Here’s a scene along what should be a tourist-choked Las Olas Blvd. up in Ft. Lauderdale. Note the empty curb, meaning all kinds of parking which is something unheard of in that city. The authorities in that town hire teams to locate and eradicate free parking. I’m personally not to concerned when high-priced coffee shops go under.
Still sub-arctic, so today I finish the latest Patterson, “Roses Are Red”. Congratulations, he finally scored with a single woman, Betsey. Two ‘e’s. But I’ll be she gets killed so he can get back to wallowing in self-pity. Patterson’s First Commandment: good guys poink women contemporaries, bad guys date women “half their age”. After you’re 36 that is legal, but he can’t leave it alone. Sorry you didn’t get a lot back when it mattered, Jim.Later, sure enough, Betsey got whacked. Must give the bon-bon eaters something to live for (reference to fat bored housewives who read fiction and sexually fantasize). We had a mid-day warm spell, sending me all over the territory and getting fuel prices down for what is sure to be another long winter. Starting this weekend, I’ll bet. Much as I wanted to stay at home, I was up to Stirling and the library later. The babe wasn’t in today. Sigh, as she definitely has smooth upper thighs, my favorite brand.
The road trip across America is still very much in the making, so I looked at various motorcycle campers again. They seem to start in the $2,400 range, meaning a used one runs at half that. Hmmm, that’s only a week in a ho-hum hotel to pay for itself. The point is, I saw some dandies. There are two chief designs I’d consider, both towable by a larger motorcycle. One is like a camper shell with a lid that unfolds. The other forms the base for a tent you have to set up. The difference is the interior space. The modern patterns are fairly luxurious compared to bush camps I’ve worked in.
This irrelevant surfing occurred because I cannot get too distracted while juggling a dozen downloads. I can now defeat any computer at the library. The primary rule of digital hacking is that if you can open the door in less than a minute, it was never really locked in the first place. During three hours of downloads, I look at things like campers and Iceland. The videos are not that critical now, but you sure miss them when the well runs dry. Do you want to see the Hindenberg explosion, Mars rover, or the Kennedy assassination? Grab them before somebody wants your credit card to view those, too.
Maybe I’ll cool it for a few days, as my activity is drawing interest from the yokels--but some people actually go to the library to watch what others are doing. Like Ken Sanchuk. I wouldn’t mind if it was only the pretty females, but no, the libraries are not full of those. Afterward, I went up to Barnes & Noble for an hour. The good magazines are all repetitious this month, as in top ten this and that for 2010, a year noted mostly for junk and misleading prices. Let’s all drive a Lexus for $239 per month.
Trivia, and this is from my own brain trust, not today’s reading. Many people who used compressed files have no idea how they are compressed. Here’s one popular algorithm, JPEG. When you look at scenery, it is quite often in horizontal bands. The yellow sand, the green sea, the blue sky. To imagine how it works, slice that picture into sideways strips. Say the topmost strip is all blue sky. Instead of storing 480 bytes of information for the pixels, just have one byte store “sky blue 480 pixels across”.
The downside of this method is that the colors get grouped. The blue is probably not consistent across the entire strip, but when it is uncompressed, the software has to take a guess on a range of color. I thought you might find that worth knowing since most people don’t have the foggiest. Yeah-no?
My heroes today are the two fat guys who won a record $4,100 on Cash Cab. They took the video bonus and won. Their logic was primo, the one guy saying we got the money, why not try for fame as well. Makes perfect sense to me. I’m following that up by re-reading “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”, a book I read decades ago crashing at Harry’s place in Big Willie and telling myself I’d read it again. Here goes. Great book, terrible title.
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