Here’s trailer 112, up the street. It is abandoned and ready for demolition. That pushy lady I met on the beach two summers ago was looking at this unit. Pauline, that was her name. I’m glad she didn’t buy as we never got along at all; she was exasperating to talk to. On and friggin’ on she’d go at a grade two level just to see how long you’d take it. This picture reveals the eventual fate of this trailer. Probably the fate of that lady as well. More about the trailer in a moment.
There are some settings I have not tried yet, but I cannot get a good sound without the Ampeg. I know the Yamaha PA speakers work faithfully so it has to be the quality of the amplifier I’m using. Back to the drawing board. If I must use the Ampeg, then I must devise a way to make it more portable.Before we go on, I did some Internet searches for the high hat. No bargains there, after shipping costs. I found decent stands at $35, but add $22 for shipping and no deal.
I see SuperTalent is marketing a solid state hard disk drive. If so, this is the first true innovation in the computer world since networking. I believe such hard drives would and should have been available ten years ago, but were not built because the factories had just geared up to produce the then new gigabyte drives.
The SuperTalent (see their web page) people use the old "give us your number and we'll call you back" nonsense. To be fair, the recording says the salesman is not available to take the call, but hey, I called in the middle of a workday, so if he is not available, fire the bastard. They know I just wanted the price.
So rather than deal with them, I poked around some trade publications. That price is $17 per gigabyte, the largest IDE drive is 32 GB, so you are looking at around $544 - but no moving parts means it does not crash. They are also tiny. I was in the shop most of the day finally learning how to solve the problems of audio drivers that disappear. This used to baffle me because the sound cards that are built in to the motherboard are most susceptible. I had not yet learned that the audio was licensed from other companies, such as Cirrus and Creative Labs. These companies would have little incentive to program an updated driver for a newer operating system. I, of course, consider that situation as conspiracy.
Pudding-Tat makes the news again. She has these “modes” I call them. If she was a teenage girl, I’d call them “moods”. Anyway, she knows where the trailer walls are acoustically thinnest and will sleep there all day knowing her boyfriends are so near and yet so far. This means she also manages to pull electric cords of the outlets as she crawls around behind things. It’s a good thing I’m such a patient father.
It looks like this trailer may be the front line of a pitched battle. Back in May, the landowner offered a buyout package, which I instantly rejected. The offer of $5,000 was unrealistically low, that was not the problem. The problem was that the landowner has come to see the May offer as “official” whereas I view it as a failed negotiation. Our conversations amount to them continually trying to bring up the “May offer” and me declining to discuss it further. This would not be the first time I’ve met Florida people who do understand basic contract law. Actually, I’ll settle for the $5 grand, but they should not have tried to push it.
There is another issue that is relevant but unrelated. The landowner is often referred to as “very intelligent”, which goes nowhere until I see proof. I’ve only talked to the underlings. To me this intelligence amounts to waving fast cash under the noses of what they perceived to be desperate tenants. It would seem they never fathomed somebody could be here and not need their charity.
I’m considering an offer from Quizno’s to learn to make sandwiches. It is a nothing job, but I need those extra months for my Social Security and a couple days a week over there would be perfect. It is just so far away, twenty-four miles along a bad freeway one way. I’m going over there tomorrow to fix a small computer problem. I have no doubt I would excel at making those sandwiches because it is a mini-assembly line, the kind of work I take to easily. I didn’t say I liked it. Nor am I that keen on working for family.
Some trivia. What is a “sacrificial anode”? It is a long magnesium pipe inside your hot-water heater. Since heating percolates chemicals out of the water, these can accumulate and corrode the metal walls of the tank. Since magnesium easily bonds with these elements, the rod is there to be eaten away instead of the steel.
Last, things are getting done around here again. The reason is the return of cooler weather, which prods me into working late in the Florida room. It has also been cloudy but unmistakable, “Wallace Weather” has returned. The heat blast lasted four months this year. I got another computer working, that’s a quick $150. How did I ever survive without a work bench? That is the first decent computer that has been donated since April, let me add.
Wait, not so fast. While installing a decent set of applications on the above computer, I noticed the 3-1/2” floppy was in pristine condition. On a lark, I dug out some of the “unreadable” disks I thought were goners. I’ll be damned! I’m backing them up by the dozens to CD right now. You have no idea of the amount of computer material that is in there because neither do I. Back at the phone company, when it wasn’t busy, I used to key in thousands of hours of material just to keep from getting bored.
A lot of it is accounting work I did on company time, but there are a lot of personal letters. I believe in there is my claim to have the first word-processed letter written in Washington State and proof of hundreds of other firsts of some kind. I programmed a 25 year biweekly mortgage schedule in VisiCalc back you couldn’t drag and drop.
Over the next ten years, I used a database called File Express because it fit on one floppy. I have entire phone books key-entered for I was one of the first to do this in South America. But the real treat will be when I find those song lists, words and chords from all the bands I played in. I was among the first to provide all my musicians with copies of the material and there is an awful lot of it on those disks.
It is going to be so strange, the fact that working at the phone company blocked me from pursuing a career in computers. I have already found HTML code I wrote in 1993, which I didn’t pursue because I ruled it “too finicky to ever amount to anything useful”. In 1993 you didn’t know what the hell the Internet even was. I was not the first, but I was light years ahead of the crowd. I’ve now copied 30 disks of an estimated 680. I only hope one day I find a 5-1/4” reader, because those are another story altogether. Don’t expect journal entries, for I wrote those by hand up until recently. I didn’t trust computers, see. I must be old-fashioned.The picture is John, my best friend at the phone company. She was keen with the “librarian” look. It was not a good idea to have people hear me ask for her on company time, so her code name was John. She disappeared into the mountains in 1999 with some cowboy she met north of Spokane. The significance here is that this is a digital photo long before 99.99% of the world even knew what that was. This photo was taken in 1994.
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