Yep, a lot happened, so fasten your metaphorical seat belt. First, the Miami International Airport Saga is not done. Since Jose had walked up from the baggage claim, the taxi driver assumed he was Peruvian. And tried to drive him through Miami Beach on the way home. You decide on that. We were, in fact, thirty feet apart but there was a government office between Concources C and D which meant that we could just barely not see each other. Once again, a big hand for the Miami International Airport, the staff, the local police, the taxi drivers and all companies with booths along the south wall who have no clue what “south” is. Airport? What’s that? Signs? Huh?
Here is a sign. It is in a back alley just south of Harrison off Dixie. What was I doing in that back alley? Easy, taking a shortcut home on my bicycle, But now I want to know why you make associations about back alleys. Gotcha!Big Al called. His new girlfriend had a printer problem but turned out to be a Netgear router problem. After three hours of troubleshooting, it turns out the Ethernet cable that came in the box with the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) was a “crossover” cable. The last thing you look for. The kid they sent out from [insert computer sales company here] configured the whole array funny and cleared out fast.
It was also another instance of BellSouth (or is that ATT again, how I get those two so mixed up) installing inadequate wiring. Without a long tale, remember that the phone company is supposed to predict usage and runs in the lines to each business years in advance. This is not a favor, but a rule they agreed to when they were allowed to form a regulated monopoly. The phone company hires genius managers to oversee this work. I’ve met some of them. I’d swear they used to work at an airport.
As an aside, you may be interested to know that the phone companies made the opposite mistake with backbone cables. These are the high speed [fiber optic] cables between cities as opposed to the local [copper] cables to you house. Having lost a big round of the game to cable TV (the phone company had determined there was “no money to be made” with cable TV), they were determined not to lose out on the Internet. This was before anyone knew that America would turn the Internet into a near total cesspool of interconnected idiots. The phone companies installed so much fiber optic cable that probably less than 10% is actually in use today.
Later, my Tuesday music lesson was cancelled, as I predicted from the facts two weeks ago. It often requires another teenager to motivate the first one, a truth you can only ignore after you become a parent. Got it? To make up for all this, who remembers the “Johnson Twins”? Maria walked into the shop today, and we came back here to run over the material we know in common. She said she likes country, but did not recognize that much of the traditional stuff. I burned her a CD, lest she go thinking anything on the current hit parade is original. She has a “light” voice, a sweet sound.
The remarkable part was that she filled in the parts normally sung by Robynette [my ex]. Remove the fact that Robynette was a trained opera singer with a three octave range, and Maria did not compare badly at all. There is still a ton of work to do with that, but the building blocks are there. For the first time in X years, I had a vocalist correctly interpret the work I was doing on the bass. A few of the winners were “Stand By Me”, “Fire”, and “Gimme One Reason”.
Where I am not convinced she wants this band for the correct reasons, it was so nice to play solid bass lines to somebody who knew what was going on, even if they did keep dropping chords. In fact, I was so unsure of her motives, I booked another rehearsal tomorrow evening just to see what pans out. She has but marginal comprehension of the mechanics of operating a band, but this is Florida. She does personally know the booking agent for the Hard Rock Café.
Hewlett-Packard is again letting their marketing department sell them out. They appear to have applied their “thousand different cartridges” mentality to the printer driver downloads. HP are real pricks on that one. The download does not include all of the files needed to operate the printer. That is pure garbage, even purer nonsense. Very few people keep that disk. In any case, that disk should contain only drivers, not DLL files. Here is a clear case of a missing DLL file that prevents operation.
This is precisely the type of rot that sets in when there is no popular pressure to “do right”. I’ve pointed out this as a difference between here and “out west”. Over here, the entire system seems to side with the outfit trying to get away with something. Women yakking on a cell phone kill pedestrians and get away with it. Stores can throw you out if you complain about bad service. You cannot sue anyone for damaging your car unless you were personally injured. It will be curious to return in ten years and see who is still in business, because the Chinese who are taking over don’t yet have the experience to be total bastards but I’ll bet you they are learning. Watch out once they figure out how to staff an airport.
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