I’ll be keeping my XP in operation a long time due to junk like that from Redmond. Callibri font, I mean, such blatant ignorance hurts the brain, the more when you consider this type of nonsense passed the test of whoever MicroSoft tests these things on. Scary, but I would not be the least surprised to learn that MicroSoft keeps a supply of morons on tap just to test their "new" systems on.
It turns out there are now up to 9 different wmv formats, which is plumb crazy. What? Yes, Hector, there is a "b" in plumb. And some versions are incompatible with Movie Maker, which they eliminated from the Win 7 package. MicroSoft, I hope to be dancing on your grave within a few short years. Do I hate MicroSoft that badly? No, but I hate the crooked way they do business, which crowds out better software from every reaching the market.
Band rehearsal was the pits. Mistakes, bad timing, general mayhem, which taken together are the signs of too many songs on the list. You can only learn so many before there is not enough time to keep everything polished up and ready to fly. The new material is more exciting than the 1950s fare so guess which tunes get the most attention? When you play your old Beatles only once or twice a month, things indeed begin to fall apart.
I’m going to post a short video on youTube, the first time I’ve ever thrown out a video of me singing and playing to a potentially large audience. Stay tuned for the link. The scenes are not closeups, but you can see Jag & I clearly. Remember that to hear the bass, you will need either headphones or very nice stereo speakers on your computer. If it sounds tinny, get those headphones out. This is a bass show. Editing the videos makes me sad. Because I look old and fat and everything else. But listen, it’s part of the aging process, I looked young for well past my years and was dating a 22 year old lady when I was 46. I had my fling, in fact I had well more than my fair share. Better a has-been than a never-was, Julia.
But the conversion process takes forever, sometimes up to an hour to change a twenty-minute video. I’m going up to Dunkin to do some reading. Catch you later. Hi, I’m back. I know I have to move to a better neighborhood, on principle alone. What a boatload of zeros have taken over that Dunkin. People bellering at the top of their lungs, letting their kids run wild, sleeping in their chairs. It was like having coffee at the DMV. I just can’t tolerate too much working class. They mean well but they are a boring, smelly, noisy, and rough-edged bunch. It is exceedingly rare to even see anyone reading a book in this town. Reading is kind of important like.
Trust me, I know the pressures of working for a living. People only work because they are poor. You can’t begin any projects when you are young because everything meaningful requires money and tools you don’t have. But by the time you are old enough to have what’s needed, there isn’t enough time left to do anything great. I knew early that is what I was up against and that is what influenced me not to plunge into debt and spend my life paying it off. I was not rich at age 40, the cap I’d set for myself.
What eventually happened? I turned 40 short and poor, and soon added fat and old. Then again, this November is ten years since I had a job, and 18 years since I worked for a living. Please, don’t preach to me about the nobility of hard work. I can’t stand that volume of bullshit. I worked just as hard as anybody when I got started, but I wasn’t freaking stupid enough to keep on doing it for a living. Those who think contrary should go find another blog, seriously.
The most productive times of my life have been when I didn’t have a job. That’s why the working class and I don’t mix. When they stop work, they do nothing. They sit there and vegetate. It is disgusting. What is that cute term they use for it? Ah, yes, “relaxing”. How can they relax knowing it starts all over again Monday morning? They bust their backsides and don’t really have that much more of anything than I do—and in most cases they have one hell of a lot less. That makes working a horrendous waste of life. For what? Money? Let me tell you something, I probably have less than half as much money as the people I hang with. I’m the poorest man in my crowd by a huge margin, yet I don’t owe anyone money, we go the same places, and pay our own way. Hard work does not explain any part of it all.
How did we get on this subject? Ah yes, Dunkin. It isn’t all roses for me, there are things I do without. Most of them are petty luxuries and things around the house. When I go out, or travel, I’ll grumble about prices—but I still make the trip. My upper limit for tickets is $20, so I don’t to a lot of concerts or opera. I drive a motorcycle, but it always has gas. I don’t get a haircut as often as I should and my clothes are not a statement. No, I never married, but almost none of my contemporaries ever did either. Mind you, it is not all said and done yet. My hero in that department is that guy who got married at age 71 and had 16 kids. Who was that? Voltaire?
True, I would have to raise the kids on social assistance, but why not? Unlike my parents, I would be right on top of every grant, every bursary, every hand-out, and every free lunch in the country. Why not? I spent my working life paying income taxes for which I never saw a single benefit. Right now, I live on insurance that I paid for, not welfare. I honestly believe my parents had a responsibility that if they could not put me through university as promised, they at least should have shown me how to do it on my own. Instead, they had that attitude if they can’t have anything, neither will you. And darn, I would have made an excellent medical tech of some sort.
Last, I’m reviewing some records from the Crimean peninsula during WWII. This is an area that was not covered in my history classes. I’m finding a significant misrepresentation of the battles that took place. It was not at all as one-sided as the accounts from Germany and the west. The Soviets were demoralized and on the defensive, but they certainly were not defeated. The tone of the military dispatches shows their logistic structures must have been very much intact. One day after the order was issued to reinforce Sebastopol, 40,000 troops were landed by ship. That can’t happen when you are losing the war.
ADDENDUM
And if you think today was boring, here is the evening. The development of a computer programming formula. I heard Wallace’s daughter, Patsie, was a programming genius, but I could not find any of her published work, so I had to figure this one out on my own. Thus, here we have a peek into the brainwork involved in one tiny snippet of computer code, in this case Qbasic.
Here is the equation:
vRadius% = INT(RND*(SQR(((640/2)*(640/2))+((460/2)*(460/2))))+1
The center view is the menu that is presented to the user. They can watch a full selection of all the graphics experiments I’ve done to date by navigating this menu. The screen colors are a bit of a trademark for the robotics club, I call it the “tiger eye” scheme.
The bottom photo shows the imaginary radius I used to figure out what to do. I’d already guessed this distance to be 395 pixels but a good programmer doesn’t expect others to do the same. Those with keen vision and even keener intelligence will notice there is still a tiny black triangle clipped off in the upper left screen. Is my formula wrong? No, I calculated the center dot without allowing for a compulsory Qbasic screen message along the bottom edge of the display.
Now the explanation. I am drawing series of round circles from the center of a rectangular screen. The screen in this instance is 640 pixels by 480 pixels. But Qbasic’s standard end of program message takes up the bottom 20 pixels, so my effective area is 640 x 460. Those two numbers do not have any convenient common factors.
I can’t just draw my radius to the perpendicular edges of the screen, as the circles would stop well short of the corners. To fill the screen, I need the number of pixels to the corners.
If I divide the length and width by half, I would have a rectangle in one quadrant, and that Pythagorus guy said the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the root of the sum of the squares of the adjacent sides. Aha, 640/2 and 460/2 are those sides. Well why not just write 320 and 230? Because, we do not know if the next user will choose the same screen resolution.
Now we have a problem. There is no Qbasic function to calculate squares, so I have to “spell it out”. Here is the square of half the width: ((640/2)*(640/2)). I add that to the square of half the height, and I have the square of the hypotenuse. But I’m after the root of that number, and Qbasic has a function for it, SQR. That gives me the maximum length of a radius that will just fill the screen.
But we are not out of the weeds. I need a random number between zero and that maximum radius. So I put parentheses around it and take a random number and then truncate the decimals to create an integer. However, that means a potential answer of zero, so I add one to the result.
Fun, or what?
