One year ago today: February 14, 2015, Operation Keelhaul.
Five years ago today: February 14, 2011, hearse-shaped cars.
Nine years ago today: February 14, 2007, it’s flower day!
Random years ago today: February 14, 2001, Key Biscayne.
MORNING
Do you feel like reading today? Good, I feel like writing. I’m back on local time and so I would not get in too good a mood, I was listening to NPR. This morning’s feature story is a Brit explaining at length that soccer is superior to American football. He points out that football is boring, you see. I dunno, have you ever tried to watch an entire soccer game? I can only stomach about 30 seconds.
Seen in the background are shop tools and power bars. This is my primary incentive to get a bigger place. That’s what most of today will be occupied with. I’m doing a state-wide scan for every property that is selling for under $35,000. That’s my traditional limit for buying in Florida. Remember, buying ties you down to a place.
And don’t get attached to the Wiki picture feature. A more realistic survey of what’s available indicates only one picture in sixteen of what they publish has any content or even novelty that I feel would interest my readership. Hence, there is about a four-month supply left. That’s just a prediction, but there is an on-going quest here to find the charmed daily article that is easy to post and gains us a leap into the big league. Imagine this blog if I had a budget of, say $100 per day, to work with.
Once infuriated by NPR “The Holocaust Station”, I listened to a Trump rally. He’s certainly got his second wind with the issues. Every one of his opponents has been seriously measured. If a fair election was held tomorrow, it would likely mean every establishment candidate would go down the tubes, no second flush necessary. Trump has changed the direction of the country, and yes, I hear the echo. “If Trump had not been born, it would have been necessary to create him”.
Green light bulbs. The jury is still out on that one. They cost four times as much to buy and are not a bargain in my experience. First, they are just as easily broken. They do not accommodate all types of lampshades. And they are not designed to be used in “enclosed spaces”. Like inside your kitchen or bathroom light fixtures. Between these and other shortcomings, the average green or “florescent bulb” has, in practice, lasted less than a year around my place. That is no kind of savings at all.
Scalped as a child.
NOON
See this project? It’s the new storage cover for my sidecar in the making. The office won’t allow those carport tents, so I’m designing a cover for the entire vehicle. Unlike a regular motorbike, it has to be in three sections. What you see here is for the sidecar, I’m gluing the tarp seam as a reinforcement for the grommets. Yes, that is my “kitchen workshop”, the largest space in my place not taken up by other projects
The seams are glued in three-foot sections because the material is unwieldy. And you have vindication that man can never own enough spring clamps. This uses the only glue I’ve found that remains flexible enough and still does the job. E6000, and even that is crappy glue. Rubber cement, for all its versatility, does not stand up to highway weather. And all forms of crazy glue, school glue, gorilla glue, and paste glue get brittle with age.
NIGHT
Here’s a trick of the trade. Why does my security system work better than others? I won’t say, but I’ll show you one of the techniques. Most people would mount a sensor like mine on a swivel, well, I mount the swivel on a pair of kitchen timers. But they are slightly offset. That’s all I’m saying, except this is the system in the workshed, and it uses electronic timers.
Note, the following applies to Adobe Reader, not to Adobe Flash Player.
Another “upgrade” you do not want on your computer unless you have no other choice: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC. This is no ordinary update, even to uninstall it, you must agree to some pretty sordid terms by Adobe. (Use Agent Ransack if you got it, it will kill any file.) There are other pdf (portable document format) readers available for free that do the same job as Adobe without planting malware on your hard drive.
Adobe often sneaks onto your computer by two devious methods. One is the “automatic update”, something smart people never activate, and the other is those incessant “out of date” popups that appear when you are in the middle of something. As far as I know, Adobe is the only software company that pushes its updates by making its own older versions non-functional. You should never trust any entity that does that kind of thing.
It startles me that Adobe can get away with this behavior as it would mark Internet doom for any other application. I use Foxit but as ever, don’t just install it. If you do switch to Foxit, be aware that even though the download is free, they will beg you for money. And should you install manually, here is what to watch for.
a) uncheck Foxit Spell Check Language. It has mysterious TSR components.
b) uncheck start menu. You’ve got enough clutter in your start menu already.
c) uncheck QuickLaunch. QuickLaunch is for the quasi-retarded half-monkey Android crowd.
d) yes, make it your default reader. You can change this later.
e) uncheck printer system. If your printer system works, don’t fuck with it.
f) yes, check Trust Manager. It byte counts to spot anything that changes, kind of neat.
g) disable all 30 day free trials that appear during install. They are a sucker’s paradise.
Other than that, Foxit is actually overkill. Stick to the basics unless you actually need to alter PDF files. Did you know PDF was originally written to prevent such alterations? When pdf editors came out, they were, at the time, a counterfeiter’s dream come true.
ADDENDUM
I’ll talk about tourists in a second, but first take a look at this square. When it is cut into different shapes, the little orange square appears. This animation shows that even so, the total surface area remains the same. But I thought you’d like to hear my explanation of what is really going on. You see, the large blue square that begins is your salary. The lines being cut are Liberals, slicing up the pie and rearranging the pieces.
And the little orange square is what you are going to wind up with if you don’t vote right this time around. Ha!
This was the last year of hope for most of the Florida tourist industry. There is no more slack in the system. Should a sizeable chunk of the market fail to show up again this fall, I’d say there will be some dire consequences? I’d guestimate a good two-thirds of the people I know with jobs are fairly directly dependent on tourism.
Last Laugh
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