One year ago today: September 20, 2013, the Talent Farm.
Five years ago today: September 20, 2009, bass-fest.
Ten years ago today: September 20, 2004, Bridgette Bardot.
We are just going to have to stand by for a bit, folks. Thanks to Windows 8.1, it turns out most of what I do to give this blog it's consistent look and feel won't work with the new opsys. Or in the alternative, takes five times as many keystrokes to even find the command button. Also, the Internet log-on system with 8.1 is not compatible with my security features, so that will take even more time. I hate Microsoft, you know. Once again, most of the work will remain on my older non-Internet XP equipment and transferred here for final upload. But that's what happens when Microsoft decides what is best for you.
And that is what I want. A unit that works like a web site, but free because it is nothing but another Internet connection to a location I own and control. As usual, everyone I've asked about this will at first say that is how the cloud works, but then wander off topic. Let me spell it out. I want a home base for this blog that keeps my files here and not on the Google server. I want software resident on my device that allows anyone in the world access to the files I place on it. (A word to the wise is that you never put anything on any networked computer that you do not want the world to see.) The visitor would access browser software on my home cloud device that displays the blog on his monitor. And that, whether it exists or not, is information I can't seem to get anyone to explain to me in plain English.
The cloud concept is not new at all, just a re-tweaking of the old distributed computer idea. The reality is, nothing really, really new has been invented in the computer field for around twenty years. That includes the new Apple offerings. Computers have gone retrograde and are now slowly returning to size with "new" tablet inventions like, duh, a keyboard. You know why they have smart phones? Because most people who use them aren't very.
Still no camera. It has become impossible to find an ordinary $30 digital camera in Florida that just takes "Internet" jpegs. They keep packing on megapixels and advanced features until the cheapest units that work cost twice that. And I've recently thrown out Vivitar, Canon, Kodak, Nikon, and Panasonic cameras, many $$$$ worth because they are all junk. Most common faults? Any combination of the following:
They eat batteries.
Require special chargers or cables.
Slow to bring into action.
Not rugged enough for everyday use.
Software clobbers your existing system.
No viewfinder.
Confusing one-way navigation menus.
No settings memory.
No 640 x 480 100 dpi (Internet) setting.
Please wait until the glitches are ironed out of Win 8.1 and things will thereafter return to as normal as allowed by the Microsoft brainiacs. That company makes me appreciate the motto of Hackers. It goes, "Don't tell me what to do."
MORNING
I didn’t take me long to research the market back up to date. All my rock band buddies report extreme slow times. But my two country music contacts say, while times are not great, they are working. And Silver Wings have played every weekend in living memory.
Like most extraterrestrial objects that pose a threat to mankind, it set down near a major American city, causing a lot of power outages and calling out the National Guard. And lights so bright you had to shield your eyes. Was it Jules Verne or H.G. Wells where the human spirit wins out against all odds, that is, all odds of Generation Y coming up with an original theme. The aliens fall in love with a divorcee slash widow. The evil government agent does a one-eighty. And mankind is again redeemed until next movie season.
A blinding rainstorm caught half the neighborhood in the market for an hour. I was about to take up a collection and get coffee and who should I run into but Spike. This guy is a blues bass player, so much of a specialist you can tell when he tries to play anything else. He knows everybody in the music business. His day job is in air conditioners, but he’s been on the music circuit for 35 years. He confirms the surplus of musicians over the last few months is due to breakups of the local band establishment.
And he reports that no, he has never heard of my last band or any of the players except the keyboardist. This is what I thought would eventually happen. An oversupply of rock and blues bands that nobody will drive even five miles to see. It isn’t entertainment enough to draw a long-distance crowd because all said bands present the same material and sound as the juke box.
Still no word back from the country band. But I talked to the guy and he seems to know you can’t have a no-star band. That’s one of the reasons I’m pushing for country music is because it seems to be the one non-concert venues that people will still drive across town to see. Most locals go to the same weekend bar no matter who is playing there. That’s why I know ten followers would make a huge difference, to the club management at least. But the last five places I’ve played have not seen a new fact since the flood.
Have you used Office Pro 2011? It’s another piece of MicroSoft junk. Again, no cell borders, the format cell command is hidden in a right-click menu, and the tabs drop a menu that covers the first three rows of your work, total duh. All in Calibri 11. The world will be a happier place when MicroSoft is dead and gone. They’ve held back progress for 40 years by not letting decent software developers have a chance.
But top awards for ignorance has to be the Einstein who turned off the spreadsheet gridlines. I know there is a way to get them back, all you have to do is stop working and go look it up. Very kind of MicroSoft to make it so easy. I mean, what do morons need gridlines for anyway? Another change I like is the way they finally changed the word processor to display two spaces after a sentence period. Except now it looks funny for those of us that learned to type properly. I cannot find any way to fix this setting.
NOON
Another piece of the navigation puzzle put together. It took a while now to figure it out, but there are two sets of Sight Reduction tables, that’s two ways to get the final results. The difficulty is all the brilliant teaching texts and tutorials fall into one or the other without explaining there is a difference. Nice guys that they are. The situation is too complicated to explain, but I’ll give you the overview as I’ve learned so far. That’s why many of you are here, after all.
