One year ago today: November 22, 2016, the old misplaced zero scam.
Five years ago today: November 22, 2012, needs reposting.
Nine years ago today: November 22, 2008, needs reposting.
Random years ago today: November 22, 2013, 85 miles inland.
[Author's note 2021: This date originally had two posts. So I include them both here as one.]
Compote. That’s what I have in this jar. It says rhubarb compote meant to be served on pound cake. This all sounds very English to me. Order that in Florida and you’ll get a pound of cake with some compost. Remember, it was De Soto who settled this place, not the Duke of Earl. Today we are seminar hunting. I’ve got a half-dozen brochures from places that say they’ll educate you on how to defend against foreclosure. Allow me, “Foreclosure? What’s that? You mean some people would actually stoop to borrowing money for a place to live? I don’t believe it.”
I’ve begun reading an offbeat book called “Men of Salt”. I recommend it already. The author is an unknown, though the dust cover says he’s worked for the NYT. Michael Benanav is one excellent travel writer by my standards. Those include telling you the prices he pays for things (did you get that, National Geographic) and after my own true heart, he teaches you new things. He’s not a subtle as this blog, but I don’t mind more direct education methods. He’s spending $1,250 to ride with a camel caravan into the heart of the Sahara for rock salt.
What did I learn? We know salt varies in taste and color, but now I know much more. The best salt is rock salt, as it naturally contains trace elements required for life and does not change flavor when cooked. There are vegetable salts obtained by burning plant stalks but it is “inferior” and cannot be fed to animals. He does not elaborate. There is also evaporated sea salt. It changes color and taste with heat and does not store well. A French company tried to compress sea salt into bars that resembled rock salt. It fooled no one and they went tits up in 1895.
Chattanooga, TN
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Agt. R was over to get some boards routed so I got him to help me clear the front door step. It is a pair of heavy concrete stairs I could not budge. He brings me this ten pound ham for Thanksgiving. Thanks, that’s uh, the largest ham I’ve ever had in my life. We looked over the progress on the floor and it’s going to be a lot of work.
Pricing out the decking material for the porch, the recommended 5/4” planks are ten bucks each for 12-footers. I would need 52 of them. That would eat up a third of the budget for the entire porch. Still, I can’t see skimping on the floor, since the area is planned only to be screened in and any other material would require special prep for the local weather conditions. I will look at alternatives. I also noticed the blocks under the original building were not place on any kind of footing. Just laid out on the sandy soil. That lasted 70 years, so I’ll just copy the pattern. It’s cheaper, too.
Trivia. Coin collectors know that rarity is a component of value. I wonder about that. I would more like to see a set of coins, say all dimes or nickels, from the past 200 years in one display than these proof sets advertised of one year. So, do you know why US coins since 1970 are never going to be rare? In that year, something called Title 31, Section 324 allows some dude called the Secretary of the Treasury to continue printing coins with the date of the “last preceding year” to “prevent or alleviate” a shortage of any coin. And you can bet that means whatever you have will never be in short supply.
Chattanooga, TN
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ADDENDUM
That hard drive I bought, yes, it was a semi-major operation. A bit of background here might do a few of my critics a little good. I know of too many compelling reasons to avoid MicroSoft compatible-products beginning around the time of the Vista release. I won’t go into detail, but like most smart people left in the world, I don’t use potentially dangerous software. MS has been chucked out of other countries for refusing to explain what certain lines of code are all about. I go further, suspecting products built since Vista also contain hardware features you may not want.
Some say social media is new, but it’s the old hood’s up crowd in the parking lot, showing off their latest toys. The first thing an idiot who buys a $500 phone wants to know is that he isn’t alone. When used as a tool, there is little reason to get a new computer if the one you are already using is doing the job. And that’s where this hard disk drive comes in. Stick around, any millennials out there, you are about to learn something. For security of private files, nothing can beat an old hard drive like shown here, manufactured in 2005, but brand new in the box. Bought from an overseas supplier and never connected to the Internet.
