April 26, 2005

April 26, 2005 Tuesday It is still early, Hippie and I are going to get our morning constitutional along Dania Beach before the day becomes a scorcher. I took the time to key enter a few hundred more printer items. For once I have the radio on. Radio is proof that talk is cheap. They are still running that phony ad for laser eye surgery, the bait and switch from $499 to $2,499 that is apparently not illegal in Florida. I switched stations but it doesn’t seem to help. Now I have a talk show about whether or not it is okay for children to sleep in bed with their parents. I’d say sure, provided you don’t want any more kids. I don’t tape radio but this show would have been a classic. It was definitely not what the hosts had expected. Some of the stupidest divorcees in the state called in. One still had her eight year old son sleeping in her bed, and she didn’t know what to do about that. Er, lady, try telling him he can’t, or is that too tall an order for you. (I don’t use the term single mom for divorcees because there is usually no child support.) Then this other bozo calls saying she’s ‘recently’ met Mr. Right. The reason for the quotes is that when it comes to dating, women can use words to mean whatever they want. Recently could mean ten years ago or late yesterday afternoon at a stripper bar. What? Well, where else are divorcees going to meet men desperate enough to marry them in Florida? Up yours, I know what I’m talking about. Yeah, well your mother dresses you funny. You probably sleep in the same bed as her. Anyway, the dumb-bunny goes on to say she has to go sleep at the boyfriend’s house. Lady, let’s add this up. You haven’t got the balls to discipline your own kid. That is parenting at its finest, not! (Notice the lick from Wayne’s World?) Not only is she missing balls, but she is missing brains. Her eight year old is plainly getting his way by whining, another parental triumph that will surely pay off, at least to some public defender. She has not yet figured out that when she is overnight at the boyfriend’s, her kid is already not sleeping in the same bed as her. However, that is two-level thinking and the average Florida woman is not very good at even one level. No mercy, folks. Hippie forgot the Cakewalk CD, anyway, we left my car at the bank and did a two-hour power walk this time. I jogged for two five minute stretches and that severely winded me. Mind you, I covered a quarter mile in that time and I could not have done that a few months ago. We stopped for coffee at the Broadwalk Grill, which has some fairly decent looking waitresses. Too bad they all have attitudes from being hit on all day long. Hippie is still surfing the net for a date and I explained the facts to him. There are no co-eds on the net looking for forty year old men, no matter how well he can play guitar. It turns out he had one lined up but her friend talked her out of it. He’s still talking to her, where I would have told her flat out that I don’t date women who choose their friends over me. You can always get new friends. It was a classic morning with a good sea breeze off the Caribbean at close to 8 miles per hour. A hint of rain that never materialized and tiny waves that pass for surf in this part of the world. My guess is we did some five miles, most of it aerobic for me as I started jogging within the first five minutes. It was a vegetarian breakfast, and coffee is a vegetable, right? Well, it is not red meat if that’s the way you wanna be. We walked south from the Dania Pier and down the Broadwalk. There was one only one babe all morning. The Broadwalk Grill is just north of where the sand dunes start, and according to Hippie the entire beach is owned by the mob. I asked Hippie if that meant to open a pizza parlor you had to get a nickname and start wearing bulky suits. He don’t know, except the part that it is the mob. He knew a guy who had a store once, past tense. It burned down. Yep, gotta pay those dues. I mean, nothing else burned down. Then I get home and decide to go inside that DVD that quit playing. Interesting. Once inside the can, the mechanism is almost identical to an internal computer model. The main difference is the interfaces, otherwise even the dimensions are the same. There are only four exposed wires and a grounding strap. Cheap-ass. You can easily see the CD that is stuck inside the tray. It is mostly empty space. It can stay open on the counter until I figure out what to do with it. Nothing is apparently wrong, so the problem is internal. Next patient is the scanner. If it works, it is DVD burning time. I’m feeling ambitious about getting a mass of documents finally scanned. I guess, like many people, I have a thing about keeping old papers, I’ve even found a few Xmas cards from 1980. (Note: 1979 is the critical year for records. Very little exists before then and there was no real journal. Moving so often, at times by force, made it impossible to store what little there was. That is why I call it the Pre-Cambrian era.) Later. In my shop, er, I mean, my living room, I’m learning some hard facts. Today’s is that an IDE cable not pushed in exactly right can cause pins on the HDD controller to look like they are okay, but are actually themselves pushed into the shell and cannot be fixed. Sigh, and it also means goodbye to another old friend. Who remembers the old Caviar 21200 drive from back in ’96? Made in Singapore by Western Digital, it was (at 1273 MB) once ahead of its time. This is the famous drive that saved Hippie’s bacon in January. It is still in the original ESD bag [Faraday cage]. She is going into the Aptiva because 2 GB is the maximum that BIOS can handle. In other news, the floppy on the Video computer quit working. I hope it is not the controller, for that is the one I hooked the 5-1/4” floppy up to, and it did not work at about the same time. I’ll need some luck on that one. I was trying to hook up the scanner when I discovered there was no A: drive or it has a bad controller. At least these hardware problems are not bringing me to a standstill any more. Later. Maybe the Caviar will be around a little longer. I could not get the Aptiva to recognize the hard drive. There were some parts of the BIOS that did not make sense, but I tried every possible combination. It will recognize a drive because I installed Windows 98 on that machine, but it is not doing anything now. This learning process must be incredibly boring to some readers, but my policy is to write what is new each day. And the old Aptiva just became spare parts. I learned that these ZIF sockets [into which you insert the CPU chip] are not the end-all of upgrades. If you look very closely, there is a certain pin arrangement that fits larger chips into the same socket. We were not told this in class. Of course, fitting is one thing and working is another, but just in case I am keeping all the old CPUs. The video computer is acting up. It refuses to recognize the mouse on every boot up, and older programs won’t install. The new Aptiva is ready to go, as soon as I find the driver for the onboard sound. There are four options at this time. I’ll list them to see if any of them become the standard. 1. I could go to Workforce One, but the computers there are often blocked as to downloads, and they are getting pernickety about the one hour limit. 2. Downtown to the $6.00 per hour rip-off. I don’t want to know what they would charge for a download, and with all the screens facing the counter, it would be hard to do it on the sly, although I think I could. 3. Spend the big bucks, sell my identity to the phone company and get internet access hooked up. 4. Use Hippie’s computer, but that is unreliable. Also, Hippie’s computer, no matter what he says, is mainly designed for entertainment. Getting anything else done on it is a hassle, which is hard to explain, but we all know people like that. They have the setup, but arranged in such a way that you’d rather not ask in the first place. They know it and always make a big deal how they are willing to lend, but in reality it just never goes well. It always reminds me of Colin’s truck, the one I arranged to borrow when I was flying back from Caracas. All it needed was new tires, a carburetor and insurance, but sure, I could borrow it. I also remember Canan (rhymes with cannon) and her computer. She’d call to study together, but that was because the evening always ended in wild sex. Well, she was Turkish. That computer was never set up and ready to go, and it took the first hour just to reconfigure it so we could do school work on it. She also used to rent pieces of it out, which I thought so strange because she did not know how to reassemble things. Some people could claim she needed the money, but anyone who can fly across the Atlantic Ocean to go to school here is not as poor as I was. Neither of us ever failed a course with this arrangement.