August 14, 2006 Monday
Guess there are no new pictures today. I was busy chasing around town for no real purpose. Way out to west of the Miami airport to find out the job was not ready to go and nobody at National Telecom gave us the word. It is kind of interesting how deregulation was supposed to increase competition with the phone companies for this kind of work, but instead all the contractors have learned how slow they can be and still get away with it.
I called Julie who still works at my old place. We might have done lunch if the project was a go. She now works in Human Resources which is easier but shakier than payroll. So here are a couple of pictures from the archives. One is a schematic of a siphon plan I drew to defeat beavers at dam building. This was in response to finding out that some dolt up north was still trying to dynamite the dam. What a moron, dumber than the beavers.
Worse, I believe he got into the news because the beavers created a wetland that he could no longer destroy. Living in a small town taught me how being dumb and having a big mouth go together but this guy soared to new records. Beavers cannot defeat a siphon and eventually move on.
There is The G by the lake at Topeekeegee Yugnee Park, mercifully known as “T-Y Park” to the locals. He used to give yoga lessons there but now it is good for a morning walk in the winter. I speculated the name is Miccosukee Indian for “the alligator infested shithole”. The G has since cut his hair and gotten semi-respectable. This picture is in the Spring of 2005.
I had to take up the day learning the new operating system, Linux. I realize now that I heard wrong that it was a difficult install. It is a weird install, that’s all. I could have saved myself $150, but I could not take the chance of messing up. I’ll quickly make it back because I see that the guy who installed it, Patrick, already knows less about it than I do in one day. This is not demeaning, rather bolsters the fact that most people do not read the manual. I met Patrick in early July while I was minding the Thrift Store for Dickens.
The system is slick and fast. Be warned that it requires learning a new vocabulary, probably one of the dumbest mistakes anybody could do concerning computers. While it beats the MS system of extremes (calling a half dozen different items by the same name, abusing an ordinary term, or calling it something so weird nobody can find it), the Linux people could have done far better in light of that experience.
I predict in a week I’ll be able to install and configure the system. Sadly, Patrick has not even installed a printer where I have CDs, scanners, cameras and removable disks. I even managed to find all the missing Linux manuals and disks I had around here by looking right where I had left them. What? You want examples of the MS extremes? Okay, how about “memory”, “desktop” and “format tracking”?
