Trivia. In Canada, 100% of job growth now comes from government hiring. Countries that eat chocolate have more Nobel Prize winners per capita. And you know that oft-repeated “fact” that Newton was born the same year as Galileo died. It’s bunk. England and Italy used different calendars. It is the type of error the ill-educated always make.Year-end means I’m in the library more often than the usual five or six visits per month. For the benefit of my Ontario readers, it is a large building full of books. And Marconi, who didn’t really invent the radio, but send a message across the Atlantic attributed the “bending” of radio waves to the Earth’s magnetic field.
Reviewing the decade, I was reminded of several fateful decisions I made. One was not to invest in Google in 2000, but I did know at the time it survived the dot-com bubble because it was privately owned. I was an instantaneous fan of Wikipedia when it came on-line in 2001, but only because it was free. I did not invest in Facebook in 2004 because MySpace was the bigger outfit at the time.
Nor did I care for youTube in 2005 because at that time Napster and Limewire had all the music you could download. Investing in anything computer-based remains inherently too risky for me. Case in point, Blackberry is going under for completely missing the tablet market. These companies don’t survive unless they have the oomph to copy anything the competition cooks up and then place second or third in the new market.
My prediction is that Google is poised to become the next MicroSoft, the company we love to hate. I label it the “Google-Gobble” as they assimilate other companies and slowly force their presence upon us. They’ve got my hotmail, Keystone became Google Earth, and you can guess who owns youTube. This is the new order and unlikely to change since Google ad revenue is as much as all the TV networks combined. Sheer size will change their culture and they will become as pervasive and distorted as MicroSoft on insisting you do things their half-brain way.
Ever on the lookout for a better way to make printed circuit boards, I see ads for special paper that you print, peel, and meld onto the substrate with your clothes iron. Or run it through one of those heat laminators. They skimp on details so they can do without my money until they get over that. Stay clear of any process that requires special paper.
The PCB design (CAD) software is difficult to use. I’m looking for the most basic single-layer free version on the market. There does not seem to be an app for one layer tracing and right now that is all I know how to create.
ADDENDUM
An upsurge in readership since June this year has finally prompted me to look closer at my work. Remember the old saying, “Keep a diary and one day the diary will keep you.” (That’s why this is a fictitious work, like James Michener, it is only based on fact but is not in itself fact.) Here’s something to chew on. Blog statistics tend to count total hits, but what happens when you count only unique visitors? You get a much smaller number, with top sites like the Huffington Post pulling in 54 million readers monthly.
All the top non-search blogs fit strongly into five categories. Political, celebrity, news, gadgets, and gaming. In general, these are also the only blogs that are updated regularly enough to visit daily. The top search blog is still Google, at 900 million hits per month.
These are for fun:
Poise Walk
Making Sandwiches
Wheelie
Duet
Easy Victims
13.5 Billion Years
Wallace at work
Mobile Home
If you feel you had a more interesting post and it isn’t here, ask yourself if there are any ads on your offerings. If so, you will NEVER be here.
And this is for security and efficiency:
Ghostery places a list of who is tracking you in a little purple rectangle on your monitor, at the upper right. It installs in a few seconds, make sure you don’t check the feedback box or Ghostery will track you. Then block everything with the ‘select all’ option. Shown here is a typical sample.
These folks think you obviously do have something to hide, because they don’t want you knowing what they are up to. Think: the three biggest “sucker lists” are maintained by Google, LinkedIn, and Zillow (a real estate company). If you live in the USA, I’ll bet you $17.91 that every prescription you’ve ever had in your life is on one of those files. I’ll bet you $55.22 that your school grades are there. And I’ll bet you an even $500.00 that everything you ever bought on-line is there no matter who you bought it from. I am not a gambler.You’ve never heard of Mary Higby Schweitzer, but she shines in my pages for another reason than her fame for discovering dinosaur DNA. She has somehow managed to keep her entire background off the Internet, even her birthdate. You can look, it ain’t there. All that is known is she graduated first in 1977 (Communicative Disorders), again in 1988 (Secondary Education), and in 1995 (Biology). Where she got the money to spend twenty years getting disparate degrees remains extraordinarily unclear. She has three children but no record of whether she is married or to whom. Even her home address is listed simply as “America”. I wonder how she does it.
If you detect I no longer advise encrypted e-mail, it is because the government now considers all privately encrypted messages as “suspect or sinister”. It is more astute to never transmit any sensitive material electronically—but do keep it encrypted on a separate computer that is not even connected to the Internet. My passwords are “more than 12” characters long and would require 1,010,833 years each to crack. No two files have the same password. I speak more than one language.
And here are some keywords to gauge the effect on readership. If these lured you here and wasted your time, your quarrel is with your search engine, not with me. I’ve argued in favor of contextual searching since day one.
Axis Sally
3 wheel messersmith
blonde guillotine illusion xmp
sidecar
Holly Halston