Now, of course you’ll get your contingent of morons who will call such precautions paranoid. But that’s why they are so rich and free. An example of what an ordinary person might want kept quiet would be pirated music stored on their hard disc. Have these millennials ever asked how those kids in California got caught and their parents fined? Probably not. Still, for security, nothing beats a perfectly good XP computer in the back office, with good old MS Office 2003, Nero Ahead, DVD player, and an Admin Password.
So now, get on your thinking caps. I share the opinion that Vista and onward software had one prime directive: to outdate pirated software. I’ve heard the argument that piracy hurts computer development. The same reasoning says people will quit composing good music if there is no money in it. And it’s bullshit, good creators out there are stacked forty deep. It is the lawyers and corporations like Sony that are whining. I consider that to be a good thing since I don’t own stocks in such enterprises. So, is piracy wrong? It’s illegal, no doubt about that, but is it wrong? Consider the following.
Certain big companies have traditionally bought or forced their opposition out of business. Remember Lotus 1-2-3? That fact is, the inferior product is often the one that makes it to market. Should people be paying top dollar for software that doesn’t work right? Where the research and development money was used to squeeze out the competition instead of perfect the software? Should the public before forced to accept sub-standard beta releases and default junk like Callibri 11 and png files? It’s not a question of using an alternate product if all the good products have been crowded out of the market. Without piracy providing their only competition, outfits like MicroSoft have zero incentive to do a decent job.
[Author’s note: for those too young to remember, MicroSoft was bloated with IBM cash early in its startup. It is not an innovative company; most of what they sell has been itself copied or you might say pirated. It uses dirty tricks to quash rivals or just buys them out. Some call this good business, so here is the tale of Lotus 1-2-3. It was spreadsheet software. But what MicroSoft did was introduce a bug into Windows 95 that made Lotus 1-2-3 make certain miscalculations. At the same time, Redmond began marketing Excel as part of MicroSoft Office.
This created the impression that Excel was free because it was bundled and created the rumor that Lotus 1-2-3 was flawed. Of course, MicroSoft apologized profusely and corrected the problem when they released Windows 98. By which time Lotus 1-2-3 was bankrupt. If I was the sort that believed in coincidences, I’d say there’s a damn good example of one.]
Nobody should have to pay for poor software. Like the Royal Navy, I maintain a perfectly adequate and functional XP system that is update-free. Now I need a new disk drive, so why not grab one from Wal*Mart? Because the package says ‘designed for Vista, 7, and 10’. I know enough about hardware to know there is a reason they are being so explicit about that. What exactly is it that makes it designed for specific software? Thus, I’m not even going to take a chance that some of these disks cannot be formatted for XP (I could not find any dependable sources who address the topic). But I have heard of such drives performing strange housekeeping functions on their own. The old “Please wait” message.
Next consideration is disk design. When XP was discontinued, 500GB was considered a large capacity. The technology was tested and rugged and SATA had not yet become a standard. Most computers had both sockets (IDE and SATA). Thus, I want a 500GB but nothing newer. Wal*Mart doesn’t sell such drives. But if you can haggle in the right language (see photo), you may get what you want for $20 bucks.
Imagine my amusement when I did a search on carbon film resistors and found two pictures of my motorcycles on the page. The mere mention of a word here is now enough to be detected by the search engines. Recognize my babies? They appear in the bottom row, see photo. The sidecar shot was only uploaded y'day. Trivia. There were 210 earthquakes this week. A new nanocompound, when placed in water, turns it to steam instantly in sunlight without boiling.
