End of the month but it sure does not seem like it. So much has got done that I feel I’ve been here far longer. Ah, didn’t I say that was going to happen when I got the workbench? It is 9:30 AM and I’ll give JP a call at home shortly. Otherwise, I have a network to set up. I’ve been thinking about alternatives to a job. One might be writing but that is one hard sell. I’ve never had such a job before and don’t know where to start. [All the commercial writing I've done has been by the hour for an employer.]
Just so you don’t think life is too exciting, I should mention I bought one of those packages of sandwich meat that has several different slices of the same meat. This one was turkey. There was turkey salami and turkey baloney. I did not care for the baloney. As soon as I bit into it, I thought of my cheap-ass father. Baloney should be outlawed. I wanted a grilled sandwich for breakfast and that was all I had left. I had to make up for it with a bowl of cereal spiked with brown sugar and shredded coconut.
The arrangement of the computer in the old dining room is much better. I’m going to get some one-way curtains and I will be sitting up high enough to watch the street while they would have to step up on something to look inside. Or maybe just block the lower half of the glass. That would work.
The strong westerly winds continue and woke me up overnight. Things rattle or blow down the street. I am very aware that most of the trees here are ornamentals, that is they lack the hurricane-proof root systems. Don’t plant them next to your house.
The G called about the symphony I had already told him I would not go. But then it glanced at my clock and realized I had been working since 6:30 AM and changed my mind. I drove there to find, as usual, he had an ulterior motive. That heavy-set blonde lady at Cort’s is a percussionist in the orchestra. That means she hits four or five notes per song as part of a forty person group. He had some kind of date with her and didn’t want to drive his car out there.
As long as it is not opera, I’m okay and you can tell I’m enjoying things if I nod off and somebody has to nudge me for snoring a little. There was nothing terrifically classical on the program and the conductor was (yet another) oriental with a doctorate degree whose passion is to bring the arts to south Florida and other steamy crap like that.
The concert hall was too dim to allow pictures with my digital. Concert halls are always too dim, and donated by some civic minded outfit that seems to have forgotten that most poor people don’t have the time and money to attend expensive shows. Mind you, it got me to finally take the Argus apart and disconnect the speaker.
That feature is fine, as long as you want everyone around you to know you are taking a picture. It was a tradeoff, because the camera beeps differently between modes but I figure I’m familiar enough with it to bypass the need for the beeps. The largest component of the circuit board was the speaker.
There was a little edge missing but overall the concert was pretty damn good. The featured pianist was Gustavo Ponzoa, who began his piano studies at the age of five. He must have quickly learned to play a lot of glissandos. It is hard to tell when they make a mistake playing those. The finale was something called the Firebird Suite. It says the 1919 version, so I told the G to make sure they didn’t slip in any of those 1918 notes or rests. I never cared for Schumann and can barely tell Stravinsky, I consider them the hacks of their day. I didn’t recognize more than a few passages of the entire show.
Mind you even without any opera glasses, I saw that there were three or four babes in the orchestra pit. One was a brunette in a silky black outfit, noticeable for having a perfect body. You don’t get that very often with the starchy South Florida diet. I was able to get a closer look at them all during intermission but no pictures. Remember the camera beep. All four were violinists, or what a lumberjack like me thinks is a violin. I could look it all up, but why?
The G got in line for a coffee and I got to chatting with a lady whose daughter was an oboe player. Apparently she has played since January and the roster doesn’t show her name yet, hardly a standard in the days of word processing. Come on, BCC, this lady spent a fortune on lessons and wants her daughter’s name up in lights. Sorry I can’t give you scans of the material, I gave the scanner back to Diane5.
That was kind of interesting. She called for the scanner, but I recall she gave it to me in lieu of payment. Also, the stuff from storage, well, I’m not a storage outfit. It was mostly junk anyway. Is that a sour note? Let me tell you what the sour note was at the concert – the coffee. Just as the G got through the line, the goof behind the counter called out that they were out of coffee. I tasted mine, it was somewhere between sawdust and poi. I walked back to the counter and sat it down. The guy says they ran out of coffee, to which I replied it was too bad it had not happened a little sooner.
