For anyone keeping tab, I sewed my first useful article today. My favorite green towel was unraveling along one edge. I used that fancy edging stitch, probably wrongly, and made a new seam. So there, I’m not totally robots and music. And scooters and computers. And cooking and silver. And. The sewing machine got an overhaul to be on the safe side. There is a slipping belt I can’t do much about, making an occasional noise like the water pump on a ’67 Chevy.
I just know women who complain about men’s activities are meticulous in oiling and tuning their own sewing machines, so it was with some wonder I found this one had not been adjusted in 30 years. It was designed empirically, with 9 different bolt sizes, which led to another discovery. These bolts must be removed in the correct order to service the gears, but damaged slots indicate otherwise. Weird, it’s as if somebody repeated took one lug nut off and never touched the others.Just to prove I don’t love to hate MicroSoft, I’m re-reading World War 3.0. It’s the chronicle of how Gates and company reacted to the fact they missed the Internet boat. They have since tried all kinds of tactics to lessen competition, which is legally illegal but technically okay if you got bucks. MicroSoft is a major shareholder in Apple and this reflects the conservative thinking of 1990, when their only philosophy that worked was buying out the competition. But you can’t buy the Internet. Or for that matter, Google, eBay or Craigslist. Not that they didn’t try.
Gates saw the writing on the wall and cleared out. He witnessed Zuckerburg make billions thirty times faster than Windows at a time when that operating system dominated the market. The Internet changed the ground rules for all companies, although Yankee graft, favoritism and corruption will always survive. Every kid in a dorm room is potential competition. I shudder to think what the 1970s Corporations from WWII would be doing today if the Internet had not shaken the world to its iron-nickel core.
Don’t waste time on the horror movie “Broken”. I only struggled through it because the credits said it was based on a true story. Later, I could not find any such connection. Some whacko kidnaps women into the forest, torturing them to see if they survive. For example, he ties them up in a way they can only survive by cutting the stitches and pulling out the razor blade he has implanted in their abdomen. By mid-movie, it wears thin and the ending is tacked on to quickly wrap things up. This is the foreign film, not to be confused with the same title about a waitress and her ex-boyfriend.
Allow me to give an indirect but sincere compliment to Doctronics, an English site that publishes electronic tutorials. They have succeeded in what I consider a more proper method of controlling copyright infringement than any legislation, enforcement, or digital format fiddling. They simply make the pages and graphics hard to copy by known methods. I have no idea if it is intentional, but items like the Ctrl-A key only highlight the current paragraph instead of the entire article. Now that’s using their brains. While it doesn’t stop piracy, it makes it so difficult and slow that only the determined will make copies. Took me nearly a half-hour for twenty pages.
How about that Canadian dollar? Gone from $0.94 cents in August to $1.05 US this morning. Of course, those who know the least about exchange rates see this as proof that Canada is better than the US. For educational purposes, for the next short while I will compare the Canadian dollar to a stable currency, showing that a swinging dollar means bad news, there Otterwa. All I have to do is find a stable currency. This might not be easy since Bretton-Woods. For the currency that did best against the dollar, check out money from Finland.
