Pudding-Tat, who is now snacking on human-grade tuna, is completely aware of the benefits of keeping this joint vermin-free. See that Millie-Belle? What can I say? Yes, you can have the left-over hotdog from the pot tonight if it makes you feel better. We are a performance-geared household and that’s all I can say for now. Ha! My cat versus his dog! Neener, neener.Eric was over with plenty of advice per the next three hurricanes. (Or is it four by now?) He does not trust candles where I do not trust batteries. Did I mention Holly [his cat] is back, and that is one big animal? Half again the size of Pudding-tat. The long hours at the shop may be at an end for now. Since the new Internet system as been operating, Mike reports there have been zero arguments or underestimations of time. That alone made the investment worthwhile.
We threw out another customer today, for being a jerk. Don’t parrot back to me what just I said “in other words”. That is the Police’s job. The guy said it so often Mike asked him if he was a Canadian. I am on Mike’s side with that. The customer is always right until he tries to get something for nothing. Like trying to tell us the computer he bought a year ago was covered for his Internet excursions. Try to find me a shop that gives a year parts and labor on a used machine.
Mike is digging into the storage bin and may not have that fancy bicycle rack after all. He said I could have it. We also teamed up to reboot that Windows ME for some customer who decided he liked it better than later systems. This became a challenge because ME won’t boot directly to a hard drive. Fortunately, I kept my old DOS 3.1 and we were able to format with that. I hear the question, why didn’t I use DOS 6.2. Because it is “automatic” and does not let you change your mind. It doesn’t stop after the format, but goes on to install itself. I prefer to create a virtual D: drive and fan out from there.
There was a light drizzle as we went to put up Eric’s storm shutters. A little rain never bothered a couple of hardy contractors. Then I was back inside for some relaxation and a good book or five. Wallace also got treated to watching me completely redo a failing hard drive on a computer with no 3.5 floppy and CDs that the BIOS couldn’t pick up, forcing me to run everything off a remote DVD-ROM. Ha, let some whiz kid try that. I suspect a failing CMOS battery as well as the hard drive, a bad combination, so I had to move fast.
Then, finding a set of instructions for an old AMD chip, I decided to examine the Chinese version closely. Is that Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese? Actually, it does not matter since, although they cannot speak to each other, they can all read the same newspaper. I could recognize about 1% of the symbols. What got me, however, was how adapted the print was to English. All indexes, phone numbers and email addresses were in English. The Chinese numbering system would be cumbersome to use for enumerating a list.
Also, they have freely adopted a few punctuation marks, such as the colon, virgule and comma. This indicates their sentences are around the same length as ours. The sentences end with a tiny “o” instead of a period. They have no need for a question mark due to the grammatical structure (they add the word “mah” to the end of anything to indicate an interrogative).
Karaoke Ron is not doing well. The report is that he has suffered a stroke or aneurism which caused his transfer to a special hospital in Tampa. That’s a 3-1/2 hour drive away from his wife who has no car. We’ll help where possible but the fact remains he is in serious condition.
Later and after several phone calls, I arrived at Boston’s and jammed with Arnel. His format has changed and he operates that gig more like an open mic. He is west coast all the way, staying up on stage to accompany the talent and operate the drum machine in the background. We’ve agreed to exchange some material so that our duo set will always stand out from the guitar-based remainder. The surprise disclosure of the evening was that Arnel is not technically a bachelor.