BCC, Broward Community College, is famous in my world as the place that tried to turn my inquiry about an $89 evening course into an $8,000 college degree. This is the place that runs a credit, education and job search on you when all you’ve asked about is information they won’t give you on the phone. It turns out you cannot just take the evening courses advertised, you have to go in an be subjected to intense sales pressure – the so-called counselor actually tried to insult money out of me, He insinuated I was too cheap to invest in my future and that my credit wasn’t “good enough” get an $8,000 student loan. All I wanted was the nine-hour course in digital photography.
There were 71 musicians listed, of which 33 were female, or had obviously female names. Men dominated the horn sections and percussion. The campus had some other art on display. Here is one for you, a spider web of black nylon some fifteen feet across. There are life-size dismembered bodies of humans and animals wrapped in spider cocoons, with a little blood showing. This is hanging on a tree near the entranceway. Your tax dollars at work. Make sure you’ve already had lunch.
Back home I continued to work on the wireless connections, getting nowhere but leaning plenty. For example, I thought WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) was a general term of all wireless networks, but it refers specifically to 802.11b. That is the outdated system I am using to experiment with. Mind you, outdated is a relative term. The principles are the same and there is no assurance the next standard, 802.11g I believe, will be any real advantage. The differences between the systems are not things the average home network owner is really concerned about in the first place.
I cannot get the demon to work like a regular XP. I’ve figured out how to find the drives but I won’t go through that every time, I want them to display using My Computer. This unit also has a little trouble displaying graphics despite the $300 AGP card. They are fast, but they show artifacts when the page is scrolled too quickly, something my old 500 MHz unit seemed to be able to keep up with. Much as I’d like to learn, I don’t have time to mess with the journal computer, so in it goes tomorrow to get the SATA drive wiped out to reinstall XP. You can’t just go in there with a regular install, which seems to require in IDE drive. It has an 80 GB SATA. Most of the software was web-based, that is, like Collier’s Encylopedia, you have to be on the Internet to use it, the only thing on your CD is the index.
I fired up the laptop, named Helene, after JP's sister. She is the one who wanted a replacement, but her husband decided she wanted an upgrade. He was quick to point out it was not faster or better than the one they had, [which was] a worn out junker with keys missing. Reminds me of dating a woman with teeth missing. So, I now have a laptop.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 2006
April 29, 2006
[Author's note 2016-04-29: this entry is reconstructed from one of those daily calendar memos that have a segment for each hour of the day. That's why so may codes and abbreviations, I have long since forgotten who most of the people are. But whose fault is that? The picture is here because it looks nice. It's a glacier in Patagonia in 2005.]
Bad news, it was not the rent [at the computer shop] that went up $550 a (total of) month, but a curious thing called CAM, for Common Area Maintenance. This is the screwjob that landlords can give you. It is one of those indistinct areas of a lease and where Fred was paying $39, they now want $589. This is ridiculous and has no bearing on the value received whatsoever. It depends now what will happen, but if I was Fred I would be looking for another place. Plainly the landlord is using this tactic to get around a restriction in raising the rent every year.
I got over to Diane6 [the code for the French Canadian lady], this is the lady with the wireless networking troubles. That is one difficult problem there, the signal just will not pick up. Everything is set right, and the connection is made but there is no data signal. I have never met any "expert" who can explain to me how this works. You ask them and you get another two-bit explanation of what you already know.
From there I went back home to bench test the wireless equipment. It works fine here, although there is no Internet connection to test it on. That is not really necessary as this network will be local. Adam was over and says he is picking up a good solid signal from the northeast. He is also going to check my cable, the one he remembers as a live connection.
I was in the shop and emailed Cheryl about the gig tonight, she is usually there anyway because of the poetry. The place has become quite popular with other musicians, again by that, I mean middle-aged male guitar-playing vocalists.
That Barbie computer is becoming one expensive unit. I installed the CD burner twice. The first time it picked up as two masters until I noticed there was only one IDE cable in the can. Then it refused to read the setup file for Office 2000. However, I got Limewire and Nero installed and working on the big unit. Of course, I had to set up the directory and noticed some pretty lively downloads already on the hard drive.
