember it:

I am writing these lines
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.
So please excuse the handwriting,
Which may not be too clear.
But this afternoon by the lion's cage
I'm afraid I got too near.
So I'm writing these lines
From inside a lion,
And it's rather dark in here.

Although Silverstein is connected with with silly poems in my mind, it seems he made quite a career as a singer-songwriter as well and drawing cartoons for Playboy. Multi-talented. For people with a giraffe fixation (you know who you are), here’s another one by Silverstein:

Please
do not
giggle
and pl
ease d
o not
laugh
it's n
ot eas
y to w
rite o
n the
neck o
f a ru
nning
giraffe

You will just have to imagine the illustration yourself. I hope this illustrates also that the KDE community is an amazingly varied bunch, with interests in ancient instruments (I once met a UNIX sysadmin who had a career as a church-organ-builder behind him) and port wine and giraffes.

PS. Qt 4.4 is going to rock on Solaris, it just needs some gentle encouragement. Thanks to the Trolls who respond to my grumbling. Backtraces where relevant are forthcoming. I’m upgrading and patching the compiler to the latest and also carefully rebuilding all the dependencies before complaining again, because I don’t want to send us too much on a wild goose (The Flying [[ something ]] , illustrated with a goose, is another poem of Silverstein’s) chase. It might be dirty build environments causing problems, and I want to avoid that. I’ve already fixed one kerberos corruption deep down in our software stack this morning.

The Wayback Machine does not archive everything. Broken image links are marked with a 💔.