I told you the beach walk was deserted. Looking south along what should be a densely packed corridor, you can see, well, mostly nobody. The shadows tell you this is mid-afternoon on a nearly perfect day. The tourists are gone. I did get a note from Wallace, who wants to visit Florida again. Hey, guy, it won’t help. I’m telling you, this place has gone for a dump.
It is 4:57 a.m. and I’m still revamping my prize Internet computer. Every Windows computer I put in the shop gradually becomes corrupted by usage from my less educated customers. It isn’t sabotage because they don’t have the brains, but rather the accumulation of little settings and idiotware (instant messaging, aol, google toolbars, etc.). Somehow they got my chipset to keep deleting itself. In times like this I wish I had stuck with programming rather than go to work at the phone company. Then I might be writing viruses instead of chasing them. No matter how well I protect these computers, they still go bad every few months. Kind of like women you meet in a saloon.It takes a total of nearly 4 hours to redo each computer, including the usual reinstalls (anti-virus, anti-spyware, spreadsheets). This tedious process gave me time to overhaul the bicycles, throw out a ton of old gear and find a power supply for the print server. Again, I am not going to pack my things in May, I am taking the basics only and leaving the rest for the bulldozer.
This also gave me time to take full inventory of what can be salvaged from this place to construct the box trailer. We have seventeen drawer handles to serve as cleats, quite a variety of hinges and more insulation panels than possibly needed. Oddly, I don’t have any software that can be used to sketch these plans, so it must be planned on paper. JP decided the walls should be at least three feet high off the trailer bed. There is a certain size above which you get continually pulled over to check for a contractor’s license. We don’t want that.
JP also reports he knows where to get the correct lumber for half price, that is, $40 per sheet. We have a plan to head to the Keys next weekend, probably Islamorada. Non-Florida types should understand there is no such thing as a quick trip to the Keys. It is more than half-way to Cuba and single lane most of the way.
While reading that bass book y’day beside the lady at Barnes & Noble, I found an ad for a “travel” bass which looked like the neck of a bass guitar. I’ll get you something on it soon. It was a bass built entirely into the neck, it had body except a small box of guts and two metal rods out to where the strap is attached. Sadly, the neck looked like a full size bass which I cannot play very well (I use a 7/8 scale model).
I finally got around to that HP computer that never did work right, yet nobody at the shop could find a thing wrong with it. I went over it very slowly and my conclusion is that it had been owned by one of those people who had no business around a computer. There was a cumulative series of tiny problems attributable to ownership by a klutz. It had been dropped too often. There was a broken pin in the PS/2 keyboard plug. It had been turned off and on with the power supply switch until that worked loose and now you sometimes have to boot it twice. While it ran most of the time, it was a lot like buying a used car from a teenager.
Speaking of used cars, there is an ad from CarMax to train buyers. They are looking for someone to learn the art of buying “8 to 10 million dollars” worth of used cars per year. The ad is very clear, for which I compliment them. I’d apply but I can’t even tell cars apart any more. Go ahead, you’ll be driving a Lamborgini before Easter.
Best recent philosophy is from Garry, the Harpman at Jimbo’s. “The one thing I learned from my mother is when someone offers you a breath mint—take it.” Second best is the current batch of coffee filters from Publix. Part of their job is to make the grounds easy to empty. These ones have to be peeled out by hand.
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