Ah, haven’t I warned all enough about burning backup disks. [Burning implies optical disks.] It’s a good thing I follow my own advice. I had two major failures today, both with memory backups that failed for no reason. Of course I’m happy that I had complete backups, but not happy that the system screwed up when nothing was wrong. Never, never trust an optical disk for backup. Make them, but don’t trust them.
First, a pretty picture to catch your attention. Always an eye to a blog, you know. This was the display at the local Winn/Dixie. Well done. The photo was taken with the new Digital Concepts mini-camera, most people don’t even know I am taking a picture. The results from this camera must generally be brightened up to 44% to get what you see here, but the results can be impressive.
I was into the shop a little early and stayed a little late. Had to, I finally sold those wind-surfers, both for $62.50. Originally, we had wanted $75.00 each but they were starting to take up space. The guy that bought them pointed out when they were the rage, these sold for $2,500. He had a sad tale to tell, maybe I’ll say later.
I punched in my flash drive to collect some Limewire downloads, and damned if that computer did not short out the pins on the USB connection. That was memory problem one, and having full backups didn’t remove the fact that I had just destroyed a $70 unit. Yeah, I know, some guys are never satisfied. (Fortunately I was later able to recover all the data and reformat the drive.) It was fairly quiet all day ($93 in sales), so I managed to watch a video about Spinal Tap.
Okay, let’s get something straight. I am a musician, not a rock and roll tour band. Big difference. Having said that, I’ve heard of this tour group, but the video indicates it is a spoof. If so, it is fairly enduring. The plot was great, poking fun at the entire tour group farce, a farce that actually goes a long way to underestimating the taste of the American public. The groupies are fantastic. The English names are enough to gag a hippo, I mean, do they really still name their sons “Nigel”?
I now have several copies of “Six Days on the Road”, one by Ferlin Husky. Is that hick enough for you? Here is a photo of Safety Sam, he is our new watchman. Doesn’t complain much, does his own thing and is a good listener. I can see, if he was much more realistic, why women might prefer his company.
Ruth has been calling in a panic, so I finally answered the phone. She is going on the Letterman show again, tomorrow I guess, and is in a flap about the web page. I had to trade some fairly harsh words with her, that no, neither Fred nor I had promised her a new web page by Sunday. That I had reminded her several times not to plan anything around new technology until she was herself confident of what was involved. When she calmed down, she agreed. But she also cancelled tomorrow without enough notice for me to find something else for the day. Remember, I had cancelled Don’s first request because she had booked me for noon.
A recap of that situation is in order. Okay, everybody into the huddle. It turns out, team, this was not a well-planned and timed marketing coup. In fact, this whole thing is as much a surprise to Ruth as the rest of the world. She does not, as presumed, have dozens of contacts and favors in the entertainment world. In fact, I think I may be it for that one. If so, a few more things begin to make sense, including why she can’t understand why I am not enthusiastic enough to drop everything for the cause.
She said to the effect that people wait their whole lives for something this big. Up to now, I thought she already had her big break. Not every lady runs a successful store for 60 years. Throw in that I now know the wigs sell for $2,000 each. She is a one-person operation and I understand that I have been promoted to second in command on the battlefield. All her movie stars aren’t doing her any good now, but I am. I see that Jennifer Lopez never even returned her call about the fashion show. Er, that’s show biz.
I should make a decision here. Throw in with the doggie wigs and help out, or keep charging her by the hour in a situation where she does not have much choice. Don’t misunderstand me, she planned a lot of things on the spur once she saw what I could do, and that was not part of the deal. I don’t run offices where I’m not in charge and this amounts to just that. I see now this thing has to fly within a couple of weeks here or it withers. I have two weeks to invest. I say do it, but reserve the right to change my mind any time.
So I sit here in my air-conditioned office, right next to my galley. Where I just made up a week’s supply of smoked turkey stew. Sipping on decaf, and editing photos. It was also backup time and that is where the second problem arose. I have disks that are formatted UDF, which claims you can keep adding to the disk until it is as full as you’d like, then finalize. Well, not only did the new photos not save, they wiped out the existing two months of photos. What really bites is that the people who build these things designed it in a way that such a thing could even happen. The disk contained the roughly 600 jpeg photos taken since July 1, a tiny fraction of which you see here.
The computer field needs an Otis, the guy who built the first successful elevator. You see, he built it so that if the cable breaks, the car stops. That’s right. No matter what else goes wrong or what causes it, the car stops. Brilliant. Everything else that happens does so with the car stopped. Well, we need a computer disk that does not erase its contents. No matter what, you can get the contents back. One cannot help suspect they can do this but won’t.
I am getting more familiar with the DXG. I took some videos of the shop when I opened this morning. It has a lot of curiously great capabilities. Taking jpegs makes a camera and film advance sound. You can lock the exposure, although the unit also has a tendency to take overly dark pictures that need brightening afterward. When the video is over, it converts the last scene to a still, which is a nice touch.
Ah, the guy who came in with the story. He owns a surf shop up the coast. Last summer, he fired a female employee who promptly accused him of raping her. Now, guilty or not, he has been put through the wringer. That is, he has been treated by the police as if he was guilty, including spending a night in jail. This guy, I mean, what can I say? It is so obvious she has made a malicious accusation to get revenge for being fired.
He is now on the police list, and police are the most sexually repressed group of males left on American soil. He will spend a fortune proving himself innocent and he is still marked for life. The police don’t ask if you have ever been convicted, they ask if you have ever been arrested. Something that is none of their business, but the police know that is hard for most people to understand why it is not the police’s business, so they get away with it. She likely has no assets and nothing to lose by lying. If anyone suggests the police are fairly listening to both sides of the story and treating everyone equally, you are nuts. She probably has two or three sob sisters on her side already, coaching her exactly what to say to turn a wink into rape.
What is more, is that all such accusations in an employer-employee situation should be treated with extra skepticism, if for no other reason than such accusations are in vogue. Particularly so, when it is a female who has been fired by a male for poor performance and she only speaks up afterward. The theory that she was afraid to speak up is 1960s logic and shows a poor grasp of reality here. That has got to be one of the more blatant situations imaginable. Yet how the police love to get in there and stomp on the guy’s head with nothing more than a highly suspicious source to go on.
My personal opinion is that most, but not all, sex “crimes” should be civil and not criminal matters. It is not the place of the police to be protecting females from having sex with anyone except themselves. Sex is too one-sided an issue to be enforced by a male-dominated private club with access to secret records, code words and methods. There is no justification for arresting people in situations which so clearly favor the accuser. You don’t have to arrest the guy and book him, a simple phone call will do. Nor do I hold females automatically blameless in every situation where some unfair sexual bargaining may be involved. Seduction and coercion are parallels in this society and I know of women who seek that out. Hell, I know women who claim every one of the hundred and twenty men they slept with conned them into it. I’d have to look back on my records to 1985 to get her name, but she is still out there.
