Would you like a little maple syrup on your hotcakes Sunday morning? Think twice, this jar will cost you $18. And it is the dark variety which the public have been hoodwinked into thinking is more desirable than the very light variety. The weather takes top billing again. It has been unusually perfect for months but don’t get fooled. That also means some bozo in Pompano is going to start a brush fire and cars will boil over on the causeways. It is still Florida, the most disorganized of the states. Some may say that is New Jersey, but by comparison, their crime bosses are very efficient.
I get to report my worst month ever, though it isn’t quite over. Hot sunny weather places people outdoors and revenue plummets. It was the smallest bingo crowd since the game got popular over there. Cancel my trip to Miami until later in the week and I was really looking forward to that. For entertainment, I may have found a free parking spot near the Ft. Lauderdale library, the big main branch. That could make for a relaxing summer.They got radiation traces out west from the Jap reactor. I personally had no idea the Japanese were locating nuclear power plants on coastlines. That is just plain dumb. It is an earthquake zone, for crying out loud. Have they learned their lesson?
By coincidence, the pre-bingo movie today was Pearl Harbor. One American general warns the Japanese would invade as far as Chicago before they were stopped. How, pray tell, were they supposed to get there? Take the Amtrak? Organize a wagon train?
That dork “warrior” mentality is one thing that’s never changed. Now these soldier types are bombing Libya. Again. There is an old saying that stupidity is indivisible. In the military, at least. I agree with Jefferson, that the USA has no need for a standing army. Nobody could invade this place, it would be suicide.
Get that CEO of Starbucks, who tells the employees he would never ask them for anything he wouldn’t ask of himself. Oh? Would he work for near-minimum wage? Starbucks has always overcharged but what I have against them is they destroyed the American tradition of the free refill. The main reason I don’t patronize them is they have the people who are supposed to be working the cash register mixing up lattes and pouring chocolate syrup while you wait in line. Dreadfully slow service at over $2 per cup. I don’t think so.
Gee, it seems a lot of the people with nothing to hide may have been all talk. As a reminder, my objection to government records has never been a privacy issue, but that the authorities will sooner or later use every record they have against you, so it is advisable to have as few records as possible. Classic example of abused records: the DMV.
Now, the state of New York used Google satellite photos to issue $70,000 in fines to people who had unregistered swimming pools. Ah, you say, they were scofflaws. Yea, well your turn is coming, we’ll see how you like it. My point is the satellite photos were never intended to intrude on privacy. That only happened once the government got their greasy hands on them. I believe most people want increased privacy, but they are afraid to say anything for fear their objections would just draw more attention to themselves.
Take Europe, where they have much more experience dealing with government records. A huge portion of the populace has succeeded in preventing Google from displaying images of their houses. Yet here in American, there are enough naïve people to allow it. What do the Europeans know that Americans don’t. The answer is, “Plenty.”
AT&T is plugging a country-wide database that follows you around. They want to put your medical records on the Internet is basically what they are saying. This May will be 15 years since I left the phone company, the youngest retiree on record, and trust me, the last outfit you want with your database is the telephone company. Oh, and I’m likely to remain the youngest, for after I left with my 6-figure buyout, they promptly changed the rule book. Employees must now be age 55 minimum to retire. How did I do it? Let’s just say I was the only one in 15,000 who read the rule book.
It’s wise I have lots of things to do indoors; the temperature outside by mid-afternoon was 91 in the shade, maybe a record. I crossed another barrier, getting my Arduino to read and display analog sensor values. In this case, a photoresistor, which brings my project of an automatic fan one step closer. A fan that turns on and follows you around the room, that is my useful idea. First, I need to build one that turns on automatically.
You can read about today’s experiment at Minutes, look for Experiment 008 . It is an experiment that failed in January that I went back and revisited with success. My guess is that it won’t be too long before I build an anti-barking deterrent. I’ve seem some on the market, disguised as a birdhouse. They are frightfully expensive, I believe in the $280 to $400 range. The working principle is a snap. It detects the dog bark and sends a 110 ultrasonic decibel beam at the little bastard for ten seconds. The dog can hear it but people can’t. If the dog continues barking, the decibels go up. I know it is a pity to punish the dog instead of the owners, but ask yourself, “Which animal is easier to train?”
I found my electronics blog (the companion to this blog) has a built-in glitch. It is very difficult to link off the first page that gets displayed. My works run into many pages and the thing will not link, it has been designed that way. If there is a workaround, I’ll find it. Meanwhile, I found some trivia that might help any web page developers in the audience.
When you do a link, such as to www.msn.com, it is wise to include a slash as a suffix, making www.msn.com/. This is because without the slash, the server has to process two requests. I don’t know the technical reason why servers are so dumb, or rather the people that designed them, but it makes sense to streamline anything you can on the Internet. Oh, how I dream of something that puts the Internet out of business by actually working right.
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