Welcome to the sweltering heat, the part of Florida they don’t tell you about. I’m safely ensconced in a shady shelter with three fans, but I can look out the patio doors and see the heat. It’s good I have plenty to do, which includes make my specialty fried chicken. Except, it isn’t fried, but nobody knows that. Hush, it’s a secret. I put together a kit for Agent M who is far handier with tools than I. One item he’ll build is the coil, which for some reason I cannot manage on my own. My wires bend, slip, come loose and work their way off whatever core I am using, which has ranged from dowels, PVC pipe, to empty shampoo bottles. This coil connects to the antenna, so when that goes operational we can do something with it. I’ve covered this material many times before but who knows where. This blog has no index.
Another four hours of testing here shows no improvement in the antenna strength, though all testing is still indoors. But the different antennas pick up different routers around a third of the time, which is truly strange. There is no ready explanation, since the stations that are found are detected at the same wattage. It would be nice to come back here some day and laugh at such questions.
I have not been in the Philippines since around 1985, the time Pat Pendergrast and I took that freighter/ferry/steamer floating death trap to Kalibo. What reminded me is that I made fish and rice for lunch, and I still make it exactly the same as the meals we had on that boat. Fish, salt (in the form of soy sauce) and rice. Every meal for two days was the same, I ate the tail, Pat preferred the head. To this day I still make it the same way, even the same proportions. Conditioning, I suppose.
Try as I might, I cannot emulate a steel guitar on the electric bass. I already play parts meant for piano, sax, fiddle, and guitar. I’m probably just not trying hard enough. Think of the instrumentals in “Good Hearted Woman”, “Silver Threads & Golden Needles”. I don’t seek the sound, rather the different feel to the notes that make the riffs distinctive. That the crowd identifies with a particular song and it is a large part of what makes my show so original. The use of hard work instead of Zydeco.
Another urban legend put to the test says don’t try this at home. You know the trick of cleaning a microwave is to boil a few ounces of vinegar, then wipe the cavity clean. Dave-O came over and we watched the microwave. First the vinegar will boil, then it will smoke and yes, it will catch fire. Ordinary vinegar. You been told.
Dave-O got an advance on his settlement. He went directly to Red Lobster for feast, it’s a bachelor thing for those who can’t cook. He’s got the Jeep back on the road and gave me a brand new DVD player he never uses. He drank the last bottle of wine I keep around and fell asleep in the armchair until dark. We are still going to head out to Davie to meet some “white girls with blonde hair and blue eyes and small knockers”.
With his luck, he walked in the door just as I finished cooking a huge pile of chicken and corn on the cob. But he had the $39 “special” at the restaurant and couldn’t manage a nibble. We watched “Charlie Wilson’s War” and calculated the economic kill ratios of the American weapons. That is, how many dollars does the bad guy need to attack an American with one dollar? Easy, 266, or just too many. This is based on the American stinger missile ($74,000) shooting down a Russian helicopter ($20,000,000).
Next I demonstrated the progress with the antennas. Dave-O was impressed and he directly tore off $40 for parts for a model for himself. The club now has money. And the club is very aware the same antennas are selling on the Internet for $150 apiece. For some reason the entire antenna technology is shrouded in mystery. But if the public will pay $150 for it, needless secrecy they shall get. They must be unacquainted with the fact the sniffing and scanning software is downloadable for free. Don’t worry, you are safe since that same software requires brains to interpret.
No jumping to conclusions. We have not yet produced a single useable result and have not connected to even one signal. It is not any practical function that amazes the onlooker, instead the amount of development in such a short time. That can be misleading. What we need are economic kill ratios. Are you going to pay $30 to $80 per month for service so you can get free information, or will you invest in a perfectly legal antenna?
Concerning free service, I see the end of general access to the Internet (a.k.a "net neutrality"). The big providers (Comcast, AT&T, Rogers) want to charge you per usage, something the phone company calls “metered service”. When it gets busy, you will be prompted to enter your Paypal account number to bump somebody else off the waiting list. I believe this situation is unavoidable because so many of the rich want it that way. In a sense, many of the clueless are already paying with their personal information.
On the other hand, metered service could produce two good results. Since the revenue would go to the telecommunication companies and not the web sites, it may cut down on the sheer number of crackpot outfits that only get visited because they are free, goodbye Twitter. And it will encourage the ultimate replacement of the Internet with something that actually works. Metered service restores the old order, where the poor are effectively cut off from the mainstream of financial opportunities, job listings and general flow of power.
