February 13, 2014

           Is it noon already? A late start for me. I tried to take a siesta. The problem is, if you know where to look, you can glance down Atlantic from the main highway and see if I’m home or not. So people drop by randomly in the daytime. And the invention of cell phones means if they don’t knock on my door, they call me when driving past. So heck with this, I’m going to the bakery. And when I got there, I saw the most expensive chocolate bar yet. This is hand-made to old Hungarian standards. The price tag is $18. Per.

           I’ve detected a significant rift over Win 7. During the marathon repair session at Fred’s y’day, you get to see a variety of people using or testing computers. It is clear that those who do not use the computer for productive gain actually like Win 7. I quickly learned, when somebody likes Win 7, to ask then what they do with the computer. Most of them play games and surf the net. A pattern emerges instantly. They use the computer mainly for entertainment. They don’t have a clue how to set page margins or embed a formula. These are tasks I do daily and my complaint is that Win 7 moved those “get to work” commands to difficult locations.
           Digging out the old suitcases, I found videos and stills of John and I back at the phone company. Hey, I wasn’t bad looking back then. Alas, the videos were put on computer the only way it could be easily done in those days, by aiming a direct-to-disk camera at a television screen playing the tape. And for some reason, when you try to capture stills, they come out just a big black rectangle. I’m working on it.
           QBASIC. I’m working on that as well. It is a primitive language with quirks that could easily wipe out your data. For example, to open a file, the command you have to use the trigger “OUTPUT”. This command both creates a file with the name you just specified and opens it. Great. Until you realize if there had been an existing file with that name, it gets erased and overwritten. The idiots back in my time were every bit as stupid as the idiots of today.
           I tend to combat such problems by having a separate directory for each program or file. I already said QBASIC is similar to early Apple programming. It can be used to generate graphics, think computer games, but level is pretty much the most you can do with it. The nugget is that there is a command that allows the program to momentarily leave QBASIC and run DOS. Now, DOS is my old buddy. If you can’t do it in DOS, it can’t be done. This is the “SHELL” command you may have heard about. You can run a DOS subroutine and then return control to QBASIC. That is one way to confuse the beejeezus out of the C+ people.
           Sadly, this excellent piece of software has been removed from Vista and onwards. Still, to refresh and hone my programming skills, I intend to write at least one useful program in QBASIC to say that I’ve done it. I want color and sound. I’m thinking in terms of artificial intelligence, which is easy to tinker with in any non-C+ language. Besides, it has been twenty years since I programmed anything but short scripts, formulas, and internal DOS procedures. This is good mental exercise and I always did like flowcharting. You can always tell a C+ programmer. They don’t flowchart. Or when they do, it looks like spaghetti.
           [Author’s note: there are other reasons for my choice of QBASIC, including the fact that it does not run on computers after Windows 98. Up to XP, Windows was a graphical layer that ran over top of DOS, but after that, DOS was not even included. DOS is powerful. MicroSoft wisely does not remove it completely, instead they include a fake version, an emulator. If I can install QBASIC, I don’t care if it is emulation, as long as it runs. It is precisely because DOS is out of favor and fashion that it attracts me back. It as a layer of security most of the Internet types cannot even touch. I will know by tomorrow if I can get a working version on XP.]

           Take a look at the scooter dash. I ran out of the wet look fingernail polish but it works well enough. Shown here, I only spread it over the important sections and you can see how badly clouded the edges remain. After a week it is still readable, showing 11,256 miles on the scooter. And I can finally read the gas guage again. While it is not a perfect fix, it is cheap and the results are acceptable. I will finish the job.
           Corn. It is now completely removed from my diet. I’ve read enough. What you think is corn is probably MON810, a formula from Monsanto. The federal agency that tests this corn and rates it as edible is comprised of ex-Monsanto executives. In Europe, this product is called Frankencorn. Some countries like France don’t just ban it for people or animals, they do not allow it to be grown on their soil. Consider this. Frankencorn is not genetically modified to increase yield or nutrition (as they would have you believe), but rather to resist herbicides. The farmer sprays his crop with much stronger than usual weed killer and everything dies except the corn. And you, at least so far. The herbicide most commonly used is “Roundup”, like for your lawn. It is a direct descendant of Agent Orange. Another Monsanto product.

           Up till two days ago, I’d only heard of Monsanto. I thought the real polluter was Du Pont, the Bhopal bunch. For pollution of a different sort, meet George Yancey. Some university actually gave this dork a PhD. He’s the guy that writes those inane articles about Latino people being white. He’s done it again. With your research money tax dollars from North Texas U in conjunction with Rice U, he studied on-line dating sites to conclude that women like tall men.
           This brilliant breakthrough, which surprises everyone all to blazes, is based on the finding that 55% of women aged 35 “would only date men taller than [themselves, the women]”. This guy’s IQ must be right off the chart, though I will not postulate in which direction. I do notice that 55% is a scant majority. Identical studies show that only morans (sic) would base anything on a study of 35-year-old women who have to advertise on the Internet to get a date this Saturday night. Gals, moving to a small town with a plywood mill would immensely increase your odds. Plus, Yancey won’t be there. Ten-hut!

ADDENDUM
           Sugar. I did not know so much about it, so I watched a decent BBC documentary. I learned and since you may not have an hour to watch it yourself, here are the points I found most interesting.
           Sugar was unknown until around 1200 A.D. It is a wild grass from New Guinea.
           It was initially so expensive it was used only to administer medicine.
           Sugar gives three crops per year and has more energy than any other food.
           Most people never tasted sugar until the 1600s, now it is in almost every food.
           Although an ancient disease, diabetes flared up around the same time.