Do we have trouble in paradise? It is hard to tell at this point. The casino is putting up another light in their parking lot. It is directly across the street from Forest Wally. Personally, I think they could have put it elsewhere than where it will stream light into our patio. Then maybe it increases security. Nobody can count on starlit nights in this city but I still like it to be dark at night.Upon checking with the IRS, I apparently do not qualify for a stimulus payment. The rules are quite complicated. There is a worksheet but face it, an income disqualification is usually an immovable object. But it doesn’t make sense the payment would go to people with high incomes. Figure that one out. I also found out the government stops sending notices if your refund is zero. I would like some kind of confirmation, but instead, you get a vacuum.
My center computer was completely virused up. That nasty Antivirus 2008. I’ve got it on repair overnight. The question is how did it get there? Those computers are under lockdown. Vigilance is the key. That unit had already been cleaned once, and this time the virus did not appear. Instead, I noticed two new jpegs in my desktop backdrop list. It is a virus and a scam, as I have met people who paid the $80 for the cure and got nothing.
I finally had a chance to set up a Vista unit. It seems Vista includes an office suite based on Microsoft Works (the mother of all oxymorons). If so, I predict Wordperfect may enjoy a mild comeback. In true Microsoft tradition, all the familiar controls and commands are scrambled, forcing users to relearn their jobs. One surprise is the inclusion of an NTI disk burning app. They sold out to the man. The second surprise is that it lacks a diskcopy command. It will burn a disk, but there is no command to clone a disk, or if there is, they hid it well.
For the record, you can install earlier versions of NTI on a Vista system and it seems to work fine. And that big fat “copy entire disk” feature is one of the first offerings, the way it should be. I also dropped by at Jack, the racehorse guy, and drilled him on how to use all the email features included with AOL. You might consider it child’s play, but I regularly meet people who have never used anything except AOL. Nobody at that company knows how to write directions.
A full day today means Friday off. Wallace and I are planning to see the famous Coral Castle. Some scrawny Latvian man spent 28 years building it as a monument to unrequited love. Everybody has heard about it, tomorrow we go there. Wallace has the mistaken impression it is near Coral Gables. Nope, it is twenty miles past that. Way out in Homestead. Now there is a dumb name for a town.
I finished reading “Thirty-Four East”. It was a bit much, chock full of unsung heroes and plainly written for the movie rights. The mention of Cosmos satellites had me double check the publication date. Okay, it can be forgiven a bit, since it was written around the same time as the 1967 Six Day War.
This is the first day of winter weather. Pure paradise, the air conditioner was off all day and the patio doors wide open. It will likely stay like this until the middle of May next year. Shirtsleeve comfort, I read some computer technical manuals in the late evening breeze, looking for anything new. There wasn’t, but I read an article that agreed with my take on the Internet. It needs replacing with something that works. 70% of all transmissions are spam and viruses. The system creaks along at the best of times.This is Wallace in South Miami, near one of those signposts that always gets my attention. There is no arrow for the distance to Moscow, but around chest height you can see “Robert Is Here”, the produce stand we went to last year for Key Lime milkshakes.
