I’ve lately told how empty the roads are these days. This is late rush hour today. I was actually trying to snap the Gulfstream casino, whose twin dome towers are barely perceptible on the horizon dead center. Things were so dead today, I drove the three miles home in six minutes. Believe me, it is not the Florida road system that suddenly got better.
Let me philosophize. Around every 50 years or so, along come a couple of Americans who change everything. In 1902, a pair of bicycle mechanics flew an airplane. In 1978, two orchard workers completely altered history, including the way we think and survive. Well, all I’m saying is the world ends in 2012 because it is prophesized that two unknown guys invent time travel. That would indeed end the world as we know it. Like the others, these two guys come from out of nowhere. And very few places are as nowhere as Hollywood, Florida.There, have I started a rumor? The club meeting today was productive but we are concerned that for all our headway with antennas, we have not yet produced a single working model. Same with robotics. The flashing LEDs I’ve built don’t qualify as electro-mechanical because they do not physically move. Thus, we examined dozens of our own mistakes, then narrowed our plans down to what we can realistically afford. Agent M still does not grasp voltage divider technology, placing him squarely where I was three months ago.
The super computer is here. It still needs work. It has only 80% of the RAM I requested. The rest is on the way. It has a slow bootup. And it will require a week to configure for my usage. The operating system is XP but the version that handles the Vista and System 7 applications. That means this is the first document I’ve produced on Office 2007 and I already don’t care for it. MicroSoft has scrambled all the commands meaning I have to relearn to use the system. Otherwise, there seems to be no overall improvement of what the applications actually do.
This afternoon I installed an 18” fan in the new Florida room. This creates an even air flow that allows me to leave the A/C off and yet work in complete comfort. It is the same arrangement as my hotel in Caracas. I dislike sleeping with a running A/C. They dry out the air and cause me a sore throat. Yet others, like Dave-O, have to have the thing running full blast and ice cold in every room of the house. Then again, he doesn’t pay for his own electric.
While I do my best to keep current with computers, I am shy in the areas where they overlap into consumer gadgets, like telephones. Call it years of experience, but I do not rush out and buy something because it is the rage, and that includes the Apple devices everybody around me is using. It seems to me most people must learn about them through television. If I don’t see the ad on the Internet, where I am resistant to advertising, I rarely know what is new until it comes up in conversation.
An example would be Android, the cell phone operating system. It is a clone of Apple’s iPhone system as far as I can see. According to Wiki, it works on 12 million lines of code. The system automatically reports to Google, who own Android, the location of each user. Google has been caught doing some nasty things over the years. For instance, you know those street views on Google maps? The little camera cars driving around were not just taking pictures, they were mapping out all WiFi networks as well. Google apologized, but did not specifically say they quit. Google not only knows who you are and where you live, they now know where you are. Because they are so secretive about it, one has to ask what they intend to use this information for.
The starter pin for the scooter has not arrived. It is not a stock item. I’ve gotten used to kick-starting and don’t care for it. It rarely works on the first kick and it is not a fun activity in the Florida summer heat. There is a noticeable increase in the number of scooters on the road these days, and most of them are the 150cc models. Talking to other owners, I see my experience with gas mileage is not unusual. It works out to 70 mpg in the long run, still three times the inflated claims for car performance. I have yet to see a car that really gets 32 mpg in town.
But 70 mpg is not spectacular for a scooter. My gas budget is $24 per month and I’m averaging slightly over 10 miles per day. This reveals how strongly the cities of America are designed for the motor vehicle. Think about the round trips. The grocery store is two miles, the nearest lumber yard is ten miles, and the movie theater six miles. Four miles for the library and twenty-two miles to see my doctor. Without a vehicle, life gets pretty damn difficult for most people. I grew up in small towns where one could walk everywhere.
If gasoline ever hits $200 a barrel, this country is in deep trouble. It is just not possible to walk everywhere and it would be far too expensive to change the infrastructure. Sure, I hear in Europe they are paying $10 per gallon, but that tells me they can live day-to-day without driving. Most towns in Europe were built well before the invention of the motor car, which is not to say that is the best plan either. My point is America cannot revert to a similar existence. If there was a bakery within everyone’s walking distance, the bread would probably cost $10 per loaf because the ingredients would still arrive by truck and that fact could not be disguised as it is now when people take their car to go shopping.
Happy D-Day.
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