It is prime hurricane season so I’ll take a chance riding my bike today. The intermittent rain gives me a chance to stop into places I’d rarely visit otherwise. For example, that toy store on Harrison. The guy has a huge inventory of educational gizmos, the type that win science fairs. I know a bit about how expensive but unoriginal rigs can ace those contests. I took some spyware off his cash register and advised him to get a separate system if he wants to go online. Some clever man once said the best computer security is a good lock on your front door and your back door.
There is a reason for the bike ride. To any new people, I have been on a diet since late June and I’ve passed a landmark. I won’t go into it here because I certainly will, once my goal is reached. I have one of those builds where exercise does not help much. It [exercise] builds endurance but any weight loss is quickly [2-3 months] back when I quit jogging. Diet works far better for me. I now weigh less than I have in 5 years and that represents a loss of over 12%.
Then getting to the shop I had a group lesson, which always pay close to twice the rate for private, so I took the rest of the day off. To ride. Ride like the wind. Get on your bikes and ride. Down up pedal, down up down. I was over to ChipTech to pick up parts and found a complete riverside path along the railroad tracks. Lovely trip, except you see, Florida has an obsession with making rivers straight. As you see from the pictures, the things that are supposed to be straight, they have a lot of trouble with. But what do you expect from an area run by “that replacement for Anopheles, the Spanish politician”.
Dickens called. He wants me to run the shop on Sundays. This was expected and my gut reaction is to say yes, but I really have to think about giving up one of my favorite days of the week. I could compensate by taking Friday off, and I will need a part-time job if Workforce okays my return to school with a pile of free money for tuition. They may be willing to bend the “retraining” rules a bit to include me because I would be past the requirement after I graduate. I have a few thousand in unused allowances but it is not enough unless I get a loan and find a school that will credit up to half the computer courses. The plan is that I would be open from ten to four on Sundays to pick up the tourist crowd. The money is definitely there.
Afterward, I went to read up on Linux. I’m beginning to make some headway, and one of the items I’ve discovered is that there is a shortage of Linux technicians, who are reportedly making $80,000 a year. The statement that Microsoft is the only company who has ever denounced Linux is incomplete until you know that Intel, IBM and a whack of other big companies have recognized its position. Some people still resist the knowledge that Microsoft has a bigger marketing department than they do programmers.
This was also the first time in my life I left a library involuntarily. The Hallandale Public Library. Since I rode my bike over, I did not take a long-sleeve winter sweater. I keep one in the car just for occasions when I have to enter government buildings where the air conditioner is set to “comfortable for the staff”. I am relatively insensitive to temperatures, but I had to leave after less than twenty minutes. My glasses had been lying on the table and they fogged up solid when I got outside. I thought about complaining, but one look at the fat old ladies on staff changed my mind about that. Fat old ladies have a God-given right to be as comfortable as possible no matter what.
Linux is still challenging. I’ve discovered how to emulate many of the more familiar features of MS. This is not saying those features are good, just that they are familiar. One is the methods of logging on by different users. Linux has one of the worst systems. You can’t get it to display a list of users so I could tell a new client how to log on. Also, each user has the ability to lock his “session”, requiring admin rights to turn the computer off if they have walked away. You’d expect better than that from a system developed “by a thousand programmers”.
They have put in a DOS-like naming scheme for their drives and folders. Stick with one or the other. DOS names have no place in a GUI environment. They call the C: drive “hda” and stick with that notoriously stupid slash notation. Home/user/filename type of thing. Nor is there an easy way to display the file hierarchy. They also make use of that word “mount” that nobody has ever explained to me satisfactorily. You have to mount the drive, but nobody knows why. It is treated like a supremely important word, yet I have never had to mount a hard drive in over 30 years. (If it happens behind the scenes, leave it for hardware people to worry about, not computer operators.)
Last, the Linux system is not very well-planned out at all. Far too many exceptions and quirks. The search mechanism truly sucks, and seems to go on forever. It may be that working it right requires specialized knowledge. That goes back to what I said about notoriously stupid. The worst feature is the one you’d think they would have grappled with first – useless, cryptic error messages. You should have seem me trying to get a video file to play, it is actually worse than Windows Media player to find and open a single file. (Windows Media player is a joke, you can’t play a file, you have to add it to a playlist and there is no button to do so.)
The mystery of the missing laptops has been solved. Happily solved. It turns out the customer changed his mind about the upgrades. So he put both of them into a gray-colored gym bag while Fred was on the phone, then walked over to the Internet computer and checked his email. Nobody noticed, and when he left fifteen minutes later, nobody gave anything a second thought. We were damn near dancing when he came in today with both units. To help celebrate, here is an Argus photo of a fountain near the Diplomat Hotel. That is one weird place.
By weird, I mean not logical to me. Whatever happens must happen 100% inside the building, because except for people coming and going in taxis, you never see anybody around that hotel. If there are families, they stay inside. I’ve seen this in South America, where they build hotels next to slums and it is dangerous to venture outside, but this is Hallandale Beach, for crying out loud. Major crime here is the Comcast man ripping off your bicycle. Mind you, if you, if the setting is one where children can be entertained just like at home, what is the purpose of these expensive hotels?
They advertise that the hotel is a family atmosphere. Why? They don’t even go out on the beach. There is a private pool with a ten foot fence and security guards. It could be that strange American “convention” or “lecture” thing that should have died in the 70s. I’ve heard every type of speaker imaginable and I have yet to hear one who justified flying him and his family around the country. You decide, I’ve met other who heard the same speaker say that he was fantastic. I’ll have to refer that one to a higher authority. Like Homer Simpson.
Andreas, the black lady was in today with one of those ten dollar digital cameras. She has the right idea, learn on a cheap unit. The problem is that it is a little too cheap. I had one of those keychain cams and they eat batteries. She mentioned seeing me on my bike cruising down the avenue. Now she wants to get hers off the balcony and join me. No problem, she is a cutie and would be even more of a fox by trimming up just a bit. Don’t tell her I said that, okay?
