April 30, 2005

           This computer is going into the shop. I need my scanner and that is that. Too months in a top-rated Florida computer school and I can’t even hook up a scanner. (It is a SCSI and all we ever did was talk about it, but that is my point.) I can’t afford to lose the computer on weekends. I jogged half-way around the gold course this morning. Which left me standing in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, folks . . .

           There is a little pond on the east side of the golf course. See the water? See the alligator fence? I checked on the Sunbird ad. Good, they listened to me last time and it is now over by itself with more expensive cars around it. I just put on the coffee and Glenn called, he slept in until 9:02 AM. Maybe I’ll do a double exercise routine today just to set an example here. Then, I am having my morning glass tomato cocktail and I notice it is sweeter than usual. Sure enough, if you read the label closely, sugar has moved up a notch on the ingredient list, ahead of acetic acid (vinegar). Time to find another brand. Why do these people put sugar in veggie juice anyway?

           I’m well into the networking book, and I think I could hook up a basic system myself. It is really the cables that are the hard work. Give me a drill and a keyhole saw and even that won’t slow me down much. They make a big deal about running the cables through the walls and attic but I’d only do that if there was no other choice. They are correct about the amount of administration involved, and the fact that it is not a high tech job. You just have to be super organized. Back in my phone company days, they had us attend all types of networking courses without ever telling us why. Some of this may be coming back to me, although I assure you it is not from any practical use on the job. Now I ask myself, am I about to take another course in networking where we do not actually touch any cables or tools?
           Glenn and I stopped by at ABC. Thom was not there, but I heard that good-looking clerk speaking a language I had never heard. I guess she just looked Spanish to me. Turns out she is Serbian. Glenn’s computer is heavily infected again, that weird virus drwtsn32.exe is taking up 85% of his system resources. However, he is the one who insists that computer must be hooked to the internet, so don’t come crying to me. Without expensive protection, your work computer should be isolated from any public network. We walked over to the library in Dania Beach. Again, people here like to walk on the roadways, where I like to cut across open fields. The talk is that they don’t like to get burrs in their socks, where I expect it as a sign of a good hike.

           We saw these guys fixing the propeller on a tobacco boat. As Glenn said, the most useless boat ever made. It has no room to invite your friends over. There is some type of boat show going on, with their own groupies and jargon and prizes. This boat looks like it was probably in the $150,000 range. Some people have far too much money. Take, for instance, this set of stairs in the park. They are not for exercise, and they are bolted permanently in place. Made of painted steel, these are not cheap stairs. I call it the Stairway to Nowhere, and I’ll think of some way to use it in “Not a Cloud in the Sky”.
           I picked up some books for sale, 3 for a dollar. One was by Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”. Generally, I am in agreement. His statements like, “The government is best which governs not at all” reflect my sentiments closely. He points out that the government does not educate us, or keep us free. The objections against a standing army also argue against a standing government. The jailers and constables serve as machines without free will, and have the same worth as dogs and horses. Legislators and ministers are as likely to serve the devil as to serve God. He points out that the government behaves almost identically to an invading foreign army. I love the passage that he does not quarrel with those far away, but with those close by who do the bidding of those far away. How do you buy a man cheaply? You give him a cheap vote, because voting for what is right is doing nothing for it.

           Another book was a contemporary A+ text, which I am just skimming. It is a find indeed, if kind of late. The writing style is different and far more understandable because the author has plainly gone over it several times to eliminate jargon. I must read this book entirely before I attempt the exam. For example, the first text defines RAM and disk memory. The second text takes the trouble to explain that everything on the disk must first be processed by RAM. Little touches like that do it for me.
           I reconciled my bank statements again, you know, one day I hope for the chance to put the screws to WAMU. Five years ago I wrote an article about the double bank fees for using an ATM. The fact that they don’t have to hire a clerk should be enough of a savings, they don’t have to shaft you coming and going. This is not an issue of right or wrong, the important thing is that I don’t like it. Usually when I don’t like something, it should be looked at more closely and there is news that this item has finally come under federal scrutiny. On a balance of over $1,000 they paid me 27 cents interest [last month]. What a racket! Same with this distinction between savings and checking. Most people don’t know the difference at user level, and don’t care. Their concept of balance is whatever they can get when they run short. Hell, just watch some of them in action on a Sunday morning trying to get their last $20 out of the thing. Presumably for breakfast.

           Later. I must compliment the new text “Enhanced A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC”, Enhanced Third Edition, by Jean Andrews, Ph.D. Definitely top-notch workmanship. It is so clearly written it reminded me of facts I have forgotten [subconsciously] since 1971. I’ve been reading five hours and not one passage has occurred that was not adequately explained. This is a serious fault in texts that are not proofread by a third party. Also, the author must have taught the material he writes, because there are so many natural places where it is obvious he has been asked to stop and explain. A very effective text. Both forward and backward references are used whenever necessary, avoiding that panicky “am I supposed to know that” feeling.
           Later. That was Glenn on the phone, saying he has to record on Friday. That means we won’t be leaving until early Saturday morning. The pagan festival he talked about now charges admission, and I won’t pay to go to anything that resembles religion. It is ungodly to think anyone would, for the very purpose of any religion is to convert you. At least they should make that attempt at their own expense. Glenn is also enthused about some web he visits that has free stuff to give away, and he keeps mentioning computers. So I told him to print out a few dozen of these “free” listings so I can calculate the worth and cost. No, it is not free to travel all the way across town for a computer and he is missing this concept. All he sees is the finished computer that I have fixed up, not realizing that unlike guitar lessons, there is an immediate cash outlay for each unit. That computer for sale at ABC for $125 is only $45 profit to me, less my costs of going over there and charging zero for my labor.
           I suspect he may think of me having a dozen computers for sale every day, and that would require a shop. For some reason, he does not want to print out these listings, saying instead I could look at them when I am over there. Not good, analyzing a business deal is not something I do looking at a computer screen. I would still want to print it, and he seems dead set against that. Probably the cost of the ink, I’d say, but if he wants to talk like it is a good deal, that has to be determined before you get started on driving around and storing inventory.
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April 29, 2005

           Another turtle on the road today, so it must be turtle season. My bathroom scale lied to me again, so I jogged over to Publix. Sure enough, I really have lost a little weight (four pounds). As a reward I picked up some (sugar-free) banana strawberry jello and made a fruit salad with apples. Hey, Hippie, the whole salad is only 80 calories. The roofers were back again today, and I showed them the Sunbird. Plus all the receipts and photos of the restoration process that nobody else has seen yet. They are very interested, but I did not notice the landlord walk around the corner and now he knows that I speak Spanish.

           The ad starts today in the Auto Trader. I have to get that damn scanner working so I can record these events. The software will not load on Windows XP and the system will not recognize the device. I may have to take the whole contraption into the shop. I can’t be putting this stuff off much longer and I’ve done everything I can think of. If I get the full $1,400, some of it is slated for a driving trip back to Washington to secure my automobile documents and get my passport.

           Today I do a marathon read on networking. I see I have several courses I took in the early 1990s on the subject, but that was at the phone company. They never explained why or anything, and they certainly never covered what the phone company’s roll was in networking. Just take the course and that’s it. I don’t recall any of it. Hopefully it will come back to me but that is not usual in such circumstances in my experience.
           Let me write my thoughts after reading 50 pages, to see how close I get. This networking is expensive, and pays well. I should concentrate on one aspect or system, and the decision is important. A big system means work for a big company, a small system means independent contracting. I see the advantages of both. The roofers are here and I had to close all the windows since they are steam cleaning the walkways also.

           Steam cleaning can be a noisy event. I read some of my Business Week, and the cover story was blogs. Again, the author goes on about what it can do without defining it. A blog seems to be nothing more than an e-mail that is broadcast. The article mentions blogging from five years ago, so it is not new. Yet, what is a blog? There are dozens of examples, but no definition. I gather it acts like a bulletin board to which anyone can link and read. If so, the big deal could simply mean that more people are tired of standard internet fare, which I long ago predicted. I’ll try to research it a wee bit more, but one thing I see wrong with it already – it seems to be very difficult to publish anonymously. To me, that is the only way you will get to the real truth. Now, once something is published anonymously, they would need a method to be paid anonymously. That, my friends, would be a truly novel computer idea – a service that allows (and assures) anyone to be paid without a paper trail, or if that runs afoul of tax law, at least a system that ensures the trail cannot be looked at without the prior knowledge and consent of both parties to the original transaction.
           I talked to Hippie, who says the blogs are an ongoing journal with entries that never end. So how is this different than a web page? What is persistent about the blogs? He also says you can publish anonymously, but the Business Week article makes it quite clear that you can be held responsible for what you publish, something that is clearly not possible if there is true anonymity. I asked him for some examples and he says to just check Google for blogs. He also reminded me that we are leaving town on May 6 to North Port again. The event for me is a pagan festival. We would be gone overnight Friday and Saturday, to return on Mother’s Day.

