Of all the situations, a former client called up for assistance on changing his AT&T password. We spent an hour trying to find the right link. The AT&T no-minds have hidden it. All their on-line instructions proved as useless as their characters, which I can say because I used to work there. You can’t click on the “Change Password” link if it isn’t there any more. We navigated twenty sub-menus before calling it quits and phoning them for help.
Gear trains, robotic gear trains. Why are pieces of plastic so expensive? Now that I know for a fact that nothing with wheels, tracks, skids or axles will move in a straight line unless you make it, I need cheap gears. To make it go straight without gears, you need gyroscopes, tracks, donkeys or steering wheels, which I don’t have either. Engineers know all this, but can they say it as clearly as I just did?
Here’s a gem. The H-bridge I bought was described in numerous “official” sites before I made the buy or build decision. All described how the chip functioned, but none mentioned the purpose of pins 1 and 9. They are ordinary (electronic) on/off switches. Gee, wasn’t it nice all those experts to say that, because when they don’t, the chip sits there and stares at you until days later when you stumble across code written in England that explains you have to switch the thing on. Take my word, you don’t want to have to learn things by reading computer code. And I’m getting the same message about listening to “experts”.
Advice for the day, overheard last night at Frenchie’s, the club. “Remember this when dating older women: “69” spelled backwards is the sign for Cancer.” Yew, did you get a visual on that one?
Projected pre-bingo activity for today? An ebike ride up to BK for coffee and the crossword, with a stop for some bobbins at the sew shop, and pick up a dozen caffeine free diet sodas on the way home. Some say diet soda kills. Cost of electricity for this trip, was probably less than 11 cents, and electricity can kill you, too. So can the aluminum in the soda cans. It depends on what you go through life expending energy on worrying about. Energy can kill you faster than all those put together if useless worrying don’t get you first.
Bingo crowds can be sparse in the summer, today was one of the smallest crowds ever. But these are the pros who play minimum six cards each and again, 40% of the money went to a single player. There was a thunderstorm growling outside for most of the game and it made the club seem like the inside of those British bomb shelters during the blitz. Eerie effect, since Jimbos is built a bit like a bomb shelter itself.
I took the opportunity to test the new band material on the crowd. They loved it. It is myopic to conclude there are no country bands because the market isn’t there, the facts show that is just not true. Like it or not, I am taking dead aim on those places that currently hire guitar solo acts. Most are not true solos because of extensive backing tracks on MP3. My act is the other extreme. There are all manner of antics on stage to remind the audience my music is live, and I emphasize things that cannot be accomplished using tracks.
The other item is audience rapport. As Ray-B pointed out, several of the beach clubs have refined their show to a couple of steady acts. I wonder if that is by preference, or the difficulty of finding somebody new every weekend. Chances are my duo will have to compete directly on price with these singles, but I too am seeking that steady Thursday - Friday gig to minimize hauling equipment.
