One of my pet peeves has become news helicopters. They are noisy, and not everybody watches the news. I don’t. This morning they were up over the casino for nearly an hour, must have woken up 200 square blocks of people. That freedom of speech thing needs amending to stop the media from using it to bother people. Of course, you’ll get the jerkfaces who’ll complain, but you’ll note they always have some sort of vested interest.
And the worst such interest is inflated self-importance. Who are these people so important they need news instantaneously? So maybe there was a crime over at Gulfstream. In terms of true self-worth, it makes no difference whether the type of people who watch television all day hear about it now, tomorrow, or in the middle of next week, really. It reminds me of the phone company, where we had one old coot who could not fall asleep unless he picked up the receiver and heard dial tone. These are psychiatric, not electrical, disorders.
We had another crackpot, a lady who would call in to see if we would check her line to “make sure it would be okay for the next week”. Her mother lived in Oklahoma, see, and might die. Damn it, if your mother’s minute-to-minute health is so important, why did you move 2,000 miles away? Anybody that stupid is unlikely to grasp that the intrusive testing of a line makes it even more likely to fail. And you wonder why all my life I’ve been a firm believer in the “user pay” system. If I was in charge, we’ll still send the Coast Guard to save you, but then we’ll send you the bill. If you don’t like that system, it shows what side of the intellectual fence you’re on.
Major rain meant a lost half-day again. It has proven unwise to ride the bike, not because of the rain, but because the roadways flood. The time gave me a chance to read more on file and folder commands issued from servers toward the client’s computer. The very existence of this capability is temptation itself, and something only an outfit like MicroSoft could have cooked up. Much has been said that they do the best they can, but isn’t it odd that Apple computers have never had any such difficulties?
I finally stopped by the stamp club at Bad Bob’s invitation. The computer club he talks about is a thirty-two-mile round trip into the next county. Examining these stamps tells me this is a hobby I should avoid. The stamps are churned out by the gazillions with the express purpose of being sold as “rare”. They are pre-cancelled, a fancy way of saying defaced, so a stamp with stripes from St. Louis is different than the same stamp from Philadelphia. Plus, they arranged and sold in sheets. There is a guide booklet listing all the cities, so if there is any danger of some collector getting them all, another supply can be quickly run off. Not for me.
Some guy ahead of me walked out the door and as I stepped up to the ATM I saw he’d left it live. I had to chase the guy down and show him how I could have helped myself to his account. Like my family, some people just don’t mix with modern technology until two decades after the pack, at which point they become instant experts.
Eddie and I talked about the drum box. His opinion is to spend twice as much money and get a “good” one. Like many, he is unclear on the concept. Trust me, Eddie, all drum boxes are junk, so get the cheapest one that will do the job. Eddie has no concept of a drum box that doesn’t have to be programmed, which bears out my theory that the manufacturers are collectively refusing to build something that is easy to use. Plus, Eddie is not a drummer, the way he talks about programming a tune rather than a track. He does not understand the instant you put in a drum single roll, you are regimenting that song to be played exactly one way.
Nor does he understand that the drum rolls are not necessary to present the audience with a danceable, enjoyable session. It turns out the only people he knows with drum machines are studio musicians who then take the programmed machine to live gigs and play to that. He doesn’t give a second thought to the situation where a vocalist may say “one more time” or a guitarist dropping a measure, situations that cannot be handled by pre-mapped song arrangements or midi tracks.
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