           There is another article about ‘fabs’. This, I also predicted twenty years ago when I saw a computer operate a lathe that turned out a 3D plastic prototype. My exact prediction was that computers used in this fashion could return the world to a cottage industry type era. I’ll make it for you, because the specialty is not a huge and overpaid workforce and a taxable factory, but my skill at programming which is very hard to synthesize and regulate. And I want to be paid in cash.
           Hippie said there was some modern dance going on at the club (where he volunteers) so I chose instead to walk around Aventura Mall. The mall bunnies were there if force. How some people have enough money to shop for sport is a good enough reason for anyone to advocate revolution. The good part is there were dozens of babes there that blow away that funny looking Paris Hilton, which is a good thing. The only new thing I saw was an outdoor shower made of wood. It attaches to your garden hose.
           I tried to get a picture but this ugly middle-aged store clerk picked up that I was going to take the picture and started hovering around me. I wanted to say, “Look, you stupid bitch, this is a public area …”, but she was not even worth that. I just walked out. It was incredible for a while there, the way she watched every move I made because she knew I wanted something and there was no way she was going to let me get whatever it was for free. Typical crow-woman. Didn’t have to know what I wanted, only that I wanted something, and that was enough for her to do her number. One of her hands was on the security phone. This was at that store “Historical Renovations” I visited just after Xmas. It was impressive, but that ugly woman sewered it for me. Damned if I’ll ever spend any money there.

           [Author’s note 2026: This photo appeared in today’s date back in 2005. I still have the piece of gear. It’s in the shed and used most every day. It is as rugged as it looks.]

           Also, I went in to Radio Shack to price a power inverter, and I see their staff now jumps on you. They are like cops, never there when you want one, but always there when you don’t. Yes, all you sales people can help me – by keeping your distance until I call for you. Aggressive salespeople make it hard to browse. Years ago, I had some sales training and had to quit because it was so phony. Filling a need is one thing, but playing on emotions to create a false need is another. “Can I help you?” is the lamest and most abused line in American retail. They have no intention of helping anyone but themselves. Between those two scumbags, I did not have a good experience, so I left and went over to Borders. On the way out, I watched the fountain. It sprays water some sixty feet in the air at time. Look near the south end of the mall. Also, the inverter was $129.99, or over $110 more than the one I bought, and mine had a higher wattage. The other Radio Shack prices were equally shocking. They are really shafting themselves trying to play the upscale stereo store instead of sticking to what made them a success.
           I’d intended to have a late Friday coffee, but wound up reading in the aisles until late. There were some promising looking women in the bookstore, but they were Miami-grade. Even today, I need some encouragement, if only a slight smile, to break the ice. Not these ones, not the Miami ones. Only a ravishing appetite got me back home, where I made a carefully planned 400 calorie supper. Shrimp soup, rice cakes and cheesecake pudding for dessert. I always make it (lo-cal cheesecake pudding mix) too lumpy since I lost my wire whisk. I watched the video movie “Up Your Anchor”. I thought it was a sequel to “Up Periscope” but no relation at all. I think this was made in Israel. For 1985 it had plenty of nudity and simulated sex between older women and teenage boys, who acted or appeared to be about 15. It would be rated differently here I’d say. How did that one get past the censors? It was a comedy only in that it was light-duty scripts.

           I still cannot find the method to activate the sum field in Excel. The Excel help feature has just as bad a search engine as regular Help, and of course, Microsoft would never make your day easier by calling something what it is. I suppose the only way to find out is to locate a computer running MS Office 2000 and work backward from there. What a pity to have to resort to such tactics. It is the little rectangle on the bar above the task bar (can’t find that name either) that shows the total of any cells you highlight. It has disappeared on Office 2003 and not to be found. It will be curious to see what they call it. Imagine, the richest man in the world cannot do better than to use an alphabetic help list for a graphical interface.
           Yes, as a matter of fact I do have solutions to these, and many other computer problems. But nobody will listen to me, as usual. (Fifteen year lag time.) As I said in 1975, the computer keyboard is missing five or six very important keys, and a dozen less important ones. For example, where is the multiplication key? (No, that is the asterisk, I asked about the multiplication key, bozo. Okay, now are you ready to shut up and listen, maybe learn a thing or two?) Another severe oversight is the “Save this file where I can always find it again” key. The “Print exactly what I’ve highlighted on my screen no matter what program I’m running” is also nowhere to be found. Also, the disk “tree” directory is outdated and that indenting scheme is hard to use. The directory should display as an organization chart with default settings such as create a new folder every Monday type of thing. There is plenty more where that came from, but I’m tired already. How about the power supply? You should have a battery running the computer, not a transformer. Why is the UPS still not built in after 30 years of experience? Furthermore, the UPS battery should be hot swappable and have a built in gauge that shows how well it is holding up, and a LOUD alarm when it has crystallized. (This is what causes NiCad batteries to build up charge resistance, sometimes called ‘memory’.) The surge protector should also be built in to the computer case.

April 28, 2005

April 28, 2005 Thursday Ah, another idea for my reality documentary on Florida, called something like “Another Perfect Day”. The emphasis is that Florida has no internal economy, the entire business cycle is based, not just on tourists, but ripping off tourists. So we have a Museum of Boring Flags. Ever noticed that dozens of countries show the complete lack of originality in the populace by using a flag that is virtually identical to other flags? Take Mali and Guinea or Ireland and the Ivory Coast. Of course, the most boring goes to Libya, with a solid fungus-green banner. Steve, the landlord, is having the roof tiles steam cleaned. They need it something fierce. I jogged and walked to Publix and weighed myself on the official scale. Toledo. It says I am at 181 pounds, and I guarantee you that is wrong, I am at 188 and holding, almost 40% overweight. My bathroom scale is notorious for slightly showing an extra two or three pounds. It drives some people half crazy. I’ve explained many times that you cannot half-measure your way to losing pounds. You have to make all the necessary changes in your life, and realize that most diet books are written for women. Men cannot normally lose weight through diet alone, they have to exercise, and that exercise has to be in the aerobic phase. No matter what the books say, I have seen the reasons diets fail and fail again. People try to cut the corners or make it as comfortable on themselves as they can. The mind plays tricks, sending them messages of starvation and making them dizzy. When that happens, you get up and run for a half-hour. You will not only lose the feeling of hunger, you will feel like you’ve eaten a small meal. Avoid midday or afternoon naps until you reach your weigh goal. Nearby is a shot of that Publix scale that lies (tells you your weight is less than actual, so head for the ice cream section). The Big G (Hippie) got a day off from cancelled lessons (I know, but he needs the money) and called saying we should visit some upscale thrift stores in Boca, being that I had to go there to pick up the Pavilion (HP computer) for ABC. I saw the day class, which I would have preferred and there were women in there. Hey, always in the class I’m not in. Then we went to downtown Boca and saw six or so thrift stores all in one area. You’d think the competition would keep the prices low, but this is Florida. I bought one book. We went to another store on Copans and met a charming if kind of funny looking gal who I’m sure was after Hippie. She mentioned her husband in the first few sentences, which to me has connotations. (If you are married, what are you doing striking up conversations with single men? Maybe you just want to talk? Well, that is my point – go talk to your husband, or at least some other married man so that nobody can misunderstand. The part of the world where married women prove to single men that they are loyal to their mates just does not interest me.) However, I was feeling frisky, and chatted quite a while with her, at least to the point where she must have realized it was not such a good idea to have mentioned her husband as a defence mechanism because she realized she liked me enough to fool around and I was now the one backing off. As usual, Hippie (like most men) does not understand that I do not try to screw every woman I meet. I am very choosy. He is right when he points out some of the things I said to her are not the choicest things to get her in the sack, but he assumes I’m too dumb to know that and I’m wrecking my chances. It does not matter how many times I explain it, some men cannot understand this policy. Now Hippie also loves to hop in the car and roll down the windows. He is a little cheap with his car, and real cheap with his AC. When we have practice, he just turns the overhead fan on low. It is sweltering hot, but a few degrees cooler than outside. He thinks nobody notices, but everybody knows he has a big air conditioner in his bedroom and all he has to do is leave the door open. I’m the opposite. So what if it costs an extra $30 a month to keep your place comfortable? Is sweating worth a dollar a day? Even though he knows the Sunbird window was broken, he rolls it down. (He is used to that in his car, instead of using the AC.) Took me two hours to fix it, but this time I wisely left the window crank handle off. I found out in the process that it is illegal to fix your car in your own driveway in Hollywood, FL. The landlord mentioned it, so it’s not like I got caught. We stopped at that antique store on Hillsboro. Expensive. We had a coffee, my first today and that was in the afternoon. They have a little café but Hippie, er, decided not to have anything after telling me about KFC. He is slowly adopting my way of doing things because he is now certain that I really do only eat two eggs a month, and I never put raw sugar into my food. Thus he cannot assume I gain weight for the same reasons he does, and it is time for him to start looking out or I’ll be the one running circles around him. He can also be nervy about computers. For example, he thinks I do not have the internet because I am old-fashioned, and he is continually offering me advice on how to ‘get with it’. He takes for granted that the reason I don’t watch TV is because I am so old I missed the invention. He does not understand I have done so much internet, I am wasted on it. It is too simple and slow moving for me, and I gave up paying for it in 1996, years before he and most other people got started. Internet bores me. He is convinced, as are many people, that the internet is totally new. Hippie, we had an internet when I was a kid. It was called the telephone. Everybody on the phone was just as young and slim and tall as they now are on the internet. But, you know, I wound up having sex with a lot more women I met on the phone than most men ever do on the internet. Now we have a standing bet that he can show me something on the internet that I did not see before in some form. (I know there are such things, but the bet is that Hippie, who spends hours each day on the internet, will never be able to show me such a thing. It is actually a safe bet, because the really new things on the internet are technical, whereas the social stuff has been around since Adam and Eve. Hippie would have to change the way he feels about technical things, and start some hefty research into it to surprise me with anything. Like a lot of right-brained people he never much thought the internet ever was for anything much but chat rooms. Hippie, after seeing me action, does now reluctantly mention sometimes that my knowledge is ‘useful’. He used to think tech know-how was valueless because he arranged his affairs to ignore it on a daily basis. That was one of the reasons he had so much trouble with his computer at first. He also thought anyone with a technical background must necessarily be lacking in the spiritual parts of life. This is a common and ancient theory that so many people who don’t have what it takes to learn practical things will cling to well past it’s expiry date.) Later. I watched a DVD called Escape from Sobibor, a place I’d never heard of until tonight. It was the largest and therefore most successful escape from a Concentration Camp. Then I went out to empty the garbage, wearing only my cutoffs. What a perfect evening, I thought. Would I be walking outside like that at this time of year in most places I’ve lived? I’m going to read late into the night. It is not 11:00 PM. The new improved Excel has taken away that little box on the task bar that summed any cells you highlighted. Of course, help is no help and there is no easy way to turn that feature back on. The Microsoft search mechanism really bites, for like Spanish it cannot handle compound words.

