One year ago today: August 30, 2014, annual glue parade?
Five years ago today: August 30, 2010, five more years?
Six years ago today: August 30, 2009, eTrade my eye.
MORNING
That’s a fine howdie-doo. The house that started the whole auction thing, the same place that was cancelled the morning of the auction, is back on the market. This time appraised at $132,000. That’s the one where the guy came running out flashing the phony “everything’s okay, my wife signed the papers this morning” document. Now before we conclude something fishy was [then] going on (which I suspected, see blog), maybe they [the owner's] did make a deal and the buyer is now trying to flip it for double.
[Author's note:The spectacular rise of this particular property, seemingly a random choice in the middle of nowhere, should be causing a few people to squirm. Those are the same people who maintain I am always saying I was first or the cause of something big. Like, my claim I am the one who Geico bases that commercial on with the man driving a motorcycle and pulling a camper. (I was driving through Texas in 2013 when I saw this camera crew . . . .) Or my claim that I am the one that got McDonald's to finally serve good coffee. That was in October, 1988, I filled out a complaint form saying I'd pay a dollar if they'd change to good coffee.)
Update: 2016. This passage is not clear, but what happened is this particular house was the one that became the example of how rotten and rigged the auction system is. By the time the bank bidders were finished, the price of this house quintupled what anyone else would have paid for it. The contention here is that it seems impossible I would pick this one house of thousands. I just did.
Well, the facts on this house are 100% verifiable that I found it on my own, picked it above dozens of contenders, stuck with it past opposition, followed it up, attended the original auction, published pictures of it here, all of it verifiable. I paid good money out of my own pocket for all this to happen. So, good, let my detractors explain all that. As for the properties, can I pick 'em or what?
I wonder how the Miami Herald would explain the drop in prices in the area. The Herald is the one who trumpets continually about how Florida’s economy is always getting better. A cursory (and apt term) search of the area we randomly chose four months ago reveals prices have dropped in every category except the auction resales.
I looked at a related area called “tax deed sales”. Once again, there are no clear instructions. It Iike reading tax law, nobody tells you what you have to do, instead they keep going on about what you can’t do. The club meeting this morning was called off this morning because of the windstorm. It’s from that hurricane fail named “Erika”. I was severely buffeted just taking the scooter up to the coffee shop.
Where we held an impromptu meeting of the robot club, all over this tire patch that will not stick. We reviewed everything from flexible epoxy to $450 a gallon yacht repair compound. Then it hit us that hardly over a week
NOON
How about that. Somebody has designed a military camouflage patter based on those Magic Eye posters. I wonder if it would fool those people who just never can see the hidden object? Who ever made the documentary was clever enough to never show a sample. It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of. Here is a stereogram example that I cannot see. But the idea of 3D camouflage, that is brilliant.
[Author's note 2016: I was finally able to see the image. It is an eagle.]
I went past the bakery just to eyeball the premises. In around a week, that should be back to normal from the holidays. I also stopped to see the ammunition maker and he described some capacitors he put together to kickstart his plasma cutter. I thought he meant he had a shop cutter, but he’s got the industrial model that will cut engine blocks. He needed the capacitors since starting the machine would dim the neighborhood street lamps.
By mid-afternoon, the storm is already dying. I took the time to recapture the lost files from my old Dell backup computer. That’s another make that gets old just sitting doing nothing. It was only ever turned on to make backup copies 13 times a year. Brand new in 2011, it crapped out in late 2014 despite a pristine environment. Yeah, I was more than concerned because those were THE files. Many, many scans of important documents.
The process included reinstalling the old operating system on a clean disk and a new computer and then slaving the old master. Then a low level disk copy, as in seven hours to copy 40 gigabytes. That’s correct, my life history fits in 40 gigabytes. Uncompressed. That will be finished by 4:00PM, too late to catch the matinee at the foreign cinema. But those files are so important, I’m not leaving a thing unattended.
It’s not going all my own way. I’m getting intermittent messages that certain “file additions” are being lost. Well, so what, they are data attachments to PDF files so I’m not even going to bother investigating what they mean. To all the wise guys who say I should have all such files safely tucked away at offsite zones, that is what I was doing when the computer crapped out. It was the hard drive.
Here’s some trivia. You never see knights on horses charging off a ship onto the shore. I found out why. Because horses get seasick and cannot throw up. They cannot be transported very far by ship. So how did the Spaniards get horses to the New World. I dunno. Look it up yourself.
NIGHT
This is not another 3D poster. It is a satellite photo from Imgur. It shows the town of Delray Beach, Florida. The caption indicates that in 2010, almost a fifth of the city’s 34,000 houses were vacant.
Back to this town. It’s the end of the month and I’m the only person left with enough money to go out for coffee. I’ve been around here long enough to predict who will drop out as the month progresses. You might think August was a longer month, nope. The snag was the first of the month was on a weekend, so the checks all arrived a day or two early, plus five weekends this month. My budget is done weekly, a far superior system.
What? You want examples? Okay, you can always start with unwelcome co-dependencies. Strangers you met an hour ago start modifying their behavior based on how they think you should act, and blame you when you act differently. I dunno, maybe there is a name for that.
Or the ones who think once they know you, they are your new best friend. Or how about the clowns who assume if you are a leader, you are obligated to lead them. For free. That kind of crazy misconception. (The Ken Sanchuk syndrome. Since you can add numbers faster than he can, you should do his math homework for him. But, but, Ken, have you ever stopped to think that the reason you are so slow is because you've been conning other people. . . .)
While I didn’t work in repair services, I often ran the equipment that diagnosed the errors for repairmen. This involves having to figure out what the other guy was thinking so you could fix it. And you quickly notice that women have more difficulty with this than they should. It’s not the repair, but the looking at things from another point of view.
I’ll stick my neck out and say you learn quickly that the most uneducated, self-centered, and immature men do, in fact, behave the same as women. The problem is, they often think they can get away with it in the same manner. They bill their inability to think through a bad circuit as the fault of the idiot who built it so funny. And I just described the Panera.
You want to know the point at which I realized I could no longer work for the phone company? It was in 1990, when they started hiring men with strange names like Nolan and Jacob. Or Tyler and Brandon. The work was hard enough, but strange names? Ain't nobody got time for that.
ADDENDUM
As of today, I am living on extra time. It has been ten years, twice what was expected. It has not all been roses. I’ve been nearly broke, I’ve developed related health problems, I’ve had individuals who knew I had a heart condition deliberately try to cause me high blood pressure. But the only remaining factor that worries me a little is that my finances were only secure up to today. After this, I’m also living on extra money. Hey, it was the best possible decision at this time in 2005.
Um, that's extra money, not borrowed money. As far as I'm concerned, since
Last Laugh
(Ken's still looking for the kickstarter.)
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