May 8, 2015

Yesteryear
One year ago today: May 8, 2014, another work day.
Five years ago today: May 8, 2010, a day at the old shop.
Six years ago today: May 8, 2009, I hack the hackers.

MORNING
           It is nearly noon and I cannot use my printer. People wonder why I don’t like MicroSoft. All I did was change the ink cartridge and the computer jammed up so badly I had to reboot it. No, it is not the printer, I’ve had my Canon for years. The computer then went into this update mode that I had specifically turned off. Two hours later it (Windows) is still crawling along at 18%, there is no convenient way to disable this unwanted “update” rubbish.

           This picture and others similar are results of my search on pedal pubs. They are included here for diversion, as there isn’t much else going on while I’m hitting the books. A century ago, monorail was the rage and overhead was considered the prime solution to congestion at street level. Seems to me that on a bicycle that follows a track, you would still be stuck in rush hour.
           In the end, I had to rig up an external disk reader, reinstall the Canon drivers, and since I had a deadline to meet, drove downtown to use another printer. Back home, Win 8.1 promptly jammed in “not connected to Store” on-screen message and refuses to load my printer driver. Then it locked on the wrong size envelope, then locked on that sick Calibri font. (FYI one of the traditional security measures in my organization is to check for a certain font before opening any envelope. It is no longer in effect, but serves as example of how inconsiderate MicroSoft can be when they make unilateral changes.)
           Six hours and five minutes. That’s how long it took, in the end, to get my printer working again with Win 8.1. The entire problem was MicroSoft defaults. There are two consolations here. First, these Millennials obviously don’t know all their bullshit is going to come back to haunt them. Two, imagine how ticked off I’d be if I’d ever actually bought any MicroSoft products. Now I will publish, anonymously of course, another round of instructions on how to shaft the Redmond bastards. This was supposed to be my day off.

NOON
           “The major faults you have today are exactly the ones you were warned about as a child.” --Me. I said that. Bass player wisdom.

           Am I jinxed today? Just after I made a decision to not buy this year, six candidate properties came on the market. One made it to inspection stage, see photo. However it was less than a mile from a project, so that is a no-way. I prefer a community setting with a small HOA with one road in an out of the division. I may look at a couple of the others if they are still on the market in another month. Waiting in the Florida summertime drops prices faster than hours of negotiation.

           The photo shows some very nice furniture and it was the real thing. They were willing to drop the price $10,000 to keep the furniture but I would have bought it. However, that project was not only walking distance, it was on the direct path to another bad neighborhood near downtown southside.
           This tuckered me out so I watched some documentaries on Mars probes. Mistake. They were that new NASA format for Dummies. Where over half the video is about their personal triumphs and hardships, as if anybody but an equally sucky bureaucrat would give a damn. I might be just me, but does anyone really care how early in the morning some NASA flunky has to wake up to get to work on time? NASA has also taken to posting the identical video under dozens of different titles. The bastard-rat mentality of the Internet.
           NASA has gone downhill on a huge scale. I never remember the guy who planned the Mars mission for 1/10th the cost and got blacklisted by NASA, who only wants projects that cost a lot, use their pet technologies, and are never funded longer than two elections. What’s that guy’s name? The one who designed Mars Direct, where they send a capsule years in advance to manufacture the fuel for the return trip.

EVENING
           Like many musicians on a Friday, I had to play even though I’ve got nothing on the table. So I zipped to the beach and walked along to find nobody. So I rolled into the Walkabout to listen to Wayne. Well, be danged, it turns out he has never played with a bassist before. For acoustic, that is rare. I know the problem well, when you get a “studio” musician, they want to play the song exactly the same way every time--and he has been avoiding that. Have I not just spent years looking for a guitar like that? All of a sudden, I am very interested.
           He’s got a jam session this Sunday and I already know more than half his list. It’s impossible to predict a guitar player’s reaction, since it normally takes a week or two before they clue in what I’m doing. However, if he’s only heard studio bass, he is about to be astounded to find out how easy his guitar parts are about to become. What an unlikely encounter, since I’ve always assumed he must have had a bass player and decided not to pursue that. Nope, he says never, even to jam.
           While I don’t know this guitar player all that well, I know the situation in spades. Fortune is about to smile on the guy, since he doesn’t know I can play most of the passages he has been chording through. No picture, I’m turning in early.


Last Laugh

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