April 27, 2005

April 27, 2005 Wednesday Despite two months of expensive training, I still cannot do anything when a computer refuses to let me into the BIOS. That is the problem with the Compaq 2000, the unit that gave sterling service all through the toothpick era. It just hangs and tells me there is a disk controller error. It should still let me read the BIOS. As a punishment for not insisting these type of things get covered in class (it worked every time they did it), I jogged half-way around the golf course, bumping into the landlord and Vladimir (oldest dog in South Florida). All is not lost, for although I’ve lost my learning mode, I’ve entered another thinking mode. (Yes, for those who’ve never tried it, you can get into the mood of thinking.) So I’m jogging and I think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get home and soak in a hot bath?” Problem. The overflow cap on my tub only lets you fill the tub about a quarter full, so there is no way to soak and read. Solution, while jogging, actually, in my usual manner, two solutions in case the first does not work. One, remove the screws holding the overflow cap, turn the cap upside down, so the drain faces up. Reinsert screws. Other plan, the screws are not symmetrical, so you can’t invert the cap. Remove the cap. Take one of those plastic margarine cases, preferably one with a pretty pattern. Take off the lid and trace a concentric circle around the inside diameter of the lid centered over the drain hole. Cut out this center piece from the lid, and replace the drain cap over the lid with the lid lip facing out. Now, you can snap the bottom part of the margarine bowl over the entire overflow mechanism when you want a deep bath. It looks pretty, but don’t forget to drill small drain holes in the margarine bowl, just in case. I was going to take pictures but the batteries died, and besides, the first method worked fine. The important part here is that the problem was solved in real time using ordinary tools and at no out-of-pocket cost. I soaked for a half-hour. Thinking and reading. I chanced on a book about investment clubs, circa 1995. There were some interesting prophesies, including a warning over the high-tech bubble. No mention of the trillion dollars that is going to get inherited between now and 2010. Not a word about the complexity of record keeping (I do it by month-dollars, newcomer shares are weighted against the number of months the former dollars have been invested, but this usually requires a computer and a college degree to get it right. If I put in $100 now, you put in $100 in three months and somebody else puts in $100 in six months, a year from how we split the profits 44:33:23, even if a windfall occurred on the last day of that year. If we invest nothing more, in another year the ratio becomes 38:33:29). This confuses some people because they can only withdraw the current value of what they put in, that is, I could not withdraw 44% of the money on the first anniversary, only the value of my $100 investment on that date. I would not join a club as described in that book because one of the articles stated that no member could own over 20% more than any other member. I had to read that twice, because at first I thought it meant more than 20% of a larger club, which I could abide. Do you see what offends me? The rule could mean that, however remote the chance, it would be possible for some lazy person to dictate (limit) what others are allowed to invest. I cannot stomach such thinking. Let them join a lazy person’s club, for Christ’s sakes. I have no use for Canadian-welfare type mindsets. Ah, but that was a good jog. Hippie tends to forget that I still exercise when he is not around and thus tends to admonish himself for not getting good results. Let us see how our philosophies work out. His vegetarian diet and mild exercise to my carefully controlled diet and progressive (but not harsh) exercise. I think you have to get aerobic before a walk does you any good. This is only my theory, but you have to signal your body that you want to use up fat. If you don’t, the body goes into emergency adrenalin mode and you get is cramps and aches instead of weight loss. Tomorrow, I jog one mile if it kills me, ha ha. I slapped the ad in the Auto Trader for the Sunbird, it runs until the car is sold. I’ve noticed it has a few things wrong from just sitting for six months. The A/C has a slow leak and the fan quits whenever it wants. So, the first offer or two gets a good deal. Then I did something I have not done in years. I bought a new magazine off the rack, Business Week. For anybody who doubts my journal is years ahead on most issues, read the article on “Protection Racket”. It details the abuse of bank fees, and even uses the exact wording I did when I complained about a little over 5-1/2 years ago. It covers the same issues, the outrageous overdraft protection fee even after I specifically stated I did not want it. The ATMs showing a false balance by not deducting fees, and at least one state (Indiana) is considering legislation that makes bank fees that annualize out to over 72% a felony. Make that 7.2% and I’ll volt for it. They missed on important law – that banks should only be able to charge fees out of the interest they pay, never touching your principle. (The article lost impact by basing the example on some faggy looking geek named Keeley, too stupid to know he did not have $230 in the bank.) Hmm, I see other articles with other concerns identical to what I’ve already written. That India is complaining about soaring labor costs (although the ones that can do the work are cheap, they also know they are a tiny minority in that nation). Hippie came over and we watched The Big Empty. A low budget video I’d seen before, but it was so boring, I’d forgotten. You know what he did? There is an all you can eat special at KFC. Backsliding, I tell you. He went there and pigged out like totally. He reasoned it was a good balance to the extra log walk on Dania Beach. It is like a smorg, so you can bet he was back to the chicken counter three times. In fact, I have a Barb Kraus (a book that lists calories of finished foods rather than indergrenets) so let me look it up. He says each trip included mashed potato, gravy and biscuits, so that makes it 932 x 3 or minimum 2,796 calories. He is also lax about diet sodas where I cannot remember when I last had a drink with sugar in it. That is not gospel, for I know my tomato cocktail, 44 calories per glass, has added fructose. I mean a drink where sugar is part of the primary taste. Three thousand calories in one meal. That is over three times what I had all day, and I exercise. (There is a separate log of the miles I walk or jog each day, including the route, time of day and proportion of each activity. A normal two mile day is 25% jogging, 75% walking.) I also do leg lifts on this post at the park. Hippie can do it better, but he forgets the fact that he is more limber than I can be totally explained by the twelve year difference in our ages. Hell, when I was forty I weighed 148 pounds and could do limitless pushups and chinups. He was a little leary of that, but I let him go through a box of my old pictures earlier today. He was shocked into disbelief. Yes, that is me. Skinny or what? That’s Kim, that’s Judy, that’s Pearle, that’s Jill, that’s Robyn, that’s Debbie, and so on. Yes, I told you I had long hair, and no, even I don’t have enough money to have, as you suggest, paid all those hundreds of women to pose with me in that manner. I also showed him a handful or two of my certificates, because he still has doubts of some things I say. The fool. For example, people who hear me speak Chinese (Cantonese) assume I know just enough to impress a fool. He did a double take when he saw my certificate of Chinese studies.