From there I went directly to the gig. You know, I was so tired I maybe should not have went over there. We only played three tunes and I was swaying on my feet. Count in a little mental exhaustion also, because I didn’t remember some of the stops. According to the audience reaction, the drumbox does a mean blues rhythm. It may be too much to ask, but I think the G noticed the increase in compliments directed at the drumbox. We also got more compliments total, not that he will ever admit it.
On the way home I talked to Marion. She reports a less than enthusiastic job market back in Washington. We went over several alternatives including a move back later this year if things do not pick up here. She wonders how I will handle the cold, but after Montana nothing is that bad. Her wedding pictures are on a disk and she’d like them on DVD. I’ll take a look, but she remembers video and I know that you can’t fit much video on a floppy.
I got my second wind and walked over to the donut shop for a midnight coffee. It was a nothing day. I came home, made popcorn and now I’m wide awake. Did I mention that the G got his wires crossed on the popcorn scare? It is an edible chemical that for some reason popcorn workers inhale. It is harmless when digested.
Here’s an interesting departure from common sense that might explain some things. I write to Cheryl (email) much like I used to tolerate Don++ (Kenneberg). It is an excellent reminder of the route I did not take. These people are the opposite of “book smart and life dumb”. Like many overeducated types, they fancy themselves good judges of character and haughtily credit themselves with a more balanced outlook than you or I. I had sent her jpegs of Chichen Itzah, California, Canada and included was a snap of Robynette in a café in Los Angeles.
The idea was not to impress her, but inform her. However, like dealing with all such people, at least part of the plan backfired. I won’t deny that an element (but just an element) of my responses was to let her know that she is vastly wrong with her presumptions [about me]. For example, she has that peasant inertia of attaching the vilest and basest motivations to others. If you cross the street, it must be only for your own selfish purposes, the least of which was to get to the other side. Don Kenneberg, right?
Well, I cannot cure that mental disease, but I can let them know that I have done things in this life that most people only dream of. It works like this – she innately “knows” that everything you say is bull and all supporting evidence is an elaborate deception. Even if it isn’t, she always starts from there. (She would deny this, but her everyday actions and conversation reveal that she thinks exactly so.) That is where these pictures come in – they provide fairly undeniable proof of what I say, some of you may have noticed the documentary style of my photos.
Now ask yourself, by any yardstick, would not these pictures practically force even the most skeptical to conclude that I had at least gone through the motions? Enter Cheryl. She has learned somewhere to live in complete denial that the other person may actually be telling the truth. Thus she becomes strained to the point of nonsense to ignore the reality of the pictures and find something wrong with the situation behind the picture. The last thing that would ever enter her mind is, “Gee, this is a fairly interesting guy.”
There were lots of pictures, including a nice one of myself at a museum. I had hair. No Cheryl, I did not get a hair transplant or Photoshop the dino or grow a mustache or borrow a jacket to make people think it was cold, all just to fool somebody at a coffee shop in Davie, Florida, some thirteen years later. Anyway, to show you how backwards she is, she actually said if she was me, she would get on the phone and beg Robyn to come back!
I understand that Cheryl is crazy, but harmless. Florida is great if you want kindergarten level advice about every last facet of your life. You might think someone who has known me even a short while would knock off with that but enter Cheryl. Oh, and like too many, she often relies on pointing out she is crazy to get herself off the hook in many small situations. Can you do anything you want if you claim to be crazy? That is the human interest part of today’s entry.
Let’s talk about the weather. It has dropped to another cold spell a chilly 72 degrees overnight. There has been a good breeze for three days which is really rare in this town. I had to dig out my one sweater. Does anyone remember the $1.99 breakfast specials? Maybe they no longer exist out on the west coast either, but I doubt they were ever in Florida. I miss them. Sadly, they would not work in Florida. The argument goes that people would only show up for the special. This is Florida-think. Of course, you proles, that is the whole idea. Get people in to sample your food.
