October 5, 2006

           [Author's note 2023: I've learned to never throw out an old notebook without leafing through every page and today I found setup instructions for this blog. It's terribly faded, but for all else that is involved in taking this part of my life on-line, this could be the first actual day.
           As an addendum, I've added what I can make out from the water-damaged notes. In 2006, it was still not obvious to all users that items like an e-mail were intended to be user-names. Also, my writing and typing styles were more different in 2006, which I find makes the blog "dance around" more.
           As luck would have it, the decision was also influenced by a drop in digital camera prices. I could not find good info on which formats to use, often just dealing with whatever the camera produced. Thus, this month will have a lot of photos that don't match the text--that's a skill that takes years, it turns out, for me. All I can guaranty is the pictures are mine and from the same month as each blog chapter. That is, all pictures in this month were taken this month.
           Later, it turns out MicroSoft has made it very difficult to edit older material. You cannot open two file displays at the same time to confirm drag & drop file movements. And most of the 2006 pictures are filed by week. Hence, most pictures are just what I think was interesting at the moment and may be repeats. MicroSoft, never heard of the Ann Lander's saying, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."]

           Responding to a little feedback, I have already rejected the blog title “Fraught & Rife”, and replaced it with “The Mechanical Side of Life”. I am forced to admit that blogs are often, er, read by people who cannot read. May I add that there are no boring days, just boring outlooks. I think the major cause of boredom is only being able to do one thing with your spare time. You know who to blame for that.
           Thus, I decided to have a boring day, so I could empathize with what some people say. This is tricky because I closely associate boredom with stupidity, as in two sides of the same coin. One can always be traced back to the other, regardless of what other factors may be involved. By that, I mean it is entirely possible to bore an intelligent person, but you have to situate him near stupidity to do so. That is, boredom and stupidity always coexist. For a change, I chose to be bored. But dammit, two or three minutes into the day, things started to interest me. I’m afraid I would have to take lessons in how to be bored.

           First off, I made coffee in the new Krups. What luck, it is one of the rare coffee makers that does not “scorch” the water. There is a critical point below boiling that makes better coffee, I think because totally boiling evaporates too much of the coffee oils. Yes, I can tell in an instant if the water was boiling when it hit the grounds.


           Then, I took out the fishbowls and thought of what I could do to encourage the right kind of business people to use them. The right kind being those who have money and want my service. I better come up with something because I don’t have much use for the bowls otherwise. Does anyone have a practical use for fishbowls if you are, like myself, not the type to keep fish?
           Over to Panera early for a Sudoku puzzle, and still wondering if anyone else has noticed the puzzles are always inversely symmetrical. If there is a number in the upper left-hand corner, there will be a number in the lower right-hand corner. On the way home, the new lady, Gil, called. She was very concerned about my price. It was a little too low and it made her suspicious I was going to try to sell her something when I arrived.

           She is happy now. It was 7.5 miles over there, biking against a stern wind from the northeast. I now know that RNs make $38 per hour, when they can get work. Don’t get me wrong, I would not do what they do for any money. Except for extremely pretty women, other people’s body fluids and functions make me gag. That, and needles. I do not like needles.

           I filled out her on-line resume and explained to her that she would need a different arrangement of computer, printer and file system to keep a copy. She was not aware that an on-line resume went on the other person’s computer. It was the same old story, she has a niece “of the younger generation who know computers” who lacked the patience to show Gil what to do. Actually, the niece wound up calling her stupid. She’s opinionated, but not stupid. She quickly caught on that I could teach her great things.
           Gil is a French name and she has a total French accent, but from Morocco. She was originally educated in Israel. Language made it possible for her to get free schooling in Quebec, in Canada. You can get anything you want out of the Canadian government if you speak French. Upon graduation, she headed straight south for both the money and low taxes. She is up on Stirling and 46th, so I stopped at the Barn on the return leg. Before long it was late afternoon. I never went into the shop.

           Back home, Ruth called. She has come down with a bad case of asthma and I think she has the flu. This is an interesting turn of events, let me explain. It is becoming important that we find a good assistant over there. You see, Ruth cannot make it for the Comcast shoot tomorrow. She needed to cancel. A month ago before we met, that would have been too bad for the film crew, but now Ruth knows she can email and cancel. See the problem? Where the original plan is always to teach people how to do things, Ruth has not yet learned to do emails, I have been doing it for her. However, she is right on top of delegating that duty, for she now knows everything needed for that part of things.

           So she basically had to call me to cancel the appointment. Yes, I know the pay is the same, but it is just not the kind of work I can do even in the short run. I climbed on the bike and went downtown to the Internet café on Young Circle. (Fred was out of town and Anna was not home.) Once on-line, I discover that Bonny Johnson [a newscaster] and possibly Comcast in general have not grasped the idea that the Internet is supposed to make you easy to find, not the opposite. I tried all the combinations [of an email address]. Then I systematically called every number on the web page until I got an answering machine that stated her name.
           Ruth has adapted to me doing the office work for her, which is usually a bad sign for learning to do things for herself. Oh, she understands the importance of knowing what is going on, but there will never be enough time to do it herself unless she stops running the shop every moment. That will never happen, not now that she has seen things that used to take an hour done in five minutes of my time.
           I even found time to go over Don’s books again. I am piecing together what happened. The books got put off because of the immense learning curve needed to take over from the lady who quit. Then someone, probably Don, tried to leap in and meet some kind of deadline. Long enough to do some damage, creating up to four versions of some statements. I am only around 4% complete, there is lots of work to do on this one. G’night.

ADDENDUM
           This is the damaged text as recovered. It shows my notes on setting up the blog page, minus any passwords. Remember in 2006 there was nobody to ask for advice or instructions. BlogSpot was a private company whose only virtue to me is that the blog posting was free. There were no worthwhile instructions and the blogs came out looking like unedited copy. How close this blog came to being named "Fraught & Rife", I have no idea where that one came from. Other blogs wanted to charge for a private web page or something. The other reason I chose BlogSpot is because it was not Google. That unfortunate event occurred later.

Fraught & Rife Username is signup name
Everglades
Display Name: Theopholus Punoval.

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