April 26, 2005

April 26, 2005 Tuesday It is still early, Hippie and I are going to get our morning constitutional along Dania Beach before the day becomes a scorcher. I took the time to key enter a few hundred more printer items. For once I have the radio on. Radio is proof that talk is cheap. They are still running that phony ad for laser eye surgery, the bait and switch from $499 to $2,499 that is apparently not illegal in Florida. I switched stations but it doesn’t seem to help. Now I have a talk show about whether or not it is okay for children to sleep in bed with their parents. I’d say sure, provided you don’t want any more kids. I don’t tape radio but this show would have been a classic. It was definitely not what the hosts had expected. Some of the stupidest divorcees in the state called in. One still had her eight year old son sleeping in her bed, and she didn’t know what to do about that. Er, lady, try telling him he can’t, or is that too tall an order for you. (I don’t use the term single mom for divorcees because there is usually no child support.) Then this other bozo calls saying she’s ‘recently’ met Mr. Right. The reason for the quotes is that when it comes to dating, women can use words to mean whatever they want. Recently could mean ten years ago or late yesterday afternoon at a stripper bar. What? Well, where else are divorcees going to meet men desperate enough to marry them in Florida? Up yours, I know what I’m talking about. Yeah, well your mother dresses you funny. You probably sleep in the same bed as her. Anyway, the dumb-bunny goes on to say she has to go sleep at the boyfriend’s house. Lady, let’s add this up. You haven’t got the balls to discipline your own kid. That is parenting at its finest, not! (Notice the lick from Wayne’s World?) Not only is she missing balls, but she is missing brains. Her eight year old is plainly getting his way by whining, another parental triumph that will surely pay off, at least to some public defender. She has not yet figured out that when she is overnight at the boyfriend’s, her kid is already not sleeping in the same bed as her. However, that is two-level thinking and the average Florida woman is not very good at even one level. No mercy, folks. Hippie forgot the Cakewalk CD, anyway, we left my car at the bank and did a two-hour power walk this time. I jogged for two five minute stretches and that severely winded me. Mind you, I covered a quarter mile in that time and I could not have done that a few months ago. We stopped for coffee at the Broadwalk Grill, which has some fairly decent looking waitresses. Too bad they all have attitudes from being hit on all day long. Hippie is still surfing the net for a date and I explained the facts to him. There are no co-eds on the net looking for forty year old men, no matter how well he can play guitar. It turns out he had one lined up but her friend talked her out of it. He’s still talking to her, where I would have told her flat out that I don’t date women who choose their friends over me. You can always get new friends. It was a classic morning with a good sea breeze off the Caribbean at close to 8 miles per hour. A hint of rain that never materialized and tiny waves that pass for surf in this part of the world. My guess is we did some five miles, most of it aerobic for me as I started jogging within the first five minutes. It was a vegetarian breakfast, and coffee is a vegetable, right? Well, it is not red meat if that’s the way you wanna be. We walked south from the Dania Pier and down the Broadwalk. There was one only one babe all morning. The Broadwalk Grill is just north of where the sand dunes start, and according to Hippie the entire beach is owned by the mob. I asked Hippie if that meant to open a pizza parlor you had to get a nickname and start wearing bulky suits. He don’t know, except the part that it is the mob. He knew a guy who had a store once, past tense. It burned down. Yep, gotta pay those dues. I mean, nothing else burned down. Then I get home and decide to go inside that DVD that quit playing. Interesting. Once inside the can, the mechanism is almost identical to an internal computer model. The main difference is the interfaces, otherwise even the dimensions are the same. There are only four exposed wires and a grounding strap. Cheap-ass. You can easily see the CD that is stuck inside the tray. It is mostly empty space. It can stay open on the counter until I figure out what to do with it. Nothing is apparently wrong, so the problem is internal. Next patient is the scanner. If it works, it is DVD burning time. I’m feeling ambitious about getting a mass of documents finally scanned. I guess, like many people, I have a thing about keeping old papers, I’ve even found a few Xmas cards from 1980. (Note: 1979 is the critical year for records. Very little exists before then and there was no real journal. Moving so often, at times by force, made it impossible to store what little there was. That is why I call it the Pre-Cambrian era.) Later. In my shop, er, I mean, my living room, I’m learning some hard facts. Today’s is that an IDE cable not pushed in exactly right can cause pins on the HDD controller to look like they are okay, but are actually themselves pushed into the shell and cannot be fixed. Sigh, and it also means goodbye to another old friend. Who remembers the old Caviar 21200 drive from back in ’96? Made in Singapore by Western Digital, it was (at 1273 MB) once ahead of its time. This is the famous drive that saved Hippie’s bacon in January. It is still in the original ESD bag [Faraday cage]. She is going into the Aptiva because 2 GB is the maximum that BIOS can handle. In other news, the floppy on the Video computer quit working. I hope it is not the controller, for that is the one I hooked the 5-1/4” floppy up to, and it did not work at about the same time. I’ll need some luck on that one. I was trying to hook up the scanner when I discovered there was no A: drive or it has a bad controller. At least these hardware problems are not bringing me to a standstill any more. Later. Maybe the Caviar will be around a little longer. I could not get the Aptiva to recognize the hard drive. There were some parts of the BIOS that did not make sense, but I tried every possible combination. It will recognize a drive because I installed Windows 98 on that machine, but it is not doing anything now. This learning process must be incredibly boring to some readers, but my policy is to write what is new each day. And the old Aptiva just became spare parts. I learned that these ZIF sockets [into which you insert the CPU chip] are not the end-all of upgrades. If you look very closely, there is a certain pin arrangement that fits larger chips into the same socket. We were not told this in class. Of course, fitting is one thing and working is another, but just in case I am keeping all the old CPUs. The video computer is acting up. It refuses to recognize the mouse on every boot up, and older programs won’t install. The new Aptiva is ready to go, as soon as I find the driver for the onboard sound. There are four options at this time. I’ll list them to see if any of them become the standard. 1. I could go to Workforce One, but the computers there are often blocked as to downloads, and they are getting pernickety about the one hour limit. 2. Downtown to the $6.00 per hour rip-off. I don’t want to know what they would charge for a download, and with all the screens facing the counter, it would be hard to do it on the sly, although I think I could. 3. Spend the big bucks, sell my identity to the phone company and get internet access hooked up. 4. Use Hippie’s computer, but that is unreliable. Also, Hippie’s computer, no matter what he says, is mainly designed for entertainment. Getting anything else done on it is a hassle, which is hard to explain, but we all know people like that. They have the setup, but arranged in such a way that you’d rather not ask in the first place. They know it and always make a big deal how they are willing to lend, but in reality it just never goes well. It always reminds me of Colin’s truck, the one I arranged to borrow when I was flying back from Caracas. All it needed was new tires, a carburetor and insurance, but sure, I could borrow it. I also remember Canan (rhymes with cannon) and her computer. She’d call to study together, but that was because the evening always ended in wild sex. Well, she was Turkish. That computer was never set up and ready to go, and it took the first hour just to reconfigure it so we could do school work on it. She also used to rent pieces of it out, which I thought so strange because she did not know how to reassemble things. Some people could claim she needed the money, but anyone who can fly across the Atlantic Ocean to go to school here is not as poor as I was. Neither of us ever failed a course with this arrangement.

April 25, 2005

April 25, 2005 Monday Now this work thing is getting serious. Let me philosophize a bit. When I was young I always used to be shocked by how stupid people could get away with things if they had an allowance from their parents. I always had to work, for any interruption in my cash flow caused terrible and almost immediate consequences. On the other hand, the guy with a lousy $50 a week help from his family could take life easy and wait out the bargains. This is old material but you see, I am pondering making just such a change. Now, I don’t mean I’ll get stupid (I hope). Stupid means (here) a very English-like refusal to understand things from the other man’s viewpoint. If you know you will never go hungry, never be homeless and never be destitute, you just think differently, that’s all. For example, only a comfortable man thinks all men are created equal and is never forced to face the reality that they are not. That is what I mean by getting away with it – if you are rich even just enough to sidestep that issue, you get away with such ideas for a lifetime and claim therefore you are a good person. I’ve stood in cold and rainy yards at 5:00 in the morning with a hundred other shivering men outside work trailers that advertised twenty laboring jobs. In my life, I have delivered newspapers, driven taxi, piled lumber, worked in factories, taught dance lessons, painted houses, built snow fence, insulated, framed, cribbed, worked the pipeline, driven truck, stuffed flyers, shingled, prefab’d trailers and all because I could not afford the tiniest interruption in my income. (The reasons that it got that way are another story, but you can thank my parents for lying to me since I was six.) This time it is different. I just lasted since November without dipping into my own money in any significant way. Everyone (meaning mainly John and Hippie) (don’t make that joke) keep telling me to advertise more for work. They recognize I can get tremendous things done given enough time, but that a job bites deep into that time. Mind you, they both get more help in a year from home than I did in a lifetime. I would not have to make a fortune, just around $400 per week and then I could ‘wait out the bargains’. Certainly, I am considering that 90% of the progress I made fixing computers was after I started taking them apart by myself. At that rate, I will be a top-notch expert in a few months more and I have $3,000 to try out the idea, a situation I have never been in before. An alternative is to work for one of these places that do house calls. As long as it is day shift and I can take time off when needed I would consider myself almost self-employed. It is easy for me to rationalize any lower income if I have plentiful time off and am learning a trade. School goes until June 15, 2005. I will have my networking by then, although what good it will do is not apparent at this point. I’m having an extended morning coffee. Yesterday was also a great virtual practice – playing along with video tapes of Hippie’s arrangements. Hippie would end every song the same way if allowed to roam free. (I call it the chop-chop ending.) Knowing what type of guitar licks he likes for bass runs, I can use the tapes to customize longer and longer bass runs that get away from following his patterns too closely. This is the mark of a good bass player in my world. He always says something the first time out of habit, but once he listens, he realizes he is not a bass player. He has said things about this recently, which is a good sign. That, and after our little chat, he is listening to what I say at times – yes, I do know how to manage a band and I do if far better than your average lead guitar player.

