More trivia, I hear the call. In 1938, minimum wage was 25 cents per hour, almost as much as the self-employed earn in Florida these days. The largest roach ever measured came in at 3.81 inches and his pregnant teen sister lives behind my electric stove. The largest silver nugget ever found weighs 1,840 pounds of 93% pure metal. And women shoplifters outnumber men by 4.5 to 1. Okay ladies, today in aisle 6 we have a special on silver nuggets . . . .Up to the Hollywood Library, now back to open six days a week with regular hours. That was one petition I signed on the spot. Close down the gay opera, not the library, you fools. I found several ads for bicycles with motors already attached in the $150 range. When I check in on Dave-O, who is still bed-ridden, I told him about these bargains. While we were looking forward to the project, I am also looking for a bargain.
All afternoon found me up at Howard’s, and he now has a slick Wikipedia biography. It is far more complicated than we set out. Be assured that was not the plan, rathermore how it emerged as I went along and figured things out. It is no secret that Wiki wanted their site to look a little more distinguished than possible with html and css alone, but in the process they really contorted the commands.
As par, they lacked a good writer on staff to document the process and produce a set of instructions. I normally don’t like people watching me correct computer code, but Howard is a professor and an exception. He was stunned by how much patience is required. Some parts of the code I had to re-read thirty repeats and several times had to look at a single line five minutes to find the bug.
Most of said bugs were caused by Wiki’s altering the code structure. In one section you must include a pipe between fields, in the next section you must leave it out. All this requires unfathomable mental energy. That is how I know instantly who is a real programmer and who is a liar from Ontario.
Wikipedia is guilty of the COIK syndrome, “Clear Only If Known”. This describes a situation where they only make sense to those who already knows what to do. They published a big disclaimer at the top of Howard’s bio stating his references were not confirmed by an independent third party (during the process we found many examples that were not confirmed or had dead links).
I could easily have erased that code but decided not to piss Wiki off. My justification would have been that Wiki fails to define “comfirmed” or what makes a “third party”. They mean until one of their people looks the matter over and decides it is okay—but they can’t bring themselves to say it like that.
Not normally a time-waster, I checked the Craigslist musician’s room to see who is looking for what. The entire list has degenerated into commercial advertising, with actual musicians counting for maybe one post in four. The rest are recording studios selling time slots, disk duplication offers and fringe items for sale. The way Craigslist is set up, there is no defense against such bad posting except to flag in unison. Musicians around here can’t agree on a song list much less on strategy.
