No, I don’t have any photos because you can look it up on the Internet yourself, but during my investigation of newer models of vending machines, I discover that in Japan there is one for every twenty people and a popular product is “Used high-school girl panties”. I guess with that kind of competition, anything goes.
It was almost a day off. Here is the frame of a Jamus mountain bike I bought today, a 21-speed job. It is a 24” frame but a serious bike with air shocks. The photo was just Steve the cancer guy showing us how to dismantle and reassemble, not my joke about what it will look like when you walk out of Publix (because the bike is worth over $300). I got it because it will fit easier inside my car.
There is another photo of the frame being tested for weight, somewhere down this page.I’ve looked closely at an evaporative cooler. These are monster fans with a tissue filter. The air is drawn through the moist filter and cooled the mysterious “up to” twenty degrees. What is attracting me is the cost of operation and the fact that a big industrial blower in the Florida room would not bother me. They cost more than air conditioners but the variable cost is basically a large fan. The coolant is ordinary water and again, I am just looking.
They are portable and can be used outdoors. This unit is 16”, weighs 64 pounds and is a yard square. The advertising did not carry any prices, but if it really does cool the air and nobody is using it, there must be something else wrong with it. Maybe a city ordinance? I know that in Florida you cannot cool your house with pumped ground water.
I put in two hours working on the Linux printer problem and would have put more but Ruth began calling. Ah, didn’t I warn plenty about not learning to use the computer and leaving it up to somebody else to troubleshoot? Right. Now it went on the blink and I could neither drive over there or tech support over the phone because she does not know the basics. What troubles me is again the veiled implications that somebody is messing with her system and the fact that she called me back less than an hour after I told her I could not help her today.
This is hard to see, but that is Steve carrying a potted tree on his bicycle. He dislikes being photographed but if I could have gotten him to stop, what a great comedy shot of how far people have to go to find shade in Florida. He’s riding the mountain bike. I had a difficult time getting that thing home because traffic will not give you a break. I had to stop and go more than usual. So I spent the early evening trying to rig up a bracket to “tow” a bicycle. I figured a thirty pound bike would need a light structure beside my existing rear wheel. Drop it in there and the second bike will follow like a wagon. It was a diversion more than a project, but it failed. You see, although the tire need only support fifteen pounds, there are a series of forces involved that make the bike wobble. The idea may work, but needs a bracket many, many times stronger than what I made plus a mechanism to solidly clamp the whole thing in place with a grip I cannot reproduce here. I just re-learned that bicycles are one of the most highly-engineered products ever made and that makes them hard to tinker with. Again, it is some vectored forces I do not understand that cause the second bike to react badly when being towed in this fashion.
While working outside, these French people would often ask me things. I cannot say a word in French. They seem nice but I can’t even tell where the words stop and end, which I realize was my major barrier to learning the language over forty years ago. I just looked that up, make that 39 years ago almost to the month.
It is late but I’m going to run through “Momma Tried” so that I have a rhythm beat for it when Brian shows up for our first practice without the G. (I was to learn to my chagrin that even a fourth-rater like Brian has been infected with the shitty guitar player attitude that he's already done his work, it is now up to the bass player to learn his song list. And hurry up about it.)
Before that, I’ll read the article on Windows Vista, the new system from MS. It costs $400. How do we just know that it does not fix known problems with XP and will be incompatible on certain major points. Also, I’ve heard a rumor that it is installed only on machines that have a chip to determine authenticity.
Later, I did not read that entire [MicroSoft] article. Enough is enough. Where there are serious problems, MS only got as far as “reducing” the threats. The Ultimate version with all features is indeed $400. They have needlessly revamped the desktop screen, meaning most users will now have to go looking for once-familiar items, I know I did with the Beta version. It also looks like tons of time was wasted on making the software available in Korean and simplified Chinese, which are not exactly big selling points in North America and are further something that, given the choice, I would not pay extra for. In the end, it looks like Apple, but isn’t. Mark my words, it will have far more serious problems that were not addressed because of misdirected effort. Most people would rather have a universal printer driver than more foreign language compatibilities.
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