My buddies and I used to send short letters to each other as the plain text appeared in that space along the top, each character represented by punched rectangles below. The actual coding was done on specially printed pads and only the finished product was to be punched. Nobody hogged the machines because back then because there weren’t enough foreigners to get away with it. (Taking controversy to the next level.)And that is how proper programming is learned. Anybody who sits down at a keyboard and says they are programming must be working by the hour. Good code requires intense solitary effort and in general, a computerized environment is far too distracting. It can be done, but what a waste of time. Occasionally, one of those 1970 type cards still falls out of an old book or photo album around my place.
A progress check with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. I’m about a third done, the part where he saves the girl from drowning and some Quakers are all about obeying the law instead of God. Quakers always obey the law, you know. And Tom? He’s so pious and perfect it’s hard to believe Aunt Polly hasn’t rescued him by now. You just know hard times are a-comin’.
Testing new software today, I found a screen capture product by Adobe, which I’ll test thoroughly if I can locate an evaluation copy. (Presenter 8 retails for 500 smackeroos.) Adobe goes ballistic to prove how integrated they are. The no-neck in their samples is titled an “e-learning Evangelist”. They have “actors” you can embed--but where did they find such ugly ones? The bus depot? Bible college? Nepotism? I understand middle-age ordinary types need love too but ugly never works. Adobe doesn’t get it that 2012 stereotyping now means when they purposely include ethnics. That controversy again.
My beef with existing video software is that they are not really “computer” media, rather computerized steps from traditional (sprocket) film that requires you build up your work step-by-step, that is, exactly what you bought a computer to avoid. As usual, there is only one chance in 130 this Adobe will go anywhere, but I’m looking closely.
One certainty is that eBay is no longer a desirable destination and I cannot recommend it. Auction, my eye. Dozens of retailers with identical prices that soak you on delivery charges, deposit money orders like they were checks, and will not accept cash even locally. People who allow all their purchases to be recorded by strangers have no right to complain about the consequences of doing so. There is something fundamentally wrong with eBay and it their business model has changed to something I don’t care for. And of course, their idiot system means you have to look in multiple categories to find anything. Try looking up “toy boat” and finding every instance.
Then, I took a peek at the enigmatical Voynich manuscript. I’ve heard of it but never seen it until today. Instantly, I’m struck with how much it resembles the notebook of anyone learning a new topic and experiencing the same problems as I. You want to learn, but each teacher has a contradictory version. That author, like myself, may have known the basics were already discovered and if only he could find a source of straight answers, he could invent something. But the others won’t stand for it.
His field was herbs, mine is electronics, so my theory is he wrote down compilations of what facts he sifted from what was available on his budget. His drawings of plants are like my first circuits. They are over-detailed attempts to understand while simultaneously regarding contemporaries as rubes who had been wrong too often. The manuscript is also in code which I solidly attribute to fear of the Vatican. This blog is likewise full of magnified circuit sections that others considered unimportant and thus never explained properly. I have not read any electronics book in a year that did not contain major errors or omissions from the start.
Last evening I took an extensive quiz on the Internet. Four hundred “How Stuff Works” questions about science, history, and discovery. I got fifteen of them wrong. Fourteen were questions about drug names, drug usage, or drug effects. (How in Sam Hill would a man like me know who sells Viagra?) And the other question was wrong. The Great Wall is not visible from outer space. That fallacy derives from an old astronaut joke that dumb people didn’t get and became an urban legend.
(Here’s the theme song for guys that really can’t score. I found it while trying to figure out why geeks would post screen capture software instructions using text. That is so totally geek, writing the script after the movie is finished.)
ADDENDUM
Say goodbye to the Internet we knew and loved. Everything you read or write on-line is recorded, those who use encryption are automatically under government observation, and nothing can really be pirated in safety any more. If it is any consolation, the authorities don’t read all your email but that is only because they don’t have the staff. All of it is recorded for future use if you are ever singled out. Same with all phone calls. I've personally seen the equipment. I still maintain the Internet is due for replacement by something privately owned and preferably off-shore and unjammable.
My latest ratings on this blog show marked upsurges but also increased incidences of piracy. I don’t mind because the infringement is predominantly from sites seeking to artificially pad their meta-tags. This is a veiled compliment in that such tactics work best with blogs like mine which do not fake the ratings. Even the occasional keyword list seen here is from Google overviews, never counterfeit SEO material. Most commonly copied are my pictures which are watermarked and oddly, my original (primitive) circuit drawings. But they were, as explained, completely tested and documented and therefore a good learning aid. I will henceforth watermark my circuit drawings.
I’ve experienced odds in my life that defy calculation, but I’m confounded by how a search on “veryatlantic” turns up thousands of results. This name was carefully chosen to be unique, original, familiar-sounding, and unlikely to ever be used in ordinary speech. It was even planned to defeat punctuation-ignoring searches since no known consecutive English sentences ended with “very” and began with “atlantic”. The earliest usage of the term is in this blog and “veryatlantic” is a trademark—but “very atlantic” is not. Still, the plan was my work would turn up exclusively, but search engines are run by weird people and all the unoriginal posts get equal billing.
The mad scramble for first place makes for convoluted search behavior. I’m more than satisfied under the circumstances that “veryatlantic” can defeat the majority of these tricksters. Search on images instead of the web and you’ll see my pictures dominate the results. Many of the other results (and I can’t explain this) are often images I only looked at once and that seems enough to get them included.
