MORNING
Next I find out it is Columbus Day because the Post Office is closed. Columbus who? I once had a dog named Columbus. “Here Lumby, here Lumby.” So I rustled up Agt. M and we held an impromptu meeting at the breakfast shop. He knows how to use a “flux wire” welder, which apparently eliminates splatter. I know dick-all about welding.
Stopping in at Yosoy (Spanish for “I am”, I think) I finally saw Lucy after, what, three years now. She is looking good and recently single again. No, she is not my type. To me, yoga is an exercise, not a business or near-religion. We a quite divergent on many such issues, but boy, is she in great shape, I mean really.
I’m re-reading my book on early European exploration. There is no place around here to view early maps, so my only source is reproductions in library books. The originals are usually in Europe and show signs of having been worked on over the years. My chances of seeing any first hand are zero but my goal is to ratify the latitudes quoted by the greats. Columbus, Verrazanno, Cartier. Now go tell the Post Office Columbus discovered land on the 10th, not the 13th.
Though still a student, I can already see these men took many sightings and averaged them out. That technique is useful right down to this day. And I can see the confusion for historians. The latitudes are okay, but the maps are lousy.
Modern maps can also be crap, starting with those printed on paper that gets wet. Say, why don’t I try the Rust-oleum spray on some place I’ll never visit, like Alaska? Anyway, the extra time [before I leave] means extra preparation. Travel without GPS, because GPS is most handy if you are a clueless bastard. My next trip will be without the benefit of a device which cannot tell me the name of the next town on the road I’ve been driving for three hours. It says it doesn’t know where I’m going, but sure as hell knows I absolutely must need the address of the most expensive hotel in town once I get there.
NOON
The welder is a go. First, the experiment: the map paper was treated with the Never-Wet spray. I’d classify the waterproof-ness as a success, with limitations. Shown here is the bead of tap water that would normally soak this cheap-ass KappaMap tissue paper now flowing right off New Mexico into the Pacific Ocean off the Queen Charlottes. Paper is not listed as one of the suitable substrates.
No word on how long the coating lasts but overall I’d say the experiment was a success. GPS can GFI until they come out with a product real people can use. I will never forget how GPS got me into that neighborhood in Birmingham. Never.
Back to the welder. Part of the significance is the cPod camper. Now that I have an idea of my requirements, I can streamline. And I don’t need full support under my mattress except when I’m actually sleeping on it. Thus, a fold out camper makes more sense. The full-size camper also takes 15 to 16 miles off each full tank’s cruising radius. I am at around the limit for weight and price for regular small motorcycle tow-trailers. Henceforth, the only thing I can do is make it shorter and lighter.
Money is no longer a factor, as the first two trips saved me four times the cost of the camper in motel fees. That still does not signal extravagance. The wise move says convert my existing frame or convert a $400 cargo trailer. Metal cargo boxes can’t match the comfort of wood and if you can smell the fiberglass, buddy, you are, one way or the other, breathing it. The plan on the books for now is to shorten the tongue on the existing trailer bed to suit a “zipped up” box [size] of 48”, which expands to 84”.
This is not slated to happen until well into December, so it won’t affect what I do this month.
AFTERNOON
I allocated two hours to do some work on the cPod. But, even with home-made projects, there comes a time when all the work is done. It’s just never happened before. Took me a while to recognize the situation, you know. You can see the camper here, with all the hatches open. I’m changing the interior lighting to LED, but there was nothing wrong with what went before.
Be sure to return. Right how, I’m heading up to happy hour at ROK burger with Trent. I haven’t talked to any intelligent people for the past week and I need reassurance they still exist.
Ah, you’re back. Trent and I had a wild time at ROK burger. We walked around the block later to find the entertainment. But essentially, until we get our country duo together, we are it. The whole strip is starved for any material that would set one of those clone clubs apart from the pack. I'm saying that country music in any one of those joints would fit the bill.
Now, I’m only saying this once, so listen up. On the way home I stopped at the old club. They’ve been advertising that “lingerie show”, where basically a few 28-32-ish bar bunnies, convinced they’ve still “got it” wander around the bar in their underwear selling gambling tickets. Wallace would have loved it.
On me, it had zero effect. Except this one lady with whom I did nothing. She was wearing said underwear, which no doubt is dynamite to older men who never got much when it mattered. She told me long ago we had met and I gave her a break. She knew my name and the place, so she was for real. But pretty as she was, I could not place her at all. So I passed on the offer.
It is clear over the years since that incident, she has, ahem, kept herself up. Whoever she is, she’s attractive. But my rule against women in bars stands. If she shows up again with the same demeanor, only then does she get the invite—to meet on neutral territory. I’m nothing if not careful when women say I’m attractive. (I'm about as average-looking a white guy as you can get.)
NIGHT
I’m afraid to report the backlash on my system after Karaoke. This tells me the chore is not just hectic but also stressful. I may take one more look at a computerized Karaoke system. Face it, I took on too much and now I can’t move for a few days. I took the time to read up on Gerald Bull, the Canuck who designed the super-gun that got him killed by the Mossad when he tried to sell it to Saddam.
The Germans had such a gun in 1918 and technically, anybody could build one. You must make the barrel long enough and strong enough. That’s it. Firing a shell 112 miles is a far cry from putting a useful but fragile satellite into a proper orbit. This type of gun is not to be confused with a “pump” gun that attempts to fire additional propellant charges as the shell moves up the barrel.
The enormous pressures involved in a super-gun wash out the insides of the barrel after each shot. The German model had numbered shells that had to be fired in sequence and after twenty shots the barrel had to be returned to the factory for re-lining.
ADDENDUM
Sometimes you have to wonder. One should not have to enroll in an evening course to find out why Windows 8.1 cancels its own print queue. But one thing that still gets me all the way from the 1980s is the people who call themselves computer literate or power users. You are neither when all you have is an iPad. No scanner, no printer, no keyboard. You are neither when you have to clear a space on your kitchen table every time I ask you to get some work done. And you are neither if you think MicroSoft products keep getting better every year.
Then there is the other extreme, the university types who insist on “open source” products. They seem to use the term instead of “free software”, but watch, they try to cover by saying they need access to the code “in case they don’t like something”. Right. I got a university room full of those people. When the situation calls for writing code, they all try to download something and modify it. I have yet to see even one Gen Y twerp successfully carry that off.
On a scale of one to ten, I rate myself around five as a user. Because I don’t know how to program anything that works on the Internet and I can’t find any reliable person to teach me. The books and teachers out there are useless. I can install Apache, PHP, Java, and fifteen other programs, but nobody will tell or show me how to put them all together and make them work on the Internet. Hence, I am a five.
The strange part is, I’ve asked dozens of people over the years who claimed they know how networks are set up. But then they start drawing stupid little diagrams that I’ve seen countless times. When I tell them no, show me how a port works, they either clam up or disappear. That’s what I’m talking about. Never in my life have I met anyone who can teach this subject properly. The so-called teachers that I’ve met are both stupid and deaf.
