End of the month but it sure does not seem like it. So much has got done that I feel I’ve been here far longer. Ah, didn’t I say that was going to happen when I got the workbench? It is 9:30 AM and I’ll give JP a call at home shortly. Otherwise, I have a network to set up. I’ve been thinking about alternatives to a job. One might be writing but that is one hard sell. I’ve never had such a job before and don’t know where to start. [All the commercial writing I've done has been by the hour for an employer.]
Just so you don’t think life is too exciting, I should mention I bought one of those packages of sandwich meat that has several different slices of the same meat. This one was turkey. There was turkey salami and turkey baloney. I did not care for the baloney. As soon as I bit into it, I thought of my cheap-ass father. Baloney should be outlawed. I wanted a grilled sandwich for breakfast and that was all I had left. I had to make up for it with a bowl of cereal spiked with brown sugar and shredded coconut.
The arrangement of the computer in the old dining room is much better. I’m going to get some one-way curtains and I will be sitting up high enough to watch the street while they would have to step up on something to look inside. Or maybe just block the lower half of the glass. That would work.
The strong westerly winds continue and woke me up overnight. Things rattle or blow down the street. I am very aware that most of the trees here are ornamentals, that is they lack the hurricane-proof root systems. Don’t plant them next to your house.
The G called about the symphony I had already told him I would not go. But then it glanced at my clock and realized I had been working since 6:30 AM and changed my mind. I drove there to find, as usual, he had an ulterior motive. That heavy-set blonde lady at Cort’s is a percussionist in the orchestra. That means she hits four or five notes per song as part of a forty person group. He had some kind of date with her and didn’t want to drive his car out there.
As long as it is not opera, I’m okay and you can tell I’m enjoying things if I nod off and somebody has to nudge me for snoring a little. There was nothing terrifically classical on the program and the conductor was (yet another) oriental with a doctorate degree whose passion is to bring the arts to south Florida and other steamy crap like that.
The concert hall was too dim to allow pictures with my digital. Concert halls are always too dim, and donated by some civic minded outfit that seems to have forgotten that most poor people don’t have the time and money to attend expensive shows. Mind you, it got me to finally take the Argus apart and disconnect the speaker.
That feature is fine, as long as you want everyone around you to know you are taking a picture. It was a tradeoff, because the camera beeps differently between modes but I figure I’m familiar enough with it to bypass the need for the beeps. The largest component of the circuit board was the speaker.
There was a little edge missing but overall the concert was pretty damn good. The featured pianist was Gustavo Ponzoa, who began his piano studies at the age of five. He must have quickly learned to play a lot of glissandos. It is hard to tell when they make a mistake playing those. The finale was something called the Firebird Suite. It says the 1919 version, so I told the G to make sure they didn’t slip in any of those 1918 notes or rests. I never cared for Schumann and can barely tell Stravinsky, I consider them the hacks of their day. I didn’t recognize more than a few passages of the entire show.
Mind you even without any opera glasses, I saw that there were three or four babes in the orchestra pit. One was a brunette in a silky black outfit, noticeable for having a perfect body. You don’t get that very often with the starchy South Florida diet. I was able to get a closer look at them all during intermission but no pictures. Remember the camera beep. All four were violinists, or what a lumberjack like me thinks is a violin. I could look it all up, but why?
The G got in line for a coffee and I got to chatting with a lady whose daughter was an oboe player. Apparently she has played since January and the roster doesn’t show her name yet, hardly a standard in the days of word processing. Come on, BCC, this lady spent a fortune on lessons and wants her daughter’s name up in lights. Sorry I can’t give you scans of the material, I gave the scanner back to Diane5.
That was kind of interesting. She called for the scanner, but I recall she gave it to me in lieu of payment. Also, the stuff from storage, well, I’m not a storage outfit. It was mostly junk anyway. Is that a sour note? Let me tell you what the sour note was at the concert – the coffee. Just as the G got through the line, the goof behind the counter called out that they were out of coffee. I tasted mine, it was somewhere between sawdust and poi. I walked back to the counter and sat it down. The guy says they ran out of coffee, to which I replied it was too bad it had not happened a little sooner.
BCC, Broward Community College, is famous in my world as the place that tried to turn my inquiry about an $89 evening course into an $8,000 college degree. This is the place that runs a credit, education and job search on you when all you’ve asked about is information they won’t give you on the phone. It turns out you cannot just take the evening courses advertised, you have to go in an be subjected to intense sales pressure – the so-called counselor actually tried to insult money out of me, He insinuated I was too cheap to invest in my future and that my credit wasn’t “good enough” get an $8,000 student loan. All I wanted was the nine-hour course in digital photography.
There were 71 musicians listed, of which 33 were female, or had obviously female names. Men dominated the horn sections and percussion. The campus had some other art on display. Here is one for you, a spider web of black nylon some fifteen feet across. There are life-size dismembered bodies of humans and animals wrapped in spider cocoons, with a little blood showing. This is hanging on a tree near the entranceway. Your tax dollars at work. Make sure you’ve already had lunch.
Back home I continued to work on the wireless connections, getting nowhere but leaning plenty. For example, I thought WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) was a general term of all wireless networks, but it refers specifically to 802.11b. That is the outdated system I am using to experiment with. Mind you, outdated is a relative term. The principles are the same and there is no assurance the next standard, 802.11g I believe, will be any real advantage. The differences between the systems are not things the average home network owner is really concerned about in the first place.
I cannot get the demon to work like a regular XP. I’ve figured out how to find the drives but I won’t go through that every time, I want them to display using My Computer. This unit also has a little trouble displaying graphics despite the $300 AGP card. They are fast, but they show artifacts when the page is scrolled too quickly, something my old 500 MHz unit seemed to be able to keep up with. Much as I’d like to learn, I don’t have time to mess with the journal computer, so in it goes tomorrow to get the SATA drive wiped out to reinstall XP. You can’t just go in there with a regular install, which seems to require in IDE drive. It has an 80 GB SATA. Most of the software was web-based, that is, like Collier’s Encylopedia, you have to be on the Internet to use it, the only thing on your CD is the index.
I fired up the laptop, named Helene, after JP's sister. She is the one who wanted a replacement, but her husband decided she wanted an upgrade. He was quick to point out it was not faster or better than the one they had, [which was] a worn out junker with keys missing. Reminds me of dating a woman with teeth missing. So, I now have a laptop.
