MORNING
For me, it was one of those days from the moment I woke. Every little thing going wrong. What? You want an example? Okay, I open my jam jar and set it on the counter. Except I set it on the edge of my plate and it starts to tip. So I reach down and grab it and zunk, in goes my thumb into the jam. Sure, it is nothing, but add ‘em up, and that was my morning. All I could do was go to the bakery and have me a little treat, shown here. It’s like custard, which I don’t normally favor. Now there's some first world problems for you.
Or how about that fake Cuban doctor in Orlando? The article doesn’t say how they could even tell [he was a fake]. And Goldie Hawn (she’s still around?) was seen wearing an orange sarong over her bathing suit. Okay, who peeked? And why? She’s like, 70. Or the pope donating “three showers and a free barber” to the homeless around the Vatican. Isn’t that so sweet, the church doing what it is supposed to? Now, do they mean three showers or do they actually mean three showers? When dealing with popes and penguins, it is always wisest to ask first.
There is a problem with my newly-built disk sander. It is far too fast and powerful for my needs. Robot parts generally don’t have to be sanded except to a snug fit. The device as I built it would polish metal. What I need is just a revolving disk that will smooth and shape rough cuts from the scroll saw. This must be the learning curve we hear about so often.
Speaking of learning, music rehearsal last evening is uncovering some elements that have been absent in my other Florida bands. Foremost is that in a properly formed duo, it is unusually difficult to practice one’s part in isolation. Is that clear? Of course not, so I’ll briefly explain. For duo presentation, I’ve written how the instruments must be arranged to capture the essential elements of the original, and for that, sometimes what is played does not much resemble the “part” in a larger band.
That's why I fire lead players. Their inability to adapt to duo playing is a defect that plagues, so far, 100% of all guitar players I’ve met east of the Mississippi. But back to rehearsal, it is often necessary to have both musicians here before a given passage can be tested to see if it “captures” the motif. It will always work if I make a backing tract, but for musical diversity, you need the other guy playing his own style to fit the pieces together. Overall, for the audience, it provides a much richer listening environment. I am quite used to the “how-did-you-do-that” stare. The trick this time is to make it standard.
NOON
"It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich." –Alan Alda.
Today the government announced record employment statistics, happy times are here again. One wonders how much more of this good news we Americans can stand. In an unrelated report, JC Penny closed 40 stores and laid off 2,250 people. Then y’day, RadioShack went bye-bye, gone at 93. Here’s a picture that some people take a while to figure out. Don’t look at me, I never spoke a single word of Spanish before I was thirty. Yep, time to book that flight to Mars.
North Korea has repeated offered to stop testing certain weapons if the US and its allies will stop these provocative exercises. The North Koreans have been totally snubbed. Say, doesn’t this scenario have a familiar ring to it? What was the name of that other leader we gave the same treatment? Aw, it’s probably nothing.
In better news, the never-was-all-that-funny Mel Brooks has announced a sequel to “Spaceballs”, called “Spaceballs: The Search For More Money”. Let me count on my fingers, that’s 28 years interval. Then again, I’m so old I can talk about how I walked a mile to school every day. Well, until the eleventh grade, when we moved across the street from the place. I’m so old I can remember when cast iron frying pans were designed so the handle never got hot. It was a sort of hollow tube and you could hold it without a mitt.
NIGHT
What else is blog-worthy today? The government wants to make the Internet another utility, a move meant to skirt the net neutrality issue. If they succeed, within a matter of months, expect to require a social security number to go on-line. Some folks are making a big stink about states “banning the Tesla”, but in reality, it isn’t the car. It’s a messy scenario of car dealerships supporting laws that ban factories from selling direct to customers. I’m for Tesla, because I view car dealerships as despicable operations who need their asses kicked.
But here, take a look at a declassified document for yourself. This is a report on Iraqi navy weapons from the late 1990s. You can see it is dry reading unless you have wholesome interest in such research. It would be more sensible for most to just look the pictures in the National Archives. And I’m not going to begin to even try to tell you how to sift through that for the good stuff. Like this blog, the biggest part of it is not yet electronic.
For example, this picture is the Lop Nor nuclear test tower in the Western Chinese desert. Pictures don’t demand as much prior knowledge of military terms and situational awareness. British records are easier as newslinks like Daily Mail often, if you scroll down far enough, publish original documents. Here’s your trivia. The most popular declassified Brit site? The military UFO files between 2008 and 2013 when they shut down the department, explaining that abductions were illegal and therefore a civilian police matter. Seriously.
ADDENDUM
Today I found out what a “canary warrant” is. This is news to me, so you get what I know on the topic. This is where a party puts up a sign declaring it has not been subject to a government investigation that comes with a gag order. Got it? Neither did I, at first. But take the famous example of Apple computers, who on November 15, 2013, published a statement that they had never had to reveal customer private information under the Patriot Act.
The way it works is, if Apple ever takes down the notice, you will know that customer privacy has been compromised. Ah, some might say, but taking down the notice is the same as disobeying a gag order. Not so. While freedom of speech laws are subject to gag orders, the law cannot compel you to lie. According to Wiki, such lawyers who have been interviewed say on-line canary warrants won’t work.
Still, now that the rest of the world has caught up to the privacy concerns I’ve expressed since 1985, you might want to look at the offerings of Spider Oak, bearing in mind that in the big picture, it is NEVER a good idea to keep really private information in somebody else’s hands.
So that you know, these “secure” cloud servers claim to be “zero-knowledge”, meaning the data is stored and transferred in a coded format that originates on your home system. Sure. Thus, the outsiders never have anything but encrypted data. However, anyone with a brain can see that this is far from a private system, since it has to know enough about you to let you access your own data, coded or not. It is then a simple matter to track you down and serve you, not with a search warrant, but with a court order to hand over a plain text copy of your data.
See the Catch-22? With the warrant you can plead the Fifth. But if you balk at the court order, you are [semi-automatically] guilty of a felony. And since it is only a copy they are after, they don’t have to bother with piddly-ass things like your Constitutional rights. So follow your mother’s advice—always have a cover story as to why you can’t remember your own password. Don’t outright refuse to fork over the password because that has now become illegal. Take a lesson from others who were forced to protect themselves: claim the gun went off by itself while you were holding it.
What I would like to see is a hard-drive that has a secondary password. If you are ever blackmailed into making a copy, you type in this secondary password that “accidentally” scrambles the drive. You have to protect yourself BEFORE they get into your private affairs. They know the public will never side with a convict, so the word is BEFORE. This area of “law” was devised by penguins. Conniving penguins. Always remember that.
Last Laugh
She's okay, sort of. I've done better.
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