Another sign I’m on semester break is my apartment. It is getting cleaned up a bit. I even stacked my milk-crate storage system up six high and tried putting up shelves in the kitchen north wall. (No dice, they don’t put studs in Florida houses, it seems.) I need six boards today to make things look fancier, and I think I may paint those milk-crates. These crates were one of the top inventions of the sixties, adding to the décor of millions and serving the needs of countless moving companies and flea markets. Imagine, a decent-sized sturdy plastic box with built in handles, and an industry too dumb to know a good thing when they saw it. What I plan is to pour paint into a 12 x 12 tray an inch deep, and dip each side of the crate into the paint. Later. I went out and spent a very overdue $40 on this place. It hit me that nothing else has really happened here since school started and my place looked like a repair shop. Which it kind of is. I bought all the doodads I’ve needed, such as a real computer power supply and a forty-foot extension cord. I got more plastic stands for advertising (fifty cents each, not $4 each like at Office Bunker). I decided not to paint my milk crate shelves. It took away from that early Calgary look. I spent five bucks on some wooden spacers, but don’t look too close of they’ll remind you of picket fence railings cut to two foot lengths. It is held together with zap straps, yet I’m telling you it would take Hurricane Annie to move that shelf. It is solid and it does not move unless that wall moves. Hippie didn’t call for our usual power walk. He always underestimates how much ground we cover, and the time also. By any standard, we should both be losing weight. Controlled diets, healthy food and very conservative portions coupled with long-distance walking. We are easily up to three miles a day in most cases. He thinks we should jog. I’m not so sure. Exercise is a factor in loosing weight but the bottom line is if you want to lose fifty pounds, you have to get your body to re-digest fifty pounds of itself and that is not a natural thing for the human body. It is going to put up a fight by convincing your brain it is starving when in fact, the food supply is right there. We have discussed trading fruit. He buys a lot of bananas, where I like apples. Actually, I like apple juice, but when I do buy apples they eventually go bad on me. When we reconnoiter the situation, it is plain I will have to step up my fruit consumption. He is already a vegetarian. To that end, I have carefully stocked up on supplements I’ll need to cover all the bases in case I don’t get a heavy fruit diet right the first time. It just makes sense to me. I drink a gallon of cranberry juice a week, but I have not eaten cranberries in twenty years. Similar goes for peaches, pears, grapefruit and so on. I’ve been drinking my fruit since 1980. The idea is to redevelop my taste for the actual fruit. Ditto for vegetables. I will not give up my decaf, that is not an option. I got another idea for my Florida feature. I toured an art supply store this morning on my way back from the lumber yard. They have these foam blocks for flower arranging, but they are the size and shape of bricks. Hmm, the old-fashioned Florida brick fight. Just a thought. I swung past ABC but the doors were still locked at 11:00 AM. What’s more is that everyone has seen Wayne’s World except me. This can be odd when I am the only person in a room that does not get a certain joke. So I spent a whole dollar and got the tape, along with another called Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I just finished watching the first one and be damned, they were talking real Cantonese. In a movie that must be at least fifteen years old. Even on video, that is the first time I have ever seen a white man speak Cantonese. Except for myself, of course. As Wayne said, “Babe-fest”. I thought the Chinese leading lady was a little too old for the part, I’d put her at close to thirty. She did not have that great of a body compared to Chinese gals I’ve known. The movie had terrific spoofs on Terminator and Rambo flicks. Again, there were some other spoofs I did not get, although I think the sex scene may have been from A Clockwork Orange. Tomorrow, I’ve arranged for a copy of Cakewalk, an audio recording program. This computer is now up to 30 GB and awaiting an 800 MHz Pentium, at which point it is upgraded to the max, although I may add more storage. I want to get all my audio onto CD as quickly as possible. A database of where everything is makes sense, but it is unfeasible to do that, both in time and money, although I am certain I waste about half that value looking for misplaced items. Next, that scanner, to cut down on the masses of paperwork I’ve saved just in the past five years. Good night

April 24, 2005

April 24, 2005 Sunday Jerry from Thrift Mall called early this morning. He won’t say on the phone, but he reports ‘something came in that is interesting’. I’ll shoot over there, although that Maria lady who asked about the computer apparently got one free from her brother, who seems to have had an extra. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get a small booklet to print on the video computer. This was not fun. First of all, Microsoft still has not learned to place a large and prominent “CANCEL PRINT” button on screen. I managed to print 16 pages before figuring out they have hidden it in the start menu under settings. Even turning the computer off and back on does not clear the print buffer otherwise, so remind me I now have to pick up a new ink cartridge. I also learned that the word processor is far too finicky to use for booklets, although that may change. Instead I used the spreadsheet and although it is simple, it is not a process to be rushed. I’m gone to Jerry’s. Later. Jerry knows good stuff when he sees it, unfortunately he sometimes gets ten years out of date. He had a box full of serial modems in fairly new condition. I helped him throw them out. I bought a paper slicer that looked repairable. It might interest you to know those things sell for close to $200 these days. I looked for a long throw stapler without success, including the supply catalogue where it is listed in the index but not on the page. Then I dropped the computer off at ABC. Several people seemed interested, but that is why I left – people are so stupid when it comes to computers. I explained to one lady while I was there that speed and memory cost a lot of money. Oh, she says she does a lot of graphics, like therefore I was going to lower the price for her? There is some chance she didn’t even know that graphics were memory hungry but that is even worse than stupid. I realize the best reason to listen to stupid people is to get their money. I just didn’t feel like it today. Later. I managed to print a small booklet. This is always a test of a new operating system for me. Too often the manufacturer goes ahead and makes ‘improvements’ that fly in the face of common sense, and the changes in Windows XP do exactly that. I already know there is a complicated setup procedure to produce a master document in Word, but what I test is the ability of the print statement to produce a properly collated stack of output. Windows XP failed miserably. I use the spreadsheet software to make the documents, thus one has to learn how to think backwards (from the inside out) to properly produce a sixteen page booklet from two ordinary pages of paper. No, you cannot use the manual duplex setting. Nor can you adjust the page size or number of columns. It won’t work (either it wastes the unprinted page area or each insertion throws off the remainder work). Follow? The trick is to print four panels per page, then flip the printout over and print the reverse side so that the whole lot can just be cut in half the short way and folded over one time for stapling. Got it? Good, now what happens if you have 16-1/2 pages? The Windows people changed several things. If you print multiple pages, they print from back to front, so they are lying in order off the printer (for lazy people, I guess). There is a property switch to turn that off, but what a hassle. It demands some fairly deep thought to pull this off. At least I think so. I produced a fairly respectable product on the fourth try, but wasted 24 sheets of paper getting there. Don’t get me wrong, I understand both sides of the computer coin. I agree that computers should make life easier, but I don’t agree that they should take the place of fundamental learning. That only encourages people who don’t know how things work to attempt things they are not qualified for – like printing booklets. The effort put into such things could have been far better applied creating software that let you print an ordinarily word-processed document in any format you’d like. Proof that just because Microsoft sells logic, they don’t have to use it themselves. Later. It is a fine little booklet, actually looking professional. Except for some nagging points that will take an hour to fix, all I’m lacking is a long-throw stapler to become published. Sigh, one cannot copyright compilations of lists but I would still be in ink, if under a pseudonym. Windows has no command to duplicate the top and bottom halves of a page and no on-screen marker to indicate where the middle of the page exists. They also suffer from inability to understand that when I set the left margin to zero, I want things to print from the edge of the page or very near to it. Furthermore, it is damn tricky to duplicated the ‘header’ a second time on the bottom half of the page, yet this is a very common requirement in real life publishing. (So that when the page is cut in half, the bottom appears with the same amount of border before the printing begins.)

