May 29, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: May 29, 2013, electronics.
Five years ago today: May 29, 2009, a 110% normal day.

           How about trivia right to start? Most people know a steam tractor when they see one. I’ve got a wee more information. See that tractor in the background? The actual piston is tiny, about the size of a large breadbox. You could easily set it on your kitchen table. All the rest of the tractor is all boilers and wheels and as any farmer can tell you, tractors are expensive. (In dollars, about the same as a university education, such as one farmer had falsely promised his eldest son, making the eventual true cost incalculable.)

           So what are those men doing? Going for a free ride? Nope, they are the plowmen. Look closely, each plowshare is connected to a lever. These must have been stout fellows, for they are doing the work of eight. As the plow moves, their job is to adjust the bite of the blade by hauling that lever into position; you can see the semicircular cogs. This is dirty work and thank the stars I was too young to be forced into it.
           This is a “soft” field. That means the plow is not turning up many stones. These dull the blades and have to picked out of the soil. The tractor pulls a skid (called a stone-boat) out into the field, and you waste your youth loading the rocks and gravel bits by hand onto the boat. When full, around every second day, the stone-boat is hauled to the edge of the field and each piece is thrown onto a pile. It takes five years to clear 40 acres with this method. There is a device called a “rake” that clears the same field in a day. But forced child labor on a farm was both free and legal in 1972.
           Note the leftmost plow bites a little deeper, evidenced by the handle being slightly higher than the rest and that plowman is looking forward. These are the parts they don’t tell you in the history books. He follows the cleat marks made in the ground by the ribs on the big tractor tire, which in turn breaks the soil up a little more. Because this furrow is now deeper and more even, on the next pass, the tractor driver drops the small front wheel into this rut and lets the tractor mostly steer itself. So much for the romantic age of steam.

NOTICE TO SINGAPORE:I get it. Somebody is using this blog to do research for the year 2011. The Singapore source is a mystery, but I must remind those from overseas that this blog does not in any way represent the daily life of the average American. Far from it. This blog is also intentionally inaccurate, so always confirm on your own before making any decisions based on what you read here. I repeat, this blog is not a good way to understand how people think or live in the West. There is a reason North America is bankrupt. Everybody is living beyond their means except the few like myself.

           Next, be very careful with the newest round of Sony downloads. They’ve devised a tricky screen that greys out the “skip” buttons. If you are not careful, they put a load of crap on your computer. I remember when Sony used to be a reputable company. They should have kept their standards high even after they discovered how unsuspecting Americans could be. Sony brought you the “service contract” instead of the two-year full replacement warrantee. They discovered Americans were dumb enough to pay extra something Sony was legally bound to provide for free. (It is still there, but you have to ask for it.)
           To those who liked Moviemaker except for its annoying habit of mixing all your files in one big folder, you probably noticed it quit working a while ago. You get that message “Moviemaker cannot save the file to the specified location…”. So I took a look. There are tons of idiots out there that offer “did you check if it’s plugged in” type advice. Folks, it is clearly your input files are corrupted and MicroSoft can’t save them because of it.
           I’ll wager you used a webcam or camcorder that stored files in some weird format, then used a converter to change the files to something Moviemaker could import. Well, Moviemaker is extremely finicky. So don’t be paying out your money to sap-heads who tell you they can fix the problem. They can’t. But when I do, I’ll tell you for free.
           I may have something already. Go to this blog and download WinFF. This is not the easiest software to use, but you want to convert your input file to .avi, that is, you are done and finished with wmv for editing purposes. It let you down.

           Use the MS Compatible AVI preset. For those who like DOS, this does a frame by frame conversion (very slow) and it looks like the list of computer lines you should see nearby. I found out the hard way to avoid .wmv conversions, and the AVI files will break up when you import them to Moviemaker. Make sure you recombine them before you edit.
           Yep, I got the thing working. AVI has a few quirks and Moviemaker likes to import every file into a separate “collection” but I was able to produce two excellent videos in less than an hour. The relevance to this is that I know I could produce a comedy series of videos that insults guitar players.
           I already video my bass lines so that I don’t have to relearn obscure tunes the crop up on occasion. Watching them, I see they are full of little reminders to be careful “not to play that like a guitarist” or “emphasize the non-guitar sound here”. I’ve got fifty of these things.
           The question is how to make money. You can’t sell the videos, since they’d just get pirated. But Elliott, my inventor friend, has had success using videos to drive customers to his product. What product do I have? This blog. Readership tapers off when I’m not traveling. And it drops to 30% of normal when I don’t travel for over three months, which just happens to be the case right now. This blog is not mass media, but yes, for the effort expended I like readership as much as the next author.