The two tables are called “concise” and “HO229”. Both have their merits and there may be other tables I don’t yet have a clue about. But the odds are, once you’ve corrected all your observations, which is fun, you will look up your “plotting information” in one of those two tables. A few days back, some of you may recall I was stumbling over a value that mystified me. All of this explanation involves that same mystery value, called “little d”. I’ll make this as easy as I can.
The almanac contains pre-calculated positions of objects in the sky but only at nice even hours. And the sun moves fastest east to west. Therefore, unless you are nimble enough to take your sextant reading bang on the hour, you need to allow for the minutes and seconds after the hour. Logic, see? The sun moves 360° in 24 hours, thus it moves 15 nautical miles per minute westward. These are contained in a table called “increments and corrections”.
Since I could not for the life of me understand the explanations, I sat down and thumbed through that table until I spotted a pattern. Ah, there’s your “little d”. Although the sun does move north and south with the seasons, the declination (it is called) is measured as an imaginary line parallel to the equator, and that line is east and west. Got it.
I know it seems backwards, but that’s how it goes. Although you measure the angle of the sun along a north-south axis, the result is a position along an east-west path as it moves. Don’t worry that it doesn’t make sense, just be aware that the tables often provide this kind of indirect information, opposite to what you are expecting. It is me that got confused about what was going on, and man, was I confused. You see, I had inadvertently learned to use both the concise and HO229 tables before it hit me the two were not compatible.
Tomorrow, since I now have my Sundays back, I will design a form that uses both methods. I’ll use them to crosscheck for accuracy until I have both down absolutely pat. If you recall, I have not been plotting any charts. That’s the fun part, but it is futile until you ace the arithmetic. I predict within a week, I’ll finally be plotting. So much for a one-month projects. But damn, I’ll never be lost again.
EVENING
Another sell-out show. It’s a small room, but still “packed to the rafters”. All evening, my left arm, on the inside, near my chest, gave me trouble. The show went on. But then I get home and it was a burr, from the yard. Thar it be, wedged into the material of my shirtsleeve so I could not see it, dyed blue from running dye during laundry. Don’t laugh. Possibly, in the long history of bingo, has anyone suffered so much for the game.
I left immediately split after to head over to Karaoke. Disappointment. Not only was the [Karaoke] system down, the usual following was not there. True, I have not been frequenting the place, but losing a following is always a serious development. I waited and had my customary hot chocolate (it is all chemicals but so is beer) but left in an hour. The CompuHost program that runs the Karaoke was plainly not working. Something is wrong over there though I don’t know what.
Here’s something sad. That lady, the one who had the foot operation, who used to hang out at the club was a Karaoke. She is really nice but just so totally not my type. I like her and all but she doesn’t hold my interest. I bought her a few drinks but I could tell she was not even used to being around a man who wasn’t trying to jump her bones. I felt I might be sending the wrong message.
I went home and watched the movie “Push”. Other than a couple of white guys that spoke flawless Cantonese, the movie has nothing you haven’t seen before. It does break the Hollywood taboo about showing a young teen female with an older man, but in this case it seems they did it to save money. The plot, such as it is, gets hard to follow at times.
ADDENDUM
Nova meets up in six days and the inverted WAV file for the DrawBot was not a success. The good news is this is the kind of deadline that I prefer. If it can be made to work, it will likely be in the next few days. I can tell by watching the needle if there is any improvement and can now easily generate any file. I've already spotted that adding a third servo would create a poor man's 3D printer.
I wrote an e-mail to Trent concerning bass. Like many, he has told me I am good enough to play guitar, but I think I have a mental block on that. I've failed at it maybe fifteen times already, my own music to me sounds amateurish. But yes, I've played many a party and impromptu set. Now, when Trent says something, you know it is worth listening to. I have a long history of paying attention to educated people. My family can additionally confirm the opposite. Wait, there's more.
This got me to thinking. Trent know how to pick along, what I call a "lilting riff". I got to thinking, might he not make a bass player. We reverse the roles, he plays bass, I play rhythm. And we invert our WAV output, you could make the joke except I already did. While most people could learn the bass notes, they can't make the instrument "come alive". If anyone could be taught the technique, it would be Trent. You know the best thing about knowing smart people? You only have to say everything once.
Don't find too much irony here. The smallest group is two and that has enough drama to repel most people. My last band was working class, which turned any hint of higher ideals into confrontation. I want the band to play music that "sells", they want to play their "teenage band fantasy songs", and refuse to accept that is a valid interpretation of what their list looks like. Trent has no objections to any music that "makes 'em happy".
When I say I wrote an e-mail, I point out to the world that my e-mails are composed to MLA standards. I never fire off a memo. Each missive is typeset and proofread. Punctuation is perfect, which does not mean I am perfect, it means I didn't make any mistakes. And I didn't. Sadly, this blog is too extensive for me to apply the same rules. But Ken, at least I try, where there is a spelling or punctuation error in every sentence you write. Same with those who use the phrase "grammar police".
[Author's note 2015-09-20: this term "grammar police" evolved into the term "grammar nazi". Whenever I am called that, I tell the accuser that he is just letting me know what side of the intellectual barbed wire he is on.]
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