One year ago today: July 14, 2013, camper pod anniversary.
Five years ago today: July 14, 2009
Ten years ago today: July 14, 2004, Apollo 17.
Good news. We have another gig this Friday. That’s milk and cookies this month. And, it’s a repeat. Those are the best gigs you will ever get. Give me four of these per month and a happier bass player will not be found. The mediocre news is the day caught up with me, I was exhausted since dawn. Sorry, gang, I’m not an athlete and despite my vigorously youthful outlook on life (ha, ha) I still need a complete day of down time now and again.
I know it may seem to non-musicians that I’m touchy about stage exposure—but remember, that’s because they are non-musicians. (I'm suggesting a real stage musician would not even question why I feel as I do.) One CANNOT tell or know which element will bring success. I have no bones about the other guy doing his best, but only up to the point where it prevents the others from doing the same. Thus, I’ve learned to play very distinctive riffs during band intro so that editing out anything becomes the more difficult. Yes, I've had my bass lines trimmed before. It really sucks.
My goal today was to get over to BrandSmart but there was a menacing raincloud ten miles high in the sky right over that part of town. So I took the red scooter, now an antique in dog years, on a sixty mile leisurely trip down the backroads of the city. I finally wound up at Harbor Freight, but their truck is a day late and all the good stuff was gone. The front scooter axle is making a slight ticking sound each revolution, but it could just be a pebble in the gears.
Speaking of “Gone”, I’m home with another Kellerthan Johnathman book of the same name. Janathman Kelleron. That guy, the author who always has a psychologist in the plot. It’s a break from reading celestial navigation, but I have a development there. I’ve decided to compose my own form. It amalgamates the various forms I’ve found in the books. It is obvious each navigator is encouraged to make the best of things, so I will follow suit. Except my form will spell out exactly what each field is, does, or comes from. As it stands, the other guy just says fill out the form. Then leaves you to spend an hour figuring out where to look. Um, guys, the very object of a form is to make life easier. Hello?
There is a sample form in y’day’s post. Maybe you glanced at it. I did somewhat more than glance. The form has 87 blank spaces to fill in. It completely lacks any real instructions. Some of the fields which are the results of equations are not even in consecutive positions. The form is complete for one particular simple type of navigation (sight reduction), but it still looks intimidating. The average reader probably could not fill in five of the blanks correctly. In fairness some of the fields indicate the information is found in the almanac. But there are countless different almanacs.
Which is why I stayed put and ate cucumber and fried tomato sandwiches. And drank copious amounts of iced tea and raspberry-ade. Some people like statistics, some just like to read too much into them. So here’s a few for today’s trivia. Cheap or expensive batteries, which I consume by the case lot, have no difference in overall performance. They are all poorly manufactured. I use seven times as many envelopes and stamps as the average American. The average age of my hand tools is eleven years. I have driven a sidecar towing a trailer 8,202 miles more than 99.9% of all Americans. My average life expectancy is another 22.7 years, but I’ll never make it. And I can tell you what I did every single day in the past 8 years and almost every day for the past 10 years.
Here’s an aside to those types who actually like MicroSoft operating systems. You are numbskulls, too stupid, really, to know how bad off you are. You’ve been indoctrinated to accept glitches as “features”, and no matter what the lot of you say, MicroSoft and the computers they work on, at the user end, are not any significantly faster than they were in 1984. MicroSoft still takes ten times too long to boot, their plug-n-play is a standing joke, their registry cannot be self-purged and nobody over in Redmond has the foggiest clue what the “now” part means in “end now”.
And a piece of advice: do not compress every file just because you can. MicroSoft has a terrible set of zip commands that are not compatible with other systems and sometimes not even with their own systems. The defaults in Vista are an example. It can be very difficult for non-Vista users to extract the files. And to the real dunces out there, listen, two-page text documents do not need compressing, okay? Please don’t send me any compressed files unless the original was too big for your e-mail attachment.
In the end, I rewarded myself with a café con leche and a pastelito over at Senor Café. I did not get underway until 5:30PM , it is now just past dark and I am dead weary tired already. I am not ready for the writer’s club meeting tomorrow, either.
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