One year ago today: June 16, 2013, bass ukulele?
Five years ago today: June 16, 2009, another regular day.
Ten years ago today: June 16, 2004, take a peek.
Here's a quote from my email: "I have a dream. That one day I’ll meet a guitar player who admits I’m better on bass than he is on lead." Then we can be friends. You see, most people quote blogs in their e-mail, so I thought I'd break the rules and do the opposite. I'm a daredevil kind of guy when it comes to convention. I was within an ace of taking a tip to Miami to visit this morning but it was a cool day, meaning I had to do my chasing around. Plus cook up enough snacks for the next week. You never know when it will be below 90 in the kitchen again. You know what they say. If you can’t stand the heat, you’re not in McMurdo or McMurray.
Trust me. The price of bizcards is the most exciting event that happened in Broward today. All that you heard otherwise was smoke and mirrors designed to pocket your dollar.
I’ve decided not to write anything for this week’s writer’s meeting. I’m observer status only, looking if any of the current writers actually take any of the advice the others give. That won’t be too hard, for as it stands, some of their plots are really hard to follow. Well, not the plot, but who is saying what. I think I figured out the reason most stories rarely have more than two people talking at a time. And this time, I’m taking a mini-coffee break half way. Those people never take breaks.
A friend asked me if I could photoshop a picture, so I took a look. I guess the answer is no. I would have to create one of those pictures with a clear background, or make that a transparent background. I dig the process, but could not find any one single command that would do it. Instead I got reams of directions on layering, magic wands, and “free trials” that wanted a $99 registration fee. (How’s that for the latest generation of born liars? It’s “free”, but if you don’t want it, you have to apply for a refund. I remember when America had laws against lying.)
Mind you, the lack of this single-button command is significant. The transparency feature was common twenty years ago, but this situation exposes how the Internet’s appeal to stupidity has stalled computer development. The incentive to research computer construction has been taken out of the hands of scientists and given to the peasants. In all years since 1991, nobody has developed an easy-to-use transparency command. Why not? Because the big money’s not in it anymore.
You see, there is less money to be made in innovative computer advancements than in cooking up idiotic apps to foist on the next crop of mouth-breathers. The death knell of the computer as a continually improving tool was the Internet. There will still be breakthroughs but the incentive to do so was gone the minute the factories realized that stupid people only have computers so they can bullshit with other stupid people who have computers. It’s called social networking, some call it Facebook.
And stupid people pwn the world in the same sense that the ants pwn Leiningen. By the way, that link is an interesting site. For those who have never seen the words “proclivities”, “nonce”, “intemperate”, and “taboret”, used in a sentence, read Paul’s Case. Psst, that’s you, Glen. I think you must have missed it in the assigned reading when you got your phantom Bachelor of Arts. You know, I think that’s the degree that they used to model transparency—nobody has ever seen it.
Warning, stay away from products by Freemake, in particular, their video converter. It does not do the job right and when you uninstall the product, it leaves 1,295 spyware links in your system registry. I had the patience to go in and delete them one by one in Safe Mode. Do you? I cannot figure out how Freemake isn’t absolutely blacklisted for this irresponsible behavior. Freemake, you suck the big green hemorrhoid.
And as for you people who complain that people pirate your music—don’t post it on the Internet. Or change something about it so people don’t get the version they want to buy. But have the decency to tell people about the version before they listen to it. Not after, like some MicroSoft or Google dork.
Back in February when the band swapped out the PA system, who recalls my observation that the new settings were heavier in the mid-range, where they clashed with the upper bass notes I normally play? They finally noticed it today. Since this band does not take any advice from lowly bass players, we can assume they will not correct the PA.
At least they don’t do it for the reason other bands crank the midrange, which is to try and get a full sound when the bass player isn’t there. It also serves to discourage the bassists from playing the upper notes, which is usually what guitar players think bass players are supposed to do anyway. Sigh, this band would have been working a year ago if only they’d do what I tell them to do. The problem appears to be that their last bass player burned them really badly. And I get the backlash.
Allow me to assure most readers that you are not being left behind by a wave of new computer applications. You are not. Most computer development in the past decade has been retrograde. Look at texting. That is a step back into the past. Same with Facebook, which for the idiots of the world has replaced the telephone as the addictive gossip machine. The cloud is just the next trap for fools. Trust me, there is nothing a pimple-faced dork knows about computers that you don’t. He merely has the time to waste figuring out some equally nerd-based application. I’ll say it again. I have not yet ever seen a totally new concept on the computer since 1981.
PS: it is not really a bass ukulele. It is being marketed as a regular bass. If you connect it to the right equipment, it is possible to get a full bass sound out of this contraption. But at that time I was looking for an acoustic bass, not something I'd still have to amplify. So it is neither a bass nor a ukuele.
ADDENDUM
My sextant is a bit overkill for the beginner. It has a micrometer drum vernier that needs to be set to zero, at least I notice that so far. The good news is this means the reading is not estimated, you read it directly off the drum. In degrees, minutes, and 2/10ths of minutes. More than what we need. The main entrance security lamp is 14° 55.8’ off the seat of my red scooter, this reading is called an “altitude” and it is expressed in degrees. This sextants maximum precision is 2/10ths of one degree, which the literature states is an accurate fineness.
This sextant is the most recent technology called a beam converger. This means instead of the horizon appearing in only half the viewport, it extends across the entire diameter. This is accomplished by replacing the half-silvered mirror with a “dielectric”. It is a slab of glass that has no effect in bright sunlight but a dusk it turns the star slightly blue and the horizon slightly orange. At this time, I am unable to interpret star readings. Only the sun, only at noon.
At this stage I am reading what I can about declination, the latitude the of the sun, which is different from the altitude of the sun measured by the sextant. I know if five days, the sun will be 23-1/2° above the equator, while I will measure it at nearly overhead. That’s the difference between declination and altitude, and I’m having a whale of a time wrapping my head around the concept.
I now understand the arithmetic for calculating latitude and longitude, but have not yet actually done so. This means I can follow the examples given and understand each step. Alas, each set of explanations has its own method and sometimes these seem at odds. And I’ve learned that determining position and the ways of star observations are two separate subjects, or at least that they can be studied that way. Astronomers could cover the identical material without any consciousness of finding a location on the Earth.
Also, there is a time correction because the sun does not move in an exactly circle. Called the equation of time, it is read off a table that lists a correction factor for each day of the year. Today’s correction is 06’. Here is my first sextant readings where I applied the various formulas and table values to arrive at an unknown figure, but with terrific accuracy.
It takes a little practice to get used to decimal degrees, but my final figure here is 76° 20.8’ N. Say “seventy-six degrees twenty point eight minutes north”. Since I measured the sun around 9:26 AM, I interpret this result to mean that if I had measured the sun at noon and got the same degrees, I would be standing at latitude 76° 20.8’ north, which would put me somewhere in the east of the Queen Elizabeth islands of northern Canada.
This makes sense, because the closer you get to the poles, the closer to 90° you will see the sun. And 76° is getting up there. Caution to the reader, this entire calculation was an exercise and for all I know could be totally wrong. But hey, I know all the remaining fun I’m going to have in this life has to take place in the next 60 months, so let me have fun my own way.
