Another early morning rainstorm means another hot and muggy day. Here’s a shot of one of those things that will be priceless when I get famous – all 25 shirts that I own. I guess what my friend, Liz, told me years ago is true, that I lack colorful clothes. Hey, I am not going to wear a yellow or a red shirt and that is that. Unless I become a paid author in the next few days and suddenly discover the Hemmingway look is back [Lord, I hope not!]. In which case I’ll have to buy a carload of those oversized Hawaiian things so I can hang out at the Diplomat Tiki bar and hit on suburban housewives.
I was two hours late, but I made it over to the dog wig place. The staff went wild to see me there, including the ones who once thought I was a crusty old dude who was stuck in his ways. Well, it took me half a day to get the month’s backlog unstuck. Apparently four people have come and gone in the four weeks, which does not surprise me. Things are too complicated for a newbie to pick up from scratch. It is a vicious circle. There is no job raining so they don’t last because there is no job training.Wiggles, the little toy mascot, is growing bigger. That wasn’t part of the deal. She is noticeably bigger than a teacup now, more like a coffee mug. She’s also going gray. You can just never let some females get too confident where their next meal is coming from. (Pudding-Tat is so spoiled she does not even move when I step on her tail anymore – she knows I’ll move.) While there are telltale signs [over there] that some people have finally learned to do things for themselves, there was basically a month’s backlog of work to do. The good news is the order system worked nearly perfectly this time. The bad news is 200 more unanswered emails. Ruth still has that uncanny knack for asking about the exact things my simple database system cannot answer instantly.
Overall, I’ve learned a ton about overseas shipping and costs. This particular order cost twice as much to ship on China Airways (from 51 cents to 93 cents per item) due to Ramadan. Huge impact on the bottom line, it is. This time the shipment took 22 cartons, and a twenty-year-old girl was sent to the warehouse to supervise the off-loading. No wonder I am viewed as the cool rationalist.
I sent a sample of my writing to the magazine this morning. Still no reply by quitting time. Since I worked today, there was no chance to pursue the ebooks further. I strongly relate to how having to work for a living stifles creativity. You need energy left over and most jobs don’t allow for that. I really need this writing job, or something similar. My goal was never to get rich, only to not have to work for a living. Being rich helps, but it is not necessary.
Upon further investigations on the new solid state hard disk drives, there is a rumor that they take an incredibly long time to boot up. The talk is that it requires over ten minutes. That, plus the primitive brute force sales methods (no price stated on the web page and the old leave your name and number crap) plus the known $500 price tag puts that equipment far into the future if at all. Does anyone beside me remember when it was felt the Internet would lower prices? I see a few hands out there. The way it was supposed to work is that small suppliers would undercut the mega-malls because they worked from home with zero employees or overhead. The problem turned out to be that in America, the average person who operates from home kind of, well, belongs there.
I’ve got some scientific trivia today. The Doppler Effect is well understood, but how on earth did he measure the effect back in the early 1800s, when there was no gear to do the measuring? Well, first he calculated the pitch, then he hired musicians. One rode on the train (the fastest transport at the time) and the other sat beside the rails on a chair. The one riding the train played a note on his trumpet. The other related what note he heard. The results matched the calculation. Brilliant, if you ask me. I have no idea what else Doppler ever did, if you were to ask me that, too.
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