April 23, 2005

April 23, 2005 Saturday I was up until three this morning working on the computer, made by a company I’ve never heard of before called Electronic Desktop. Once I got internal it was all familiar and I ran in to some fascinating things. That is what kept me up, not the computer itself, which is a simple 1998 version using off the shelf parts. It had 4 RAM slots and a 5th DIMM slot, but I don’t know what for. I tried popping a DIMM to see what happened and the system just hangs. The way my workbench is set up I can instantly gauge the success of any change against the machine beside it, and I discovered an interesting effect. If I replace the 32 MB RAM with two 16s, the Pentium Pro becomes lightning fast for some unknown reason. The total memory is the same but it turns this puppy into a sizzling little desktop unit. Thus, I proceeded to install a CD player and a CD burner, convert the whole thing to FAT 32 and free up half the 1.2 GB hard drive by cleaning out all the internet junk. It is far more likely that something was wrong, such as an earlier upgrade with the wrong speed of DIMMs, rather than me discovering something. All I found was the effect. It is really an impressive unit and I would consider keeping it, except that the parts are so dated. It has the large socket keyboard, a modem with features lost in antiquity and no PCI slots for a USB upgrade. I was pleased enough to even go over some of the junk printers I have to make a matching set, but that failed. I should say at this point how the printer database is progressing. I have most of the current brands logged and there are over 1,500 models. That is just current models, meaning that you can still get ink cartridges for them. I have not entered the cartridge types yet, but they also number in the thousands. It smells to high heaven of a massive ripoff. Probably 90% of all cartridges are inkjets which use the same technology. Obviously there is something funny going on and I seem to predict these things about two years before the government steps in. The worst offender is Hewlett-Packard, with 368 models on the market at this one time, followed by Canon with 259 and Epson with 206. You’ll have to wait for other contenders like Brother because their model names are just plain hard to type, like a Canadian postal code, you are constantly working the shift key. The point is, just these three companies have 833 printers out there, which have two things in common. One, they all use the same technology and two, none of the cartridges will work in more than a few printers each. Every American knows it is far cheaper to make a standardized model of one thing, and then turn it out by the zillions. For such huge companies to break this rule in unison and crank up the cartridge prices should tell you something. Can you smell it now? That is why I want the Chinese products to flood the market, and why it does not bother me when overpaid American factory workers lose their jobs. I’m holding a Hewlett-Packard 51649 cartridge (empty) in my hand, trying to figure out what makes it worth $35.99. No new technology, no better service, nothing. As a technology becomes dated, the price should go down, unless there is a new improved model every year. I first saw these inkjet plastic cartridges some fifteen years ago, and they were all in the $7.99 price range. What am I supposed to think? I think Hewlett-Packard is stealing and I hope they go bankrupt. That will teach them a lesson. Speaking of lessons, the Hippie called and we did this practice my way. Instant results. We have 15 core tunes on a list, and every one of them video taped the way we intend to present them on stage. Add in a 90 minute power walk all the way to Publix, and that is a productive day. Even he said something about the super efficient way I handled it, although he qualified that by saying he could do it that way if he had to. Yeah? Plus, the video does not lie. I was right that several of his original songs have exactly the same rhythm and notes as existing blues hits. Not only that, many are in the same key. No wonder, I told him, Alfredo and I had trouble remembering what song he wanted to do next. The tapes also show that he (Glenn) does mix up the bass lines and has said I’ve made mistakes where I knew perfectly well I was playing it the way we practiced. We have a half-set (15 to 16 ‘performable’ tunes) of blues and rock classics. The refreshing thing about it is for once it does not contain any ‘beginner’ standards, such as House of the Rising Sun, Proud Mary or a ton of stuff we used to play for filler. This time it is a real list, although many of the tunes are quite dated. The idea is for us to fit into the newly emerging Cajun clubs, formerly blues clubs. South Florida is moving away from the steady blues diet and there are several of these we would fit nicely into on weekends. Here is the list: Jambalaya Hey Good Lookin’ El Paso Blue Moon of Kentucky Sixteen Tons Blue Suede Shoes Iko Iko Little Red Rooster Before You ‘Cuse Me Stormy Monday Born Under a Bad Sign Dust My Broom Add another three originals and that is 15 tunes, not bad for a late Saturday night. One more [practice] like that and I will begin to insist we play even if we have to pass the hat around. He has also finally stopped insisting I play certain licks on the bass that are really meant for guitar. (The bass frets are half again wider and require significantly more pressure.) The familiar songs in the list now have a definitive, but not actually distinct, bluegrass bass line that gives them a ‘bouncy’ edge. Think of the muddy stand-up bass sounds in old Elvis hits. Of course, all this is really going on to a database with video clips. His very talented musical ear does not extend to video. He would normally cut out things that I spot as indispensable. A good example is his original song Cajun Queen (identical melody line to Iko Iko), we rehearse it and he says, “That’s the lead break”, in an offhand and totally natural tone. He thinks it useless, I think it priceless. And it’s my tape.

April 22, 2005

April 22, 2005 Friday The video computer is now up and running in my home office, taking over completely from the old Compaq. The fan seems to run erratically, I’ll be looking closely at that. Maybe the power supply is too weak for all the components I’ve added. The XP version I’m using defaults to U.K. English so I cannot enter words like ‘caliber’ unless they are in quotes. The keyboard is set funny also. The double quotes and ‘at-sign’ (@) are switched around, so are the backslash and octothorpe. I tried swapping keyboards. I hope it is some internal setting and not another gimp feature. Another stupid thing is that in the word processor, some mysterious keystroke causes the top half of the screen to become the sending information area for e-mail. There is no easy way to get rid of that although I tried for 30 minutes. Does anyone know where the templates are in Windows XP? I thought I make up a brochure and the templates are gone. Up yours, Bill Gates, I was going to use that feature, you know. That, and the Hippie and I are trading words again. I’ll explain the situation if you’ll accept that he feels the situation is too complicated for anyone to understand (he has used this tactic before) and you just need it explained to you again. Here goes. The premise for any useful band is to go on the road, record in a studio, or perform weekend gigs. The operative word is ‘useful’. This band is for playing gigs by default, for nobody is leaving town and studio work is strictly for professional, unusually talented people. Are you with me so far? It is no good to flatter me and say you want me to do studio work, because I know I’m an amateur for life. It is clear I won’t take up time for any musical venture except playing live gigs, where you make money and meet horny women. It is clear because I say it loud and often before things ever get underway. If you are over 28, it does not matter how good or bad you are, only that you get out there and perform. Ask Dwight Yoakum. Glenn keeps going around in circles, and will often accuse others of not being team players if they don’t put up with it. Now, the weekend practices often become ‘jam sessions’, which do me no good no matter what he says. I don’t learn anything by them. Never have, never will. The new musicians also bring in the element of distraction. That is wasted time and in most cases these people are way out of my league. Glenn says they sound good, I say so what? They have not committed to playing gigs, so what are they doing here in the first place. Glenn says they may record, which is really his baby, for we never originally talked about recording anything. He can jam on his own time. I have better things to do on weekends than listen to somebody play keyboards, then I notice when he takes a break, the thing keeps on playing by itself. I got better things to do than listen to other people play. He makes a big deal that it is only a few hours. Yes, a few hours of prime weekend time, where I have a habit of leaving town on weekends which I cannot do if there is a practice. He totally misses this point. There are two keyboard players, one who doesn’t want to gig, the other who may do some studio work but he is already ‘kind of like’ playing in another band. So what the hell are they doing at our practices, I want to know? Chip, the accordion guy just wants to jam. Glenn keeps saying I’ve got to be a better team player. I stopped him right there and informed him that I expressly said I would never settle for being a studio musician years ago (in 2000). Furthermore, I committed to playing gigs and I bought $800 worth of equipment. I’ve never missed or cancelled a gig, or failed to show for practice. It is these other people he should be talking to about being on a team. If we are practicing, it must be toward a defined set. A band has to be run a lot like a business that never makes a profit. These other guys are showing up for some other reason and need to be informed of our goals, or stay away. They’ve all missed practices, therefore they have no say in our core song list. We learn enough tunes to carry a gig and anything they want to play is added to the end of that list – after we are playing. All this riffing off to tunes I’ve never heard of just sucks. Then, there is Glenn’s fixation with having a drummer. If he will not perform without a drummer, then call me when he gets one. I say we record the drums on CD (actually his idea) or get a drum machine. There is no explanation why he has performed all his solo career without a drummer, but insists on it now. I hinted that he has used the drummer excuse too many times. Glenn lives for music and if I can understand that, he can understand that other people can take it or leave it. I do not have to lower myself to the directionless, mindless level of the masses just to be on a team. There is another team over on this side, hello? If tomorrow’s practice does not go toward a fixed set, I may bow out for a while. True, the situation is convoluted, but that doesn’t mean I don’t follow it. Hey, I just wrote it down, didn’t I? Glenn thinks he can lose me talking in circles and gets awful frustrated when he can’t. Tomorrow, it is a 25 song fixed set, all recorded. Anybody who comes along later gets a copy of the video to learn those tunes. Cut to the chase, Glenn, no more mingling around. I dropped in to see Marcela. She wants to sell the kid’s computer, so I’ve got it here to see if I can free up any space on that hard drive. The asking price is twenty bucks once it is sold, so I’ll move it tomorrow for $60. I need the money. April 23, 2005 Saturday

