This is a Kinko’s cash card. I don’t have much to do with Kinko’s since I quite there in 1991. I mean, I knew it was the boss’s daughter but I wasn’t the only one. Anyway, you charge the card up at an ATM-like machine and then go around the store spending the card. If there is any balance, the checkout booths give you a refund. A neat system, but doesn’t this card remind you of something I wrote about in South America some twenty years ago?
Thanks to Pinnacle, and their product “Dazzle”, I spent close to twelve extra hours in the shop this week. Unless I get through to some help, I believe that is the last thing I will ever have to do with that company. Their claim that you install the software, hook up the gizmo and start recording DVDs direct to disk is ridiculously false. I tried this process on three independent computers, all of which ran into the same problem.When you got to the stage to “start recording”, that button was grayed out and a message to the effect that you were to “wait while disk is being prepared” came on screen. In one instance, I left it over night and the process was still not finished. Even if it had finally worked, waiting even a half-hour for this was not part of the deal. The worst part was that nowhere in the manual was there any mention that this problem could occur. That spells gross incompetence to me.
Their help line was no help. They want your life history first and the FAQ area also made no mention of the message. Yet it must be a FAQ because of the nature of the whole situation. Boo, Pinnacle. (I tried every combination of disks, procedures, troubleshooting, swapping out parts, and reinstalling the application on three unrelated computers, and the damn thing still would not work. Furthermore, when you finally went to stop this disk prepare nonsense, it would lock up your system so you had to restart.) Double boo, Pinnacle.
There is no siding with them on this issue. Programming is a near-Martian but man-made environment where nothing exists by accident. If that disk message appears, it is because somebody put it there. If somebody put it there, then they are aware that it can go into a no-go mode. They should fix such things before they sell it. Such situations remind of the car door problem. A hundred years later, there is still a way you can half-slam a car door, so it is neither closed nor open. It takes supreme and deliberate idiocy for such things to endure.
The good news is Mitch was back in touch. Seems he was away on vacation and didn’t say anything before he left. Now, Mitch likes cold weather, so where did he go? The North Pole? That’s a joke, son. I only had time to scan the emails to catch up. Wallace got his patent renewed and reports a house for sale for $17,500. I’m certain that is a misprint. You can’t get moose pasture for that on any west coast island.
I left the shop at 2:00 p.m. and decided not to swing past the club. Bad move. When I got there at 8:00 p.m. I was informed there was a huge crowd in all day and they had just left an hour before I arrived. Nice of them to call me. It was a random crowd but I still feel that the popular knowledge there is entertainment and women at the place is going to connect big time in the near future. I should not suppose they didn’t call me because I don’t even know if I ever gave the club my number.
I went to the library instead, then when that closed, over to the Barn on Stirling. The good news is that I can now count from 0 to 999 in Mandarin. The books on the subject are either useless, very expensive, or both. It is grammatically similar to Cantonese, which I have not spoken on a regular basis for close to twenty years. Even then, it was “yes please thank you please” Chinese. I’ll learn the bigger numbers, as it is a very simple system right up to a million million, and these numbers are apparently common due to their currency.
Let me explain a couple things about Chinese to non-speakers. First of all, it is a very simple language. Yes, there are tones, around four of them, but this is not as big a challenge as it would seem. This is because spoken Chinese consists mostly of nouns, the sentence structure is identical to beginner’s English and all words are one syllable. To ask a question, you kind of just say the sentence backwards.
Although I attempted a basic course (in spoken Chinese) in my late teens, there is no substitute for live practice and my first real exposure to an Oriental language was Siamese almost fifteen years later. I read a book on Thai Buddhism while taking long bus rides along the peninsula. At one point I had mastered half the Siamese alphabet. In the end, Thailand was just too strange and too far away.
Here’s something peculiar you might wonder at (unless you are familiar with the absolute poverty of my teenage years) – I did not really attend those Chinese lessons myself because I had to work. Instead, my girlfriend, Judy Minty took the lessons for me. I was able to grasp the structure but not the pronunciation. She caused quite a stir, a Caucasian beauty like her showing up in that classroom. Sigh. It is futile to try to learn a new language now, but at least I can do is learn to count.
During practice with numbers, I came across today’s trivia. First, the number 57 (woo-shr-chee (literally five-tens-seven)). That is the angle (in degrees) at which the sun will glint right back into your face off the hood of your car. No matter what the paint color, the sunlight is polarized and is therefore a bright white color. This is known as “Brewster’s Angle”, but please don’t put that on the exam because I’ll forget it in no time.
Next number is 52 (woo-shr-ar). The aging fleet of B-52 bombers is going to get a lot older if the Air Force has its way. They would like the bombers to undergo a fitting that will keep them flying until 2044, a lifespan of something like 85 years. The same source stated that it was only some stress factor on the upper wing surfaces that would prevent them from flying even longer. Although I cannot figure out what we still need them for, that’s one helluva airplane. I mean, who would we dare drop bombs on in another thirty years?
Speaking of bombs, the club was empty when I got there. We closed down at 10:00 p.m. One guy playing a gambling machine and his okay-looking wife in her white shorty-shorts were not enough to keep the doors open. Florida bars suffer from staying open seven days a week, in that it merely spreads six days business over seven. And increases variable expenses. Then again, it depends on one’s expectations. I got a tank of gas, ate a ten-dollar breakfast this morning and still have enough for tomorrow. Whence I plan to do nothing all day long. Except, like read, I will read where some people I know would be playing chess, checkers or crib, ha!
The thermometer on the interior of my car that regularly registered 145 degrees, well, the plastic cover on it melted off today.
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