I’ve already explained that there are no SEO concessions on this blog, that is, I have not contracted a room of geek-types to tweak the hidden meta-tags to trick searchers into landing here by mistake. You may see some keywords in italics at the blog ending, but these are taken from past searches and not hidden. These results show that Internet searching is degenerate, while of course the blog is pure and blameless.Is this change significant? It is in at least one sense. Search engines can never achieve accuracy without prioritizing blogs that really do have content and really are posted daily. Therefore the search result is a result of doing my homework consistently over an extended time frame—and you can’t fake hard work. Is this publication about to assume its true and proper Position amongst the Grand Community of Bloghood? (Did you get that, “amongst”?)
For Thanksgiving (not a big holiday for me) I picked up Estelle and went to Denny’s for pumpkin pie. Estelle is the lady I met at the Hungarian bakery, not my type but skinny. I like skinny. Denny’s and I go back 40 years, when I used to stay there half the night when my rented attic room got too cold in the winter. Refills are still free and I had the pumpkin pie. Estelle and I shared something new, pancake dough in little fritters with syrup. Darn good. I still like Denny’s despite their change of atmosphere. I understand now that so long ago, the staff felt sorry for me when they let me stay all night. That is how destitute my own parents left me at 17 years old. Please, no pep talks, at 17 I was a farm kid with nothing.
Nothing was open today, but the FEC (Florida East Coast Railroad) still creamed somebody south of Aventura. I had to drive 19 miles to get around the blocked crossings. Police everywhere. Back home by 3:00 PM, I’m watching “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, first time. So much excitement around here so thanks for nothing, Florida women. The next best things would be my Ibanez guitar has stayed in tune for three months, my new $7 multimeter works better than the $20 unit it replaces, and in spite of my bombed birthday party, I still have enough money to go out this upcoming weekend. I'm still recovering from the most expensive holiday of my life.
Then I spent the late afternoon doing what I want, which was building and testing some voltage divider circuits. Partially, this was research for my chapter on resistors. I can’t publish without pictures and I don’t have a decent camera for close-ups. And drinking this, this . . . what is this swill? Powerade? I don’t like these Gatorade-type electrolyte liquids that taste like weak, salty lemonade. Yuck.The “Hitchhiker” movie gets bland within the first hour. Except for Zooey in a pantsuit. That was okay. I found an old war movie called “Sahara”, that’s WWII, not the Civil War. As long as you call every German a Nazi and fantasize they had more than the actual 54 tanks against the British 3,000, the movie it has a plot. In theory, everything could have been that way but it wasn’t. Great scenery in Death Valley, CA. A 1995 remake of the 1943 edition. The actors spoke authentic German and Arabic.
Some interesting links:
A spray-on fungus that kills bedbugs.
Bacteria produces gold.
This fold up car is already in production.
It's a magic eye 3D illusion! (I keep rediscovering these.
ADDENDUM
While I don’t give much credence to the European union, the union does at least cause them to sometimes act as a team. They told the US money giants to keep their noses out of business and politics. The warning came after Visa, Amex, and Paypal (misspelling intentional) cut off funding to WikiLeaks, a blatantly political act. These corporations could not have done such a thing if they didn’t have everybody on file. I won’t say I told you so, but I did.
There is a popular fallacy that Paypal is a bank in Luxembourg. Not so, that is the branch office they opened in 2007 to do business in Europe. They were formerly in England but moved for tax reasons. That has a familiar ring to it. According to Wiki: “In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter on a state-by-state basis. PayPal is not classified as a bank in the United States. . .”
Paypal is what is known as an acquirer. They do not extend credit, that is, the money must be in your account before you can spend it. Originally, this was supposed to be anonymous cash transactions. I rued the day when Paypal went back on that promise. They “make money by moving it instead of holding it”, thus there is no legal requirement for your ID. They simply discovered most people think they must.
I believe there is still a huge market on-line for the party that invents a method to make anonymous purchases. I know people who won’t buy on-line simply because they don’t want the entire world to eventually know about it. (Some countries require all eBay purchases to be on Paypal or all Paypal accounts to be paid by credit card. In the US, only 40% pay this way.)