April 21, 2005

April 21, 2005 Thursday Okay, gang. It looks like the word processing is done on the video computer, and I have a whole new system of quirks to deal with. Like, how does one turn off the auto-indent on the date line that begins each of these entries? Plainly, Microsoft is (ahem) personal friends with every bad typist in the world to put in such a feature suitable only for imbeciles who should not be typing in the first place. I went over t ABC this morning to check on the British Airways computers. In the end, I made it downtown, and Thom didn’t. It is just as well because at any given point in time about 10% of the streets in Miami are being torn up or barricaded. This construction proceeds at a snail’s pace that would be laughable in any other part of the country. The parking meters are $5 minimum for 3 hours. Better shop lots and get your money’s worth? The office is in the American Express building on the 9th floor. The phone man, Carlos, was there snipping away at the wiring. The lady showed me around the place (what an incredible view) but also said they had decided to recycle the desks. Too bad, they are really quite nice and excellent for my computer school. The monitors are embedded behind the desk top. They have 22 computers and 36 monitor, plus three servers, three laptops and a few dozen boxes of cables and cords. Roughly half what was described on the phone. Still, if it is free or just a couple hundred bucks, it may be worth it. The computers, even if they turn out to be upgradeable, have a mini desktop case with only one 5-1/4” drive bay, so installing a second CD is not possible. The CPUs are Pentium Pro, I think the equivalent of Pentium IIs, but I’m not sure on that one. That single drive bay makes life complicated. Even if I install a modem to make the things internet ready, they just will not sell for much. They have 3.1 GB hard drives. I asked if they would give me one to work with, and they declined (understandably) because the disks have not been erased by their own people. The lady was not too bad looking, but mentioned her kids in the second sentence. The servers are heavy and I still don’t know what to do with them – that course is next semester. Right afterward I zipped over to Quizno’s and took a look at that laptop. It has not been cleaned in five years, so I set it to defrag and tried my best to polish it up a bit. It is totally infected with viruses and all kinds of nasty things from the internet. The OS is Windows ME, the first time I’ve ever actually seen it in action. It is not that great and I could not find some needed things very easily. Helene paid me $20 for the trip, and said a curious thing. “When I get my divorce you and I can get married and you can teach me computers.” (This was in a conversation that she wanted to learn computers, but that Corey did not have the patience to teach her.) Helene, this is so sudden! The two sandwich shops are bringing in $15,000 net per week and all the loans are paid off. That is interesting, because I did not think those places did all that well, and I think the market is saturated with fast food franchises. Cory, according to John, says he made a mistake getting married because he has been offered $1 million for the shop, of which he would have to give Helene half. They don’t get along all that well, and Helene said ‘when’, not ‘if’. But that could be a slip. Isn’t that a neat picture of me working on the laptop in the maze of soda cables back of the shop? John left early and we met back up at the Church. Lisa, Kirsten and omigosh I can’t remember the other name are still working there. Lisa is 25 and not married, which fascinates John. I should explain to him that her options in Miami are not all that great. Think of the calibre of man she meets every day in that joint. There was some English mustard manufacturer’s convention going on. They all know Dave personally but their wives made it look like middle-aged housewives day, so I left. The hippie called, and we met up for a few minutes. He thinks my place looks totally like a repair shop. It does. He may also be a little jealous that my old system is nicer than what he spent $2,000 on, especially my ‘old’ Nokia monitor. Tomorrow morning I will run the numbers, but even if those computers could be fixed up and sold for $100 each, that is a lot of work for the return, plus Carlos will want a cut. He asked for my business card. So did the lady. Each computer will have to be opened up, and a 56K modem installed. Chances are the CD reader will have to be replaced with a CD burner. There are decent hard drives and memory inside but that is not something people will pay extra for in a used computer. The target range seems to be $150 to $200 if the computer includes a working color printer. Also, Marcela called from Sonie’s Thrift. There is a lady in there that wants to buy the computer she has set up for the kids. I had to talk her out of it. That unit is a toy at best and the fact that it works at all is misleading because the OS takes up most of the drive that is installed. I asked her to wait a few days and see what I can come up with. As always, I am cautious when they have kids at home who will complain if you don’t have the newest of everything. That in itself is a con job. I wonder how many computers have been sold because the manufacturers go to work on the kids whose parents may not understand and think they are helping the brat become a genius.

April 20, 2005

April 20, 2005 Wednesday            So much for instructor-to-class communication. There is a day or two missing here because nobody knew for sure when the last day of class was. Half the class thought it was this Friday, and myself and the other half believed it was next Monday (skipping the two network classes we doubled up or class would have gone till the following Friday). Wrong, we walked into class tonight and it was the last lecture. I am really going to have to think deeply about my report to Workforce on the structure of the lessons. We had a quick in house exam which counted for nothing, but I did get 84% on it. That is 16% less than I was expecting.
           This is also the first journal entry in the new super computer. The computer that is being modified to eventually (and hopefully) edit digital video. Part of the reason is that all the other computers I was working on crapped out. The old Aptiva won’t take the 1.18 GB hard drive for no good reason, the other Aptiva is stuck on low resolution monitor mode, and the Compaq won’t allow access to the other 8 GB hard drive. I was lucky not to catch myself without a computer in the process. That is precisely my main point about the lessons – why am I still unable to fix very basic computer problems. I’ve now installed Windows 98 SE some twenty times, and only once or twice did it go as well as the ‘simulations’ in the classroom.

           Between Monday and now, I’ve spent a number of hours trying to repair computers in mass and setting up a system for Thom over at ABC Thrift. He has a line on 35 computers and 70 monitors which I’ll likely cover in much more detail as it gets underway. Beyond that, thinking I had to cram for next week, I’ve been studying and reading related texts for up to 9 hours per day. In class, we played an interesting game arranged like the game show where you can answer or pass, but if you answer wrong you lose a point. The idea, which was an excellent learning experience, was to give the meanings of acronyms. To anyone in the class (and there were a few) that suggested I was a slow learner because I could not yet troubleshoot, the results of this little game told a different story. The reason I can’t troubleshoot is because it was not really taught properly. Final score was me 22, them 6.
           In fact, you give it a try. ASCII, COBOL, BASIC, NLQ, NIC, UNC, DLL, SVGA, EP, POTS, URL, UPS, CSMA/CD, DHCP, and the final WYSIWYG. No points for closeness, in fact you lose a point for saying ‘committee’ instead of ‘code’ in ASCII. I’ll give you a few of the obvious answers. Near Letter Quality, Dynamic Link Library, Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect and What You See Is What You Get. There were two I was hoping for, byte and EBCDIC (‘Ebb-see-Dick’) that were not on the list. What? You didn’t know byte was not just many bits. It comes from Binary Digit Eight, which must have made sense to some early geeks. The other is Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange, but you knew that.

           There is still the credential exam I have to pass, and this can be taken any time. That probably means any time within reason. I’ll wait a while in case I get a spate of experience in the next week or two. On the basis of what I was expecting, this course was 24 of the worst lectures I’ve ever attended, yet nobody could be accused of doing anything wrong. They did not do anything wrong, it was what they were teaching in the first place that was the problem. I can identify all kinds of network cables, but I’ve never touched or used a single one of them. We’ll see how much good all that ‘learning’ does me tomorrow when we go to pick up the computers in Coral Gables. I cannot fix computers yet. (And if I can in the future, it will be too indirect to claim the class was my starting point. If I knew I’d have to do it all on my own, I doubt I would have gone to school. Yes, I did learn things there, but it was not reinforced by immediate practical exercises.) It would have been 27 lectures if I had not missed the first week.
           It looks like the job market again for me. I have to work another few quarters to get my minimum Social Security points, and I might as well do that learning to repair computers. I’ll target Ft. Lauderdale and area, as long as it is not a long haul into school for the Monday and Wednesday course starting on May 9, 2005. That’s another evening class, networking I believe. This time, I will be prepared for it to be all talk and no action.

           Otherwise, let’s take a look at what’s on the agenda. Well, The Hippie wants to go visit his parents again. They are taking off back north for the summer to escape the Florida heat. He wants to see them before they leave, but also wants me there as an excuse to go do things rather than just sit there and talk. I can ‘relate’ to that. I’m home and making a loaf of apple-walnut cake to celebrate the end of semester one. I last did a tally four or five years ago that except for a few year long episodes that I intentionally took off, I have been in school for some part of the year ever since I started kindergarten. Thus, I have roughly 44 years of education, most of it fairly technical material. The Hippie calls it practical knowledge, his degree is in some ‘ology’ where he thinks it is very important that Hitler believed in fortune-telling or something like that. Ha, he kicked our butts big time and came within an ace of solving all the problems with Cuban drivers in Miami.
           John has still not called about getting lost last Saturday. I need to talk to him about the furniture store. I really don’t know about hanging around Florida all that much longer unless I get into something that really pays the big bucks. Even then, a lot of those bucks would be used to set myself up elsewhere. Even walking into a shopping center in Boca Raton is a reminder that things are really different in other areas of the country.
Out of school gives me considerably more time to poke around at finding part time work. If I could make an extra $300 per week for now, I probably would not go back to a job until after the summertime, and that job might just be in Seattle. There is nothing to stop me from leaving except school and the possibility of making some fast dollars in the used computer industry. I’ve got coffee and cake in the oven to let me mull this over until the wee hours. Believe me, I am really considering just packing up. The timing is just bad, that’s all. June takes me into the hottest part of the year and it would be dumb to leave just as the nice season is starting. So I might as well stay here another year.

