It is a picture of a Linksys wireless router. Actually, it behaves more like a switch until you set it as a router, but folks, this is what you should be buying. Sure, it costs ten bucks more than the junk. See those detachable antennas? Worth more than the rest when you decide to upgrade later.
What’s this? A notice from my bank that they are now charging $5.00 to cash any check written on my account if a non-account holder presents it for payment at the teller. I’m not surprised, since all banks are equally bad. What mystifies me is that if banks won’t honor checks, why do they persist in still letting people write them? Haven’t they had over 1,000 years to come up with something that works? They don’t specify what happens if the check is for less than $5.00, strongly hinting that they go the idea from a politician. Good thing I have no use for checks. Or politicians.
[Author's note 2016-02-05: from what I gather, some citizen's watchdog group said no way to a $5 check charge and the banks quietly dropped the matter. But if I know the banks, they'll just gouge you somewhere else.]
There is a little rough and tumble with the "cantenna". The claim on the web page that all the parts were "readily available" is a lie. Nobody makes the pigtail any more and I need two of them. Also, Belkin and Netgear routers have permanently attached antennas, and guess what brands my neighbors are using? I think I will rig Adam’s television pole as a relay and hard-wire my equipment. I’ll be using that router Dickens gave me from the Thrift. All that was wrong with it is the owner had mucked around with the settings and didn’t know how to reset it. Still, that took expensive hours to figure out. Either way, I need another $60 router. Dawgonnit, free service is getting more expensive all the time.
Where has Dickens got to? He never made it over to the shop to say farewell, although with a big family, there is never time for such things. He’ll have found something by now, probably up the seaboard near Boston. I’ve never been up that way. However, I did find marine grade-plywood for $84 per sheet. The box structure is easily within the capabilities of my existing shop and this trailer will supply useful scavenged parts from vents to full electrical wiring, if I want to go that far. Even if I lose my tape measure five times a month, I can do this.
I put together a training package for Will, the guitarist hopeful. He has to go in regularly for medical treatments that leave him exhausted. I know the feeling and I also know that reaching for my guitar is the most therapeutic thing to do at that point. He is also keenly aware of the value of things, not like some people who think I drive sixty miles to a gig because there is nothing better to do. We got together for a one hour lesson and he catches on instantly. Not fast. Instantly. This is usually a good omen.
During this process, I bought Will a drink. I went up to the bar and joked with Linda (the barkeep) how I hated to “break my last five-dollar bill”. Joke, ha-ha. Some lady-person leans over and says that I am the same age as her father “and he is exactly the same way”. I replied that she is the same age as the girl I took home last Friday night “and she was at all nothing like you”. What? Huh? It shut her up, didn’t it? She started it.
Do I detect a pattern on the musicians list? There is an upsurge in ads for musicians seeking bands every new year. I see some have met the “13 Group”, a pack of losers who answer every ad. A swarm of people are whining about how much of their time has thus been wasted. I wonder if they might be the same people who once ragged on me for wanting to expose the “13 Group” two years ago. Could be, since most Floridians are, oh, so noble (“who are you to judge”) until they get kicked in the teeth themselves. Whamo, instant victims!
For example, I get an e-mail from a lady who spent a month rehearsing with some drunken pot-smokers who then decided they wanted a male singer. Yep, I know exactly who she means. Or the keyboardist who wants to join your band only if you learn his material and what’s taking you so long? Don’t you like him already? What do you mean you don’t know any Elton John? Have you been living under a rock? Yeah, that guy.
I could name the offenders, but I won’t. However, people like “Mustang Sally”, Lounge Liz” and “The Runt” are on the list. I make no comment on their musical abilities, but that these people have severe mental, not musical but mental, shortcomings that prevent them from ever forming a successful venture of any kind. They just don’t have what it takes, period. They are doomed to wander around wasting other people’s time, ever aware the distant past is telling them something they don’t want to listen to any more. Gee, that sounds like something Plato might have said. Do you suppose there were any losers in ancient Greece, too? If so, I'll bet they all played lyre and thought it made them the boss.
Once musicians learn to enjoy wasting people’s time, it is no longer a disease and there is no cure. It becomes an aberration they take to the grave. You’d think some of these people, after failing 50+ times to get a band together in the past 30+ years just might begin to suspect they are blaming the wrong party. But nooooooooooo!
I’m sure I’ve rejected [playing music with] this same lady before, but I’ll see what she has to say now that she’s been through the cow. No forming bands with neurotic middle-aged ladies, I always say. No forming anything with them period. There is a reason they are still on the market, you know. Leftover women go spinny and they don’t improve with age. Some people also think musical talent makes their asinine opinions more tolerable—I won’t mention names here either. It just seems that I recall one broad who kept mentioning “negative vibes” whenever she can’t get her own way. Of course, I just described half the women on mySpace. And a third of the men.
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