One thing planned for sure is my birthday party at the location shown on this maplet. I’m negotiating today to get out of bingo this Saturday so I can make it to the Keys for night fishing on Friday. JZ and I will hit the town on me, your classic teenage-style skrunt hunt. The festivities should spill over until late Sunday, by whence a good time will have been had by all. But I’m worried about that purple dot in the picture. It’s stuck right into the back of JP’s truck. There’s a couple of lucky ladies in the isles who just don’t know it yet.[Author's note 2021: in the end, my big last party was a bust. JZ never showed and never called. I wound up going for pizza with his brother & wife. Great band, but no women in the place they chose. A family atmosphere.]
; It turns out my last date, the lady who called me “weird”, was not an isolated incident. Two other guys who dated her got the same treatment. I stopped on the beach and bumped into several men who’d reached that conclusion. She wanted new loser to replace the one she just divorced. There must be a term for that behavior. They want a guy like the last one, but this time one they can control. One who has no mind or life of his own. The lady doesn’t want to change or mend her ways. Nothing is her fault. Where have we seen this before?
But a callout late in the day put me back happy, since that’s the gas for my mini-vacation. It was to change a password on the AT&T email service. Like most phone company efforts, each department goes its own way and money is wasted later to get anything to work together. In this case, somebody had designed a new set of overlays to change a password. That was done without updating the countless links to all the pages with the directions, which in turn led people to the obsolete instructions. And paid for my weekend gas.
These callouts, because I only take them from former clients at the shop downtown, are often occasions for visits as well. My average acquaintance with them is thus over six years, longer, you might say, than most marriages. This thought came around by virtue of tomorrow being the official end of my “retirement practice”. You’ll have to read a lot of this blog for the details on that, but essentially I’ve been doing a test retirement since February(?) 2005 and the experiment was entirely successful. Unlike many, I have utterly no fear of the future or consequences.
The conversation at this visit followed a familiar pattern. Where on Earth, they ask, did I learn so much about computers and the Internet? And that is a good inquiry, because I don’t know. I wish there was a school I could recommend, but there isn’t. Usually, I stumble across new items in the course of my own computer usage. I do all my accounting, journals, and research with a computer, so I’m a power user. But that is not a complete explanation for most people spend far more time on it every day than my average of one hour and nine minutes (of which 25.2 minutes is this blog).
I feel if I was on the computer any longer, there would be nothing of general interest to write about. Today I interviewed a guitar player, picked up hardware at Home Depot, shopped at the Catholic thrift, filled the gas tank, drilled bolt holes, tested a pull-up resistor, worked the crossword at the bakery, paid the electric, begged out of bingo, in all from you can see it was a ten-hour day nowhere near the Internet.
That new motorcycle trunk is already paying for itself in convenience. With the classy milk crate I was formerly using, I never did the second-thought that I could not leave anything valuable in it, now I’ve got a set of wrenches inside. So here is the scooter crouching in the shade. This clearly shows the box as a good size larger than the rest, although the construction is flimsier than I’d hoped for. But it holds two full loads of laundry.The scooter has 8,800 miles on it, 78% of which has been in short drives from here. The variable expenses (costs other than maintenance, so think “mostly gas”) has been $495.77 or slightly over the predicted five cents per mile. Total cost of ownership is almost ten cents per mile; I can’t imagine what it would cost to run a car in the same circumstances. And the starving Florida legislature is moving to compel insurance on 250cc bikes. They can see what’s coming.
I also chased down a false alarm caused by the effect of e-mailers who use the CC feature. Folks, that is a blatantly foolish thing to do, and so is BCC for that matter. These send not only your message, but a list of your contacts to the recipient and anyone else who happens to be listening in along the way. Myself, I’ve never send a bulk email but I can understand how some users would confuse doing so with their own popularity. I was leery of broadcasting personal information long before it was cool.
You are not being hacked. What is happening is somebody else who has your CC list has sent it to some spam operator. When you get a sudden blast of junk, it is likely because some dormant list out there has been re-activated. But change your password anyway. Self-test: How to tell if you are a computer nincompoop? Answer this question. “Do you believe that computers have made the younger generation smarter?”
ADDENDUM
Subsequent to testing all the available free circuit and logic simulator software handily available on line, I’ve spotted a disgusting similarity between this software and music software. Recall last day I talked about over-compressed indie (independent) muzak? Well, I see a likeness to several unrelated types of programs that have the same defect—they are built to follow a set of standard rules rather than allow you, the designer, a free hand.
These simulators won’t let you design what you want. They won’t let you save your drawings until they pass the control check. The problem is, this check cannot be disabled, so you can only design what the programming allows. After twenty months of study, I consider it complete idiocy to trust any electronics engineer to supply a good set of rules that allow innovative thinking.
This time I wanted a circuit board to have a strip of connected test points. But connected to each other, not to a component. This is so I could attach a set of grounding sockets on the board for use later. No way. They’ll not be allowing any such broad-minded, flexible exploration with their software, by God! They’ve got a business to run.
The music software is similar, with its underlying presumptions and settings that channel all the output toward the same shallow and boring repetitiveness. I saw this problem with video editing and accounting software back in the 90s. That’s when the second generation of C+ dorks began hitting the market, which we called “programming for minimum wage”. They force you to certain consequences that were not part of the deal. I mean, have you ever tried to reverse a transaction out of Quickbooks? You’re lucky the damn software doesn’t self-forward your keystrokes to the IRS, you lying, cheating scumbag of a scofflaw.