           I told Thom about the Lock and Key event. He knows a ton of single women, but so do a lot of married men from what it looks like on the outside. He says he told them about it and they were unaware of even how it works. Proof, friends, that dating now takes place on the internet, where everybody is a movie star. We are working on convincing the women that if my key fits their lock, they have thirty seconds to get naked with me. You may have noticed no pictures recently. I did have a passel of them, but the Argus camera has a slide off battery case lid that can (and did) come loose in my pack. Too bad, I had an excellent shot of the boot the city puts on cars for just parking overnight after the meters are off for the evening.
           Which reminds me of another scene for my movie about the real Florida. Think back to Jurassic Park, the glass of water on the table. It ripples slightly and you are tipped off it is the footstep of Tyrannosaurus Rex. I’ve noticed that same ripple in my toilet bowl when the carpenter is working next door, and I’ve been wondering what to do with all the footage I have of fat women in this town.
           ast, I finally have a good version of Access, and I’m still thinking of keying in all the information on those hundreds of printer cartridges. I’ve still got a bunch of it on a spreadsheet somewhere. I’ll find it later, it must be on the master backups from the Compaq I was using last summer. Oh, the school gave me a nicely printed completion certificate with their seal. I put it on the pile in my upper bookshelf case. It will be good to get back to my old passion of organizing data. OfficeMax says they have a website for all their supplies, but not everybody has internet and you know how hard it is to navigate through all the bull dunk advertising. I want, for instance, a summary of which printers are the best and worst deal for cartridges. So, let me think. There are many companies, who make many cartridges that fit many printers. Oh my God! Did I get that backwards? Shouldn’t the printers come before the cartridges? No. One cartridge can fit many printers, but not the other way around. Some logic you just leave to the experts, like I would if I ever meet one.


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April 19, 2005

April 19, 2005 Tuesday Whatever else happens today, this might be the main event. There is a British Airways office on Biscayne going out of business. They have 35 computers and 70 monitors to donate, just come and get it. Along with 70 (I think) ‘training desks’ and two servers. Tom said he has the warehouse space and will rent a truck. I think John and I should make a few trips, but I’m not the one with the storefront. I’ll need to find out what an IBM GL300 is, but the guy (Carlos) says they are standalone workstations (as opposed to dumb terminals) and he wants them out of there. The place went under two years ago and this stuff is just gathering dust. I believe these would be around four of five years old, so if my memory is correct, these units should be barely used. Remember also that part of my motive is to establish a reputation as a “safe” place to buy a used computer around here, something nobody else has managed. He (Carlos) wants to delete the drive contents and thinks the monitors are 15” and 17”, making them better than what I have on hand. Speaking of what I have on hand, there is a plethora of upgrades going on. I have two evaluation copies of the newest operating systems available, and I thought I told you one of the donated Aptivas had a 30 MB hard drive. That is going immediately into the video computer. That 8 MB drive is going into the Compaq (the one you are reading all this from) and the Compaq 1 MB is going into the old Aptiva. The old Aptiva 8 MB is going into the vacant spot on the new Aptiva. Computers may give me trouble, but I have no difficulty setting up complicated adventures. To anyone who figures out this cannot be done unless I, well, take a few shortcuts, I say mind yer own business.

April 18, 2005

April 18, 2005 Monday Glenn and I went over to the Thrift stores near the Hard Rock gambling place. One day be the rough part of town. It has a new coat of paint and lots of palm trees now, but there are no bargains left. I bought shoes and a hat that Glenn insists makes me look like an old English sports car driver. This spree set me back $15.88, but like I told Glenn, if you want to make a fashion statement, you have to spend the money. Thank goodness it is only every other year. Seriously, there is a shop there with some excellent clothes and I hope to go there one weekend. We also looked in at the new library on Stirling. It is quite nice and I may spend some time there. You can only get into it if westbound on the north lane of Stirling, a bad move on the part of city planning. Don’t ask me why, but whenever Glenn cuts across a lawn or through a hedge, he gets plastered with burls and sticky plant seeds. It doesn’t bother me or I should say not nearly as badly. We tried a soda that was made from cashews, I did not care for it. I got back here in time to study some more, making a total of eight hours today already. Following the exact written instructions, I still manage to get a “wrong media type” message from the new Aptiva. It is going into the shop with me – not just to find out what is wrong, but to point out that we are not being taught what to do when things go wrong. Every exercise we’ve done in class has worked out perfectly and all problems solved by the end of the lecture. I was up until 3:00 AM without success. Yes, I know there is a trick to it. But nobody is showing me what that is. School was aggravating again. There are lots of suspicious glances around the room whenever we are asked, “Don’t you remember, we covered that?” I mean, it gets pretty sad when other students have to catch me at break to explain things to them. It is even worse when that Chris is not there, because his presence can be very intimidating to the new people. He works full time at a country club fixing their networks and computers so he is not the ideal classmate. Today we flew past some spyware programs, which looked very interesting but there was no time to follow it up. We were busy installing some new hardware and the drivers which I gratefully acknowledge was real hands-on. We had a card that allowed you to watch TV while working on your monitor. It was weird, the TV picture played in half-transparency on the face of whatever you were running. Not something I’d run out and buy. Everybody else loved it, and they are heavily addicted to TV. Isn’t is strange how people who watch TV 60 hours a week don’t think they are as addicted as those who watch 65 hours? Alfredo got the new Aptiva running. It was dumb troubleshooting on my part, true, but I would like to know why after two months of expensive school, I am still not sure how to fix a computer. The argument is that of course, I am far more confident with computers now, but that is far more related to the fact that I’ve been reading the textbook eight hours a day than to anything we did in class. I’ve taken a lot of courses and usually there is some balance where here the textbook was 95% of it all easily. The lecture material is skimmed over far too rapidly and there are neither handout notes nor time to properly write anything down. The problem was that the backup copies I’d made of the Windows 98 SE startup disk were missing a few files. (If this type of problem drives you around the bend, take up another field of work. I am doubly angry not because of the problem, but because I am still not familiar enough with computers to have spotted the symptoms a day earlier.) Something new today. One of the class computers had become clogged up with spyware and pop-up ads. Since I’ve never used the internet on a computer without top notch firewalls, I had to take a look to see the damage. It is a category of event that I had no incentive to keep up with. Wow! That crap just takes over your computer. I’m surprised the law let it get so bad (I’m informed later that there is legislation pending). I mean, when it gets to the point that the ads prevent you from using your computer, I think the problem has just as much to do with you than the ad makers. This single log-on from that unprotected computers installed close to 400 different pieces of spyware. The ads do all kinds of sneaky things, such as demanding you fill out a survey before you can uninstall. The instructor spent over an hour trying to get rid of all the viruses, and probably thinks we all learned it watching him click the mouse while we were working on our lessons. It was funny, because these people are still ten years behind me – Mike does not realize the exact things I prevent by keeping reign on my personal information are causing the spyware problem. He keeps telling us there is nothing you can do about it because nobody knows who is writing the spyware. What a thing for an instructor to mention. There is plenty you can do, starting with reading the ad and targeting the company that’s using it. Send all American Express junk mail back to American Express. Phone them and tell them you won’t use their card because they advertise on the internet. At the rate things are going, it will take years for certain people to figure things like this out on their own. I did not want to use my real name on the internet, it is something all intelligent people never did in the first place. Mike insisted we long on using our correct first and last names and I found 8 instances of spyware using my name, all in the past 26 days. You can’t say anything to Mike because his attitude is, “So what?”. Yet in the next moment he fancies himself clever uninstalling the consequences of such stupidity. It does not good to explain to such a moron that you intentionally kept your name off the airwaves. He’d be proud he ‘blew your cover’ type of thing. He is a product of a society that invades privacy and supports that kind of activity, defending himself by denegrating anyone who thinks otherwise. As stated, the classes have become almost continual insinuations by Mike that anyone who does not know something we talked about must be suffering from a severe learning disability. He is getting it back, because the class has also learned that I won’t stand for that kind of nonsense. Several of them have privately told me that they knew something was wrong but did not have the worldly experience to justify why they felt that way. One of them has even thanked me because he thought he was alone and did not have the vocabulary to state what was wrong. The whole teaching experience is what is wrong. Most of them did not know there was a proper lab to lecture ratio and just took whatever was thrown their way. Twice today Mike said to watch him if we “wanted to learn anything” and twice I told him that I do not learn things by watching other people do them. There are too many knowing glances around the room when for him to ignore that fact. Too many people already know in general knowledge I am far more educated than Mike, and in a short time, I will know more about computers as well. Networking. It is a minor part of the course, but that is where the class is getting a full demonstration of what I said a month ago. As long as everything is in a controlled environment and we all push the computers keys in unison, every exercise has a successful outcome. I said that is not how the real world works. Last day, several people tried to do the networking thing we breezed over a few weeks back. It didn’t work – but it was also clear that they were not really supposed to try it. (Nobody really has a network they can practice on at home, and there was certainly no time to do it in class.) Well, Mike had his hand at getting it to work. He does not know his stuff when it comes to networking. Ha, ha. But the real revelation was watching how he approached fixing the problems. He is no better than the rest of us were at problem solving. It is plain now that his knowledge of computers is not a reflection of his intellect. It is also very observable that I knew what was going on after the second week of classes. Last, I am really abbreviating the explanations of how the class has sided with me on most of the issues. I never meant to lead the palace revolt, but unless I learn to repair computers in the next twelve hours of class, we have a problem. Furthermore, all the other students knew it, but each felt isolated and afraid to say anything. I’ve never let fear hold me back. Well, that is not strictly true, but suffice to say the level at which I back off is far beyond average.