On the other side of the counter, I see the management advertising the special only as a trick to upsell you. The $1.99 special costs you $10 by the time you get out the door. Both parties are equally guilty in this town. It is sad in a way because this is what they have done to paradise. The breakfast special at Denny’s is the closest thing to worthwhile and even then, they vastly overcharge for the coffee. I don’t mind because at least you get free refills, provided you can find a waitress or get past the Sunday lineups.
JZ has not been at home. His dad was obviously feeling better and went for a car ride the other day. Maybe I’ll give him [JZ] a call around ten in the morning to see if he is going to church. We haven’t visited for over a month. I’ve been thinking about the situation at Fred’s, I don’t think he will ever agree to paying that much money for maintenance and the landlord, having proven herself tough to reason with, is not going to back off either. There is just no way that location is getting anywhere near $2,500 worth of common area maintenance a month. Maybe $300, tops. That family of cats living under the real estate office has become a colony.
I think the time has arrived to be looking for a real job. This new computer gets another mention. It was in the shop this morning and Fred agrees, somebody has highly modified the operating system. It just will not allow even the admin account full access so I may wind up reinstalling windows just to get the thing to work. I mean it works, but only if you are a nothing user who never needs to make backup copies.
The Taurus. It has begun to wobble at speed. Definitely something with the tires. Nothing serious yet. Definitely showing its age. It now has 145,000 miles on it, making it the bargain of the last three years.
Return Home
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Friday, April 28, 2006
April 28, 2006
Here I am, home alone on a Friday and it is past 11:00 PM. So much good it was playing in a band these days when and where there are no women. The G swears he does not do that on purpose. (That's a joke, but he does chase women away.) I’ll tell you about the day but first let me describe the barely auspicious first gig with the ticky-bop machine. I think the only thing that keeps the beach economy going is the relaxed attitudes toward foreign money. The locals can’t afford to do much more than take a stroll on the Broadwalk.
The good news was that the drumbox sounds great when equalized through a PA system. Many problems were experienced, all solvable. The same things happened with my original drumbox twenty years ago – when you first play it live, the beats don’t sound anything like what we practiced. I have to keep double-checking to make sure I didn’t schmuck up. The G's PA stereo inputs are a different balance than my equipment, so I may have to spring for a pre-amp. Maybe use my bass amp but that thing is a pig to lug around. We can also do lengthy lead breaks, often killing an entire hour with just five or so tunes. That alone gives the drumbox a chance for acceptance. It also carries some respectable sound with a realistic snare and tambourine. The problem is that the G loaths anything that isn't him showing off on stage.
I worked all day for $50, and even then all I got was a check. I got up to Diane’s, the French lady. Egad, it is apparent she likes my company. That is too bad, she is totally not my type. I went to return her scanner, and got talked into refurbishing that broken laptop she should have got rid of a year ago. The one with the cracked screen that was in the van she rolled. She has awful luck with vehicles, this trip she blew the motor five hours south of the border (Canada) and had to spend a fortune to tow and repair it.
It is all up and running except the sound – sometimes that happens with Win XP. I didn’t have time to find the problem, as I had to get back to Fred’s with the money for this computer. His rent on that shop is $2,000 per month, I thought it was worth maybe $1200. Yet, I can see it. The location is one of the best for his business.
I’ve still got $50 in my pocket, so I’m doing okay. Going back to Diane for a moment, she is living in this trailer that FEMA gave her as a loan for 18 months. They rolled it near her old place, but not right up to it, so her balcony and deck are 40 feet away, plus there is a rule that she cannot hang anything on the walls, not even a picture. Her place is so crowded she cannot turn around. She is a survivor and a tough lady, but then, all of her hardships are her own doing.
She knows a man who is a dual citizen, of both Canada and the USA. I thought that no matter what country you were in, the social security was payable, but she says this guy was “caught” and now the USA takes 25% of any Canada Pension Plan money he makes off his US Social Security payment. I was totally unaware of that. I find out later that Canada charges a flat 25% tax if you collect you pension out of the country--a condition that was not there when workers paid into the fund.
