I’m still waist deep in the Amazon swamp, searching for the Fountain of Straight Answers. Sadly, it is becoming clear I am looking in the wrong continent. Things will continue, mainly due to the momentum now developed from FireHow. Despite no major rip-offs yet, I cannot recommend either of these places (Amazon or FireHow) for beginners who are expecting to be fairly paid. Far from being an oversight, these outfits have a deliberate policy of being vague on all critical points. That is partially why I’m treating anything I do for Amazon as a spin-off at this time.The shop was absolutely dead all day. I’m having second thoughts about remaining in business. The genius landlady re-mortgaged the property to speculate on the beachfront, and is now on bad times. Too bad, you dumb broad. The point is, she is going to have to back off on the rent to about half or she is seriously risking a default or a vacancy. Half rent, if you remember, is what it should have been before she connived to use the CAM clause to effectively double it. True, if she goes under it would affect us, but vice versa.
Concerning technical matters, I have another challenging disk copy. If I did not mention it, let me repeat that CD disks do have “grooves”, although they are optical strips and not actual indentations. Their purpose is to keep the laser aligned and yes, you can see them if you have enough magnification and know what to look for. Stay with me here, when the burning laser gets jarred, it can still burn a disk that can be played back on that same player. Nobody suspects a thing. The problem surfaces when you try to play or copy that misaligned disk using a good unit.
How does one solve this problem? Every disk copy fails and ruins the target disk, which is why it wound up in my hands. It is for a good customer, so I must find a solution. I give myself 24 hours to come up with something or my pen-name isn’t veryatlantic. Meanwhile, Pudding-Tat is slowly spending more time indoors and the orange tinge to her fur is fading away. She meows when I ask her opinion of making the fur into bedroom slippers when she croaks, finding it a humorless questions. I mean, I’m empowering her in the decision of whether the fur goes on the inside or the outside. Unappreciative females, anyway.
In a reminder schools have not changed much, I’ve had several students in to use the machines who have been upsold. They first wanted a simple course or two and were talked into student loans to return to full time college. One dude is taking a C# course and I volunteered to help him study if I could participate in the assignments. What a pity that a programmer like myself has to resort to such things to get a single course from a college, and also a shame upon the creators of these codes that the codes are harder and not easier to grasp.
Trust me, I have not seen one new computer coding concept since 1972 and by now, computer code should therefore be so easy as to be laughable. It should be a topic covered in elementary school, not the cause of 900 page manuals and aftermarket support groups. For those who don’t know, those basic concepts are the comment, the if-then-else loop and its variations, and the go to subroutines. I defy any person alive to show me how the C family of languages has anything new to offer except needless complexity. Libraries? Those are just subroutines, etc. As a telling shame of C, the most common error is still lack of a punctuation mark because some commands use it and others do not—proving it a language invented by over-educated nincompoops who cannot even type.
Um, one more interesting thing. When the student showed me his sample code, I noticed he had been taught to section certain areas, in the exact same fashion as I had recommended twenty years ago. That means it takes C+ people twenty years to catch up with the real world. We all know that is too large a gap and now they are struggling to get it to look like good old COBOL. Ha, what utter, disgusting idiots they be.
