August 17, 2009

           Big event today was a bicycle blowout, I had to ride two miles home on the rim in one of the rare evening downpours. Normally you time early evening rides when the rain is over, but this time it waited for me. I’d had to hit a curb dead on moments earlier due to traffic so it was a pinch flat. And that means flat flat, and that I’ll either miss or be late for work tomorrow. That shows you how important that bike has become. As you see here, the hot weather means the bicycle is brought indoors for this type of repair. I had been riding back from Memorial where prescription refills take 24 hours, that is, two trips. That hospital is three miles from here, easy biking distance.
           It’s steak and lobster this weekend. My old music class is on again for this semester, subject to budgetary whims. But show me a school board crass enough to cancel little Suzie’s music class, especially when her teacher is the neatest “old guy” she ever met. Six out of seven of my students are early teen girls and I doubleplusdare anybody to tell them what they can’t have. Maybe I’ll fix the Taurus. Classes start 7:00 PM this Friday. What Jimbos gig?
           Earlier I was in the shop getting all my email contacts up to date. I sent several pages of material to the drumbox guy in the UK. He is not enthusiastic about my business proposition but on the other hand has not said no. I have completely tested his software and even wrote (and donated) a better manual for him to publish for free. My findings on his product are as follows, which you may recognize as the first stages of reverse engineering.
           The code is compiled, probably Visual C. There are too many perfectly functioning sub-modules to believe they were programmed from scratch. There is a chance in addition to being an expert coder, we are also dealing with a fantastic drummer, an electronics expert, an experienced sound man and a financial wizard. I say he has lifted the modules from various sources and may not understand I don’t care if he stole them from the Queen herself.

           I’ve arranged a tentative meeting with another programmer this Friday. The intention is to pool our talents, although if the drumbox guy knows much about teamwork, he will either join us or sell us the source code. (Actually, he turned out to be a paranoid sort that did neither.) At some point he is going to figure out he should get on board or lose an opportunity here. If Friday goes the way I think it might, I am about to return to programming, a field I abandoned twenty years ago to study accounting. (Which is good, since it turned out to be a lousy-paying career.)
           Here is a different perspective on liquid intake during hot weather. Normally it is measure in ounces, but I decided to weigh my daily consumption in pounds. I refilled a set of empty plastic soda bottles with equivalent volumes of water, meaning this experiment presumes everything I drank today has the same density as water. That’s fair, I think. True, I seem to be the only one driving a bicycle by the miles in this sun, but I don’t think my consumption is otherwise unusual. What is your guess? How many pounds of liquid did I drink today? Between sunrise and sunset, twelve pounds. I’m not the guy you want to cross the Kalahari with.

           [Author's note 2014-08-17: in the end, this turned out to be my last music class. It was unexpectedly canceled at the last moment. Instead the class went ahead with the adult students only, held at the huge condo of the superintendent. We continued the class for ten weeks and the result was the famous "5-oh-5" party, where we all went down to the club and played for the unique grad ceremony of the decade. Sadly, never to be repeated.]

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