Global warming. Blog policy is to only mention the extremes, and it was 99 degrees on the patio by 10:00 AM. This type of damp heat that has earned to term “brutal” is associated with August, not the springtime. Now you know why I prefer a small A/C in each room. It’s cheaper, and when it breaks down, you don’t have to find a place meanwhile.Here’s a news item I predicted. Nine-tenths of all mortgages signed in 2006 in this area a “under water”. In money terms that means more is owed on the property than its sales value. If we look at all years, not just 2006, half the mortgages are also in trouble. Hey, no mercy. There was never any chance everybody could get rich in real estate and they all ignored the warning signs.
What’s this Starbucks is being forced to lower prices due to competition from fast food joints? That is sweet justice to me, for I hold Starbucks responsible for making it difficult to get an ordinary coffee. If you want a $3 coffee flavored milkshake, at least don’t order it when there is a lineup of people on their work break. Besides, Starbucks staff and customers have attitudes, like they are swank. They’re not.
Trivia. I also read that for the first time, the number of households with cellular only service has finally surpassed those with only land-lines. A fifth of the total, like here, have nothing to do with the regular phone company. That is certainly their own fault. The last time I had a regular phone hooked up, they published all the details on the Internet, which at that time was against my wishes. Note that 80% of households have both services. Still, the rise is significant and I wonder how many have land-line service only to get DSL.
The birthday was a success tonight. I love being booked for parties. It was so hot the building A/C barely kept the place inhabitable and I had to play with a WindTunnel (industrial strength fan) on my back. I played for 5 hours with one short break and then went disk jockey for another three. Somebody had broken the juke box beyond repair and you gotta have music on a Saturday.
There is another significance about tonight. Without giving any exact figures, I establish several checkpoints for progress in my musical ventures. Two of them passed tonight, both are ratios: total income minus tips to equipment cost and total tips to out-of-pocket expenses. There is no turning back now. For the record, I make more per night than I did wasting my time with guitarists. If I ever get another guitarist, it will be on my terms. I’ve solidly proven I don’t need one.
It looks like I’ve lost my Apache PHP book. That was a $60 text. Oh well, it gives me a chance to talk computers again. I found two contradictory passages, one that states Javascript cannot be run on a server computer (“The Book of Javascript”, Dave Thau, No Starch Press, CA, page 7). The other gives samples of Javascript that runs on a server (“Active Server Pages”, Keith Morneau, Thomson Learning, MA, page 6). Both books were printed in 2000. I’m beginning to think Thau is irresponsible for making a false statement, which is a pity since he is considered an expert in these matters. This is important for he brought my database idea to a standstill one year ago. Now, I will look at the project again, using Apache. I’ll explain.
When you program web pages, the final test is whether it will work in a client-server setting. The problem is, most of us don’t have a server kicking around test it on. And trust me, testing in on somebody else’s rented server is a damn headache. If there are any errors, and there always are, you have to change them one at a time and upload to the server to test it again and again. Apache will emulate a server on your computer’s hard drive. This means you only pay for server time once you have a working web page. Plus you can make the inevitable program changes locally. I have just 700 lines of code separating me from a dazzling market triumph.
Today’s trivia is from 1923. A Canadian award of $100,000 for a cancer cure drew 2,716 applicants. It is illegal under Canadian law to claim a false cure. The exception is for selling “Chinese medicine”. It is still illegal, but Canadian police are terrified of appearing “racist”, so nobody has ever been arrested. Just don’t be the first white guy to try it.
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