The experiment was a success but the patient died. I’ve been tinkering with the videocam security systems again, looking for something that works decently. It kept me up till three this morning to find a few details. If this seems inefficient, could it be that most people do not have anything like the experiences I have trying to find things out from other people. All my life, whenever I try something new, I seem to be alone and all the so-called experts turn out to know just enough to fool the uninitiated.
For instance, that V-stream video capture card. The manual does not say a word that if you have a separate audio card, it disables the V-stream audio jack. Then another hour to figure out the line-in volume is not auto, you have to turn the sound up or it does not record. Which makes it hard to go take a nap meanwhile. Every piece of video recording equipment I’ve every owned has some kind of quirk like this. There should be a separate word for video that does not include audio. Right now, the terminology is indistinct. What? No, “silent movie” is too long and already means something else.
I got up early enough to beat the crowd at Wal-Mart. It was imperative to get two new fans operating because it is not feasible to work only evenings at my workbench. That was fun trying to get somebody to help me get the big fan off the top shelf at Wal-Mart. Department stores seem to be designed with a specific disregard for the value of your time. I grabbed the ladder, got it down myself, and suddenly there were more clerks than you could shake as stick at all over the place.
It is still early, so I’m going to Young Circle to make the bank deposit. I’m ready to go after a morning smoothie of pluot, apple, lemon, milk, ice, and vanilla. Artificial (it tastes the same no matter what they say). Good thing I didn’t put some Postum in there as well. Is that “Paw-stum” or “Poh-stum”? I’ll let you figure it out. Later, I took the long way around and saw this lawn display. Do you get the impression this is their first child?
The bagel special was my only treat today, over at CoffeeTime. The two sisters were there. It is hard to tell they are sisters, Legs is a babe while the other one, well, she had better make any arrangements she is going to make pretty damn soon. I hope she can cook or something, I’m not being funny or cruel here, folks. I decided to bike around the old park where I used to jog daily. My records show I guessed the distance at 1.5 miles, but it is really 1.665. I jogged 33 miles further than I thought last year.
Here’s something I’ve never seen before. This driveway has some special plant growing in the spaces between the paving blocks. It must be hardy enough to stand up to the traffic. It has tiny leaves rather than blades, like grass. It resembles lichen. Very clever. I put in 14 miles around the area today, mostly past the private marinas in east Hollywood. Warning, you millionaires, the shoreline is badly polluted with plastic garbage.
There was some loud reggae music coming from the direction of the [Hollywood] Bowl. I exercised my right to ignore it and keep going the opposite direction. All the way over to Panera for coffee a couple hours later. I have an unusual event to report, listen to this. I had my small black journal with the notes from my Javascript studies around a year ago. Since I could not find any practical use for the language (incredibly difficult syntax for the trivial results achieved), I began taking notes on CSS.
I tend to be oblivious when studying, but at one point I leaned back to discover I had become surrounded by people with laptops. The odd thing is that they were all fascinated by my notebook and impressed by what I was doing. Sadly, I must report none of them were babe-types. It was as if they appreciated someone having the guts to write longhand in this laptop era, to hell with public opinion.
Um, let me get you a scan of the journal. It may explain things to see my handwriting, which I have often been told is eye-catching to some people. I also have the habit of stamping the corners of my pages with a distinctive pink dot. Anyway, the admiring looks took me by surprise.
I’m planning a simple project of displaying business cards on out web page. I scan the cards and lump them into pages in categories I design. Cowboy Mike’s closets go on hold until he pays the bill for the next 4 months. Besides, I see now that the examples that convert table-based web pages to CSS-based are not serious projects. You’d have to give me a very good reason to do something that complicated rather than start from scratch. This will also mean I have to finally master that ftp program. I know exactly how it works, but like modern programming, I don’t know where it fits into the scheme of things in the real world.
What I mean there is, I could easily program something and create a new application. I can program web pages to perfection. What I can’t do is find out what to do with the code between the time it is finished and others begin using it. Nobody seems to want to tell me or show me how it is done, so I’m on my own. I attribute this gap in my experience to the 15 non-programming years I spent on a union job. Things changed and I had no way of keeping up.
Yes, the fans make a world of difference. Now that the evenings are a little cooler again, they drop the apparent temperature right down into the low 70’s, shirtsleeve comfort. I just can’t see wasting electric to cool it when fans will work. I got used to this in South America, arranging it so you are between two fans [so the papers on your desk don’t blow all over the room]. I feel it is better for the environment anyway, I don’t have the facts but I deduce I could probably run 15 fans with the same electricity as one AC unit. This is not a substitute for a real air conditioner next summer.
The last thing today was trying to set up a Windows computer again. Much as I like Linux, there are some applications that don’t have a counterpart in that OS. I went through seven hard drives. I have a stack of older models that will just hold the OS, so I planned to go through them. I thought they’d all work. It could be that I’m having identical motherboard problems on two computers, but that is far-fetched compared to just having a series of bad hard drives.