I had to charge her the going rate because I was there three hours. She is an expert at getting free things out of men but she knows it is not so easy with me. I know the computer does not work, but I also know it was working when I gave it back to her last year and that it had nothing wrong with it then. Yes, I used her scanner but I would not have paid anything for that, it is just not worth it. There were no print cartridges in it that I know of and I am not responsible for anything that may have happened to them. She has zero experience being around men who don't find her charming.
That is not bragging. How many times in your life has someone told you they have never met anyone like you? Well for me, folks, that statement is a rather frequent event, I probably hear it ten or fifteen times a year. Take it any way you want, but I don’t hang around long with dipshits of my own volition. She has said several small things that implied we have gotten to know each other, and that is just not true. To me she is nothing more than another customer. One that does not pay very well
.
I thought since she knows people in Canada, she might be able to tell me the minimum that Canada Pension pays, but not so. She knows as little about it as anyone else. It seems everyone I ask either does not know or starts giving me lame advice like call them up – as if I have not tried. The first mark of stupid people is that they think you must be stupid too. I read an interesting phrase about that once. Something about just because you didn’t know an opportunity when you saw it , it is still an opportunity. Circular, yes, but it makes a damn good point.
Ah well, I’m back home and trying to make a copy of the Pirate’s Festival for the G, his friend can’t play it or duplicate it. I triple-checked everything and there is nothing wrong. [Later, they must not have the correct decoder on their computers, or are trying to play it on the wrong kind of deck. The copies I made are fine.]
[Author's note 2020: remember these were early days ov converting to MP3 for me, and I have nobody to help. If I word things a bit funny, it is because I'm still learning on my own. There is nobody anywhere near my age around here who knows a thing about operating systems of software or the latest computer developments. It seems by the time I ever hear about anything, half the world has been using it for months already.]
Thursday, April 27, 2006
April 27, 2006
Yeah, I’m a morning person, but this morning is not one of them. Where I got into the shop early and had a great day both in lessons and good money, there were constant reminders that this is still Florida. You have to be extra careful in everything to prevent some local sneaking up and trying something funny. Mind you, I'm pretty used to that but I still hate monkey see monkey do. It strains the available resources.
These are all little things, I am aware of that. It is that added together they took the edge of enjoyment out of the day. Examples are, let me think, where to start? Okay, start anywhere. You know those tamper-proof plastic seals they put on bottles, like salad dressing. The ones you have to peel off to open the cap? Wow, today I had one that I had to take into the work room (now that I have one, of course) and use my tools to get the thing off.
How about extension cords? It seems to me to tie a knot in a line, you have to get one end through a loop. So why is it, when you carefully roll up a cord, then unroll it later, the knot appears in the center? Huh, tell me, c’mon. Right in the damn center.
Now my argument for privacy, I say it is an important commodity that should never be denied to those who want it at their own expense. Even that is a loose definition, because as long as they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it should cost them nothing. My beef is with imitation, because as I mentioned just now, it eats up the raw materials. I know, let me take you back a few years for an example. All this happened before I was ten, but it serves to prove a point about copy-cat-ism.
Remember those red plastic bricks in the tube? You could build houses and things and the package usually showed something that could not possibly be built with the contents? We had those when I was growing up. I don’t think they make them any more because of a choking hazard. That means to save the life of some stupid brat stupid enough to choke on anything so they can grow up to be a single mother or car thief, you know the type. They are going to roll their SUV talking on the cell phone anyway, and thanks to them, the world is without an educational toy.
Anyway, the toy was too educational. It would sit in the tube for eons, until I decided to build something. I would read the instructions and count the number of bricks and decide which project to begin, often calculating to the brick what could be done with the available resources. Hey, I said educational, because I still plan like that today. So how does too educational come into it? Easy, I had brothers and sisters.
They sat there until they saw me start. All of a sudden they want to play with the bricks too. They quickly learned, every last one of them, that this played right into the misguided priorities of the local authorities, my parents. We all remember enforced co-operation, where you have to cooperate but in reality you hope they will die.
