More database, don’t you love it when I get into the relational integrity stuff? Ha, but luckily I won’t tell you much except the parts you absolutely must know to avoid being rated a techno-retard. Well, I mean for those of you for whom it is not already too late. Speaking of late, there is no word from Steve, the Cancer guy and his cat (Pudding) is starting to figure out when I’ll be opening the door.
Wallace finally contacted his people in Ft. Lauderdale, so he is heading out there for a visit. This morning he trounced me in crib again. His luck, or skill as he rates it, is incredible in the chanciest part of the game – the cut for the starter. In one hand, he kept two Jacks and two Kings and got a Queen. Hard to believe it! He also pointed out a rule I’d been using wrong for thirty years, namely the count for the extremely rare crib flush.Here is shot of a riverbank not normally found in Florida. The rivers have either been dredged completely straight or have shallow banks. How to explain towering banks in this jpeg, higher than the tourists heads?
It is actually another Australian tree at the, ahem, root of the problem. This particular pine tree has a huge spreading subterranean system that lacks depth. Thus, a good hurricane can plow the thing over, thus ripping up a lot of the surrounding soil. So it is not a riverbank, but the underside of an uprooted plant that fell the other way.
Wallace left in the late afternoon, so I jumped into the database programming. You don’t realize what a complicated thing an ordinary invoice is until you try to program a machine to do it. One could, of course, just design a screen form and let the operator fill in the blanks, but that hardly constitutes programming in my world. I’m going to try a series of buttons that the operator uses to pull information out of the tables. The “blanks” get filled in with such items as the billing and shipping addresses instead of chancing operator errors which are always a problem with manual “computer” systems.
Music instruction is beginning to really become lucrative. This is the first week I’ve made more teaching music than computers. It is a different kind of teaching, but by careful recording of the expenses, I can show it is marginally cheaper to conduct music lessons. That is “margin” in the economic sense. The cost of one more lesson is almost nil as compared to the long-run fixed cost of a computer lesson. Which is $2.30 per hour.
Here is a musical picture Fred has for sale. the corners are Styrofoam packing. The picture is a waterfall which has one of those rotating light thingees that make the water [appear to] move. Speakers built into the frame play some relaxing music. The first thing I would do is see if I could get the thingee to turn backwards and replace the relaxing music with an MP3 player. There is no accounting for taste.Cowboy Mike responded about the peppermills. He knows about the trouble trying to take great pictures of something so shiny. I say take them out in the sunlight. He wants to try his digital camera, but wait until next week when he has a few extra mills completed. That will work with my schedule. Meanwhile, you want some trivia. Here is the word for “fear of large words”: hippopotomonstrosequipediophobia. I see that stumped the MS spellchecker something fierce.
I must be careful because during the last two weeks the majority of my trivia has come from one single book at the local library. However, I have no fear whatsoever that anyone around here will ever find that book. It isn’t in the “new age” section and besides, there is no evidence that people with local degrees can even read. They sure as hell cannot spell and they all have hippopotomonstrosequipediophobia coupled with a morbid inbred terror of those who do not.
All I can say to them is “pneumonaultramicroscpopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”, and none of your “Antidisestablismentarianism” rookie comebacks. (Yes, people, it is a proper noun.)
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