It’s a good thing Friday is my day off. I’m at home, trying to hold down some peanut butter cookies after a day of practically fasting. It was too hot again so I went downtown and stayed inside [the library] all afternoon. What I finally found was a picture of a “pilot biscuit”. Shown in this picture, that is what we were given to eat as cookies when I was a kid. This particular biscuit from a Danish museum is claimed to be the oldest example that still exists in the world. That’s because anything older and my parents already fed it to me.
Beginning today, I am not saving any e-mail messages, drafts, and I’m deleting everything in all folders. I had deleted these items when my system got infected by MicroSoft Outlook, so imagine my surprise to view the code and find they still had, among all else, all 2,115 of my recent outgoing messages stored. Folks, do not trust MicroSoft as far as you could throw them. If you need to save an e-mail, copy and paste it to a word processor and delete the original. There is an old Texan saying that it is only a fool who trusts anyone unless he absolutely has to.
A recent test of speed typists, defined now as only 72 words per minute with only 94% accuracy, shows that they could not identify the positions of the letters on the keyboard. That goes to show how the education system has changed for the worse. I know those positions in my sleep. And another thing, Generation X, in my day that speed and error rate would get you a fail.
Another article is making the rounds about how MicroSoft is complaining about the US government’s domestic spying as an “advanced persistent threat”. Make no mistake about it, MicroSoft knows all about software spying and for them to lash out at others is the most suspicious thing I’ve heard this decade. Sounds more like a Google-esque claim to be on your side. What’s the matter MicroSoft? Did somebody use your own technology back on you?
Trivia time. I found myself at the main Library taking it easy this afternoon. I picked some books arbitrarily and was thereby distracted. (I had a rare upset tummy so my diet consisted of tea and water.) Here’s the trivia. In a pinch, if you get a flat bicycle tire in the woods that cannot be patched, try this trick. Take the tube out and stuff the inside of the tire with as much dry dead grass as you can. Lever the tire back onto the rim and it will get you home. Neat or what?
Being deprived of food, I strove to find out some information about chocolate. On line, you mostly get claims to be the best. But how is chocolate rated, what constitutes different grades? That was not so easy to uncover. Did you know white chocolate contains no cocoa whatsoever? As with all food, what tastes best is subjective. The most expensive chocolate is called “criollo” and the least expensive is the only kind most of us have ever tasted, “forastero” from Africa.
Apparently this African chocolate can be identified by its lack of aftertaste. You have to take another bite as soon as the last is swallowed or the flavor is gone. The other books I picked at random included a dissertation on making chisels and a book of Israeli poetry that completely escapes me. “Table. Oh, mine table! Never have I seen thee so square”.
Collin, my inventor buddy, pointed out something. If you read the testimonials on dating sites, all the success stories are women. So I checked that against my own. Sure enough dude, you got that right. And it is an older lady connecting with an older man culminating in marriage. How’d I miss that? Too busy thinking about chocolate, I’ll bet. And noting other phenomena like how all the actors on Bonanza reruns shopped at L. L. Bean. Look for yourself.
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