Now there are dozens of hands grabbing the bricks as fast as they can. It would do no good to point out that they were not building anything or that they would stop and to watch TV the second I quit, and start again if I did. I never could figure out what motivates such people, but I know it has something to do with not wanting to look even worse than they are by comparison. Yes, I know all this has parallels in contemporary economics theory. I just think my example is more understandable.
There I feel I’ve done a service. It is hell educating fundamentally ignorant people. They would pull the stunt just described and never understand why you didn’t take on anything after that. Why you were not continually devising more opportunities for cooperation. While not strictly true, I have often claimed that situation is what channeled me in life toward things that cannot be equally divided, such as music and knowledge. It proved impossible for even my parents to break a piano lesson into six pieces, though rest assured they would have. Another great tactic is to pretend something was work. Like this journal. As long as it is perceived as work, they won’t touch it.
[This reference to Cheryl, a skinny lady who the G tricked into showing up at the coffee house.] Weird Cheryl, every attractive quality she ever had given away to a guy who kicked her out when she refused to pay for repairs to the air conditioning in his car. Cheryl does not understand that I think she is okay but I do not like her that way. A man who says no to opportunistic sex is not a square peg in her world. She perceives male sex drive as consisting primarily of desperation and has never met someone like me who operates on marginal but significantly sounder principles.
The new home office Sonny called and he has to unload some computers for quick cash. This is being written on one of them. It is a beauty, but still only 1.8 GHz and 512 RAM. It works much faster than the comparable unit at the shop. Maybe a better internal design. At any rate, I played back full video on it so be ready for some kind of production in the near future, It still has some bugs, for instance it is set so the admin account cannot add or delete programs and it does not display any optical drives in the main menu. It can work them but I must have the display.
It took all evening to set this up, partly due to my decision to get this whole computer part of my life up off the ground level in the Florida room. There is no evidence of flooding but it doesn’t make sense to leave anything on the ground when I had an underused dining room. Here is the new setup, and a closer look at the computer which I refer to as the ‘Screamin’ Demon’.
Ah, here’s some pictures of my newest student, Bob. He wants basic computer skills and his story is familiar. He worked for years in a government office, only to retire and almost immediately have a heart attack. They’ve told him not to plan too far ahead, know what I mean. He worked on a computer for years, probably fifteen or more. Of course, once he got out of there and tried to get something done at home, he realized that all those years count for nothing when you have a PC. You really got to know your stuff or you will be on the chat lines and not much else. Hey, does that remind you of any big company I used to work for?
New student and the camera lesson. He wants to know the Internet basics, such as e-mail and how to send an attachment. We’ve had two lessons and he is a reminder of what the people who sell you things often don’t tell you. Say you are going to buy a digital camera. Well, go buy one and you may wish you had listened to me. Let’s make a basic list of what you have to make sure is on your table to get your value from this camera.
· interface cable
· batteries
· camera driver
· photo software
· color printer
· CD burner
· CD burner software
You get the idea. If you try to cut corners, you don’t get to do much with the camera. That is your basic list, because of course, you will need the correct cables, driver and cartridges for the printer, and the correct type of paper for the photos you intend to print. None of which they told you about in advance, I’ll bet. If computer gadget sales was an honest business, I wouldn’t have a job.
The new computer is fascinating. It will take a little getting used to. That is partially because I forgot all the dozens of customized settings from the old unit. I know it is possible to migrate all that, but migrate sounds too much like migraine. I prefer to relearn all the setting in case a student asks. Oh, there was an interest question posed on the Vancouver CL, “If abnormal means not normal, what does aboriginal mean?”
Time to pump out some words for sale, as well. There has got to be a market for what I write, and please don’t get the impression this journal represents all of my output, or for that matter, my best output. The top things I do are advertising copy, something that even strangers and critics agree is ‘very persuasive material’.
Then I’ll be able to claim I quit the corporate world and went to live in a $400 a month trailer in Hallandale Beach, to write for a living. Sure, nothing published in ten years, but what the hell, at least I didn’t spent the time at somebody else’s desk unless I felt like it.
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