Tobacco Road. It is a club just off downtown Miami that apparently was a pretty good deal until some years back. Note the sign says “until 5 A.M.” but it is a Miami sign. The Hippie and I played there within living memory. There is no significance to all this except I will be a few blocks from there tomorrow. Tobacco Road is a showcase for Viagra. (As O’Rourke pointed out, America was running short of middle-aged men with boners. Miller sales were slumping, I tell ya.)
It is going to take a week, but I’ll ace Quickbooks. Yes, I did use this program in its original form many moons ago, because I recall ordering 1,000 check blanks to find out my bank would not accept them. They were a thirty-second of an inch too large. Shows you how progressive my bank was—I had to get rid of the checks. The edition I’m using, Premier 2006, is a more visual environment that minimizes the accounting skills required. Notice I avoided saying it was dumbed-down?It is true, HP has stopped allowing downloads of drivers for some MicroSoft systems, saying that MicroSoft has failed to provide them with enough information to keep the drivers up to date. This is, of course, nonsense, because most of the drivers haven’t changed in years. But what do you expect from a company with over a thousand different printers on the market, all of which do basically the same thing? HP will use any excuse to force you to buy a new printer. They are the least ethical company in their field, with Brother and Epson running a short second.
It’s Brother, because their “help desk” will not help you unless you “open an account” and Epson because their printer cartridges cannot be easily refilled. I was working on a Windows 98 installation this morning. Yes, 98 still exists out there. In the later afternoon I read a specification booklet on DVDs. My conclusion is to avoid converting my backups from CDs to DVDs because of the lack of defined standards. The number of things that can go wrong with DVDs is monstrous. I’m more likely to invest in one of those carousels and stick with CDs until the engineers get their act together. I have located a unit that both stores and reads the disk (as opposed to just locating the disk), but it tops $500. Ouch, that hurts considering the reader is worth probably $30.
Today got off to a good start when filing my week-old expense receipts. Found the forgotten change from a twenty tucked in there. And I’m at a loss for a word. What is the term for people who have an unjustified opinion of how others are supposed to behave? No, not merely thinking people should be quiet in the library, I mean the dolts who go overboard. In my life I’ve gotten into dozens of situations by merely reading. I was once asked to leave a coffee shop because I was reading a hard-cover instead of a newspaper. Another time a couple complained to the museum because I was reading a novel in the long line-ups (instead of talking to them about their grandkids). There is a term for this. Besides dip-stick, I mean.
While I still don’t like Clapton (he writes blues like a 14 year-old chick) I finally customized a bass line to “Before You Accuse Me”. The original has almost no bass at all for it is actually a Chet Atkins-style rhythm line behind a tired blues lick. I was very tempted to syncopate it along the lines of “Funk #49” but decided against it because I can really throw some guitarists off time with that one. Say, I just thought of something. Since I can’t fool an MP3, why don’t I add “Funk #49” to my list? I’ve never heard a Florida band do that tune and I haven’t heard it played the right way in at least twenty years. I wonder if I can still do it.
Due to the shortage of time, I had to advise the neighbors to decide if they want to spend money on their own antennas. They are heading back to Quebec in two and a half months. These antennas are all home made. By pure coincidence, the best ones are produced a few hundred miles into the moose pasture north of Montreal, some place called Chicoutimi. Reckon it this way, if you want any contact with the planet Earth from there, long range antennas are prerequisite.
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