September 20, 2008

           Here’s a picture you might not expect. It shows the completely empty streets of Florida during a heat wave. Like the one we’ve had for a week now. Nobody in the yards, nobody walking, the thermometer is in the muggy high 90s. You’ll see nobody for block after block. I had quite a few pictures but this is the only one that turned out.

           Portuguese. I guess if things go slowly enough, I can follow it after all. A lady was in today with some kind of networking problem. From what I figure, she needs a hub but has no clue what that is. She kept repeating a word that sounded like “franjipanni”. That’s a new one on me. I hope it wasn’t some kind of marriage proposal. I want cash.

           Arnel was over at the shop to give me a few pointers on the MIDI program. I still don’t know how what a “controller” is or how to connect any MIDI appliances. As anticipated, there are lots of sources of pre-recorded MIDI tunes on the Internet. By next week I’ll have located the best ones. We installed Cakewalk at the shop. I also had to replace Peggy’s computer with a faster unit. (Peggy’s computer was just to prove the concept, a successful experiment.)
           Wallace and I both remembered the big Bre-X scam, so we looked up the details on-line. This is the Toronto stock promoter whose team “discovered” a new gold field in Indonesia. By carefully timed press releases, the estimated size of the ore kept shooting up by millions of ounces, and the stock from two cents to two hundred dollars. I smelled a rat but lots of so-called professional fund managers, such as the Quebec Teachers Pension, did not. They lost a hundred million.

           Around ten years ago, the two “geologists” responsible for assaying the ore died mysteriously. One fell out of a helicopter, no less. The other’s body was found in the jungle “half-eaten by wild animals”. Got that? Obviously faked, and I said so at that time. It seems the “widow” of one of them immediately moved to the Cayman Islands. Where she receives an awful lot of mail.
           Then we looked up Bernie Cornfeld, who at one time had 5,000 salesmen out there scamming world-wide. He kept one step ahead of the law. As I’ve pointed out, a lot of civil law can be summed up by merely assuming the law exists to protect dumb people. It does not protect the weak or the poor and certainly not the innocent. The way it works is you cannot cheat your stupid co-workers directly, but you can do it indirectly through the stock market. Strange arrangement it is.

           It was too damn hot to do anything. I went over to see Arnel at the Kingshead Pub. I’d never been in there before. They have a large patio that is cooled by one of those overhead spray systems. It works very well, keeping the temperature quite within the comfort levels. A pipe with spray nozzles goes around the outside ceiling. When you step outside you know instantly how hot it is, even at midnight.
           By the way, when I left, there was a lady in the parking lot checking license tag numbers. I had backed my car in, a habit I learned in Canada to prevent this brand of snooping. She would read a few plates, then walk over to a black sedan, talk, and go look at a few more. When she tried to squeeze behind to read my plate, I hauled out my camera and pretended to take her picture. She ran off.

           Sure, I know that I’ve hit a stretch of doldrums, not much is happening these days. The blog gets a little thin. Trust me, this is a period of consolidation where many details are being cleared up behind the scenes. Stay tuned and we’ll have plenty of new material for you in a short while. This photo of Pudding lying on a cool piece of cardboard was added in 2023 for interest. I'm hearing reports that older blog photos are not displaying. Google never could just leave things alone.