September 7, 2015

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 7, 2014, West Palm Beach.
Five years ago today: September 7, 2010, no pacemaker.
Six years ago today: September 7, 2009, duct tape vs. skin tags.
MORNING
           Food. Time to mention food. Here you go, tomato potato chicken bake. Just about ready to go in the oven—but I only get half. We are still on a diet over here, what, eleven years now. What? Oh, that’s garlic sauce. They say it is salad dressing, but they don’t know, they don't know. It’s for everything. We are allowed as many spices as you want. So don’t skimp on the sauce.

           Today I met the longest serving Radio Shack manager. Been there for 24 years. However, if that is tops, I’m glad I never went that route. You did know they tried to recruit me back in the 80s. But the pay was so dreadfully low I never considered it. About half what I was already earning in my career. Coincidentally, he was at the store to replace the second-longest employee, that Portuguese lady who finally retired after 21 years.
           She was the smart one. She packed up and left back to Europe. She owned a house in some fancy area that she bought for something like $7200 and now it is worth a fortune. She was a nice lady, but like all the Portuguese I’ve met, a bit on the boring side. Yea? Well now she’s living on the seacoast with an American income. And I’m looking for a mobile home out near Naples or something. Of course, I’ve never worked 21 years in my life, total, so I have to take a few trade-offs.
           I see I’ve got some readers in Madagascar. They have Internet in Madagascar? Just kidding, I’ve followed the history and current events (non-political) of that country for most of my life. And I’m glad to see those hits. And my second largest following is still, for reasons I don’t fathom, from the Ukraine. They have Internet in Ukraine? Just kidding. I can count to ten in Ukrainian.
           Trivia. The equivalent of more than ¼ of the Earth’s entire population has flown on a Boeing 747. That’s about 1.5 billion passengers—and I was one of the first. Out of Vancouver, Canada, on New Year’s Eve, 1973. I had been meeting the parents of my lady and those parents had one thing on their minds. Marriage. Now. No finishing university or anything like that. And it was a rich family, but to this day, I don’t regret walking away from it. Well, flying away.

NOON
           Dang rain, how did it know I needed to work on the scooter? I finally gave up on the years of messing around with the poor electronics on those Chinese machines. Shown here, I have replace the headlamp filament bulb with a quartz halogen unit from this century. The Chinese bulbs were a hard to find copy, cost around $12 each, and lasted six or eight months maximum.

           I don’t know if you can see it well, but that is a wooden ring that fits the bulb socket with three adjusting screws to gimbal the lamp. The bright blue connecting clips tap off the existing wiring.            Of course it is wood. That’s the only material my robot shop is equipped to fabricate.
           It’s my own design and makes the bulb a little trickier to replace, as the bulb and socket are only as a unit. But that unit is $3 cheaper than the Chinese bulb alone and I can get a replacement at any AutoZone. The ring is designed to accept a universal flanged holder that I have to drill press.
           The hope is that the quartz lamp will last so much longer and be of superior durability that I won’t be tearing the dash off the scooter twice a year to get at the headlight. As shown here, it basically must be completely dismantled to effect the repair.
           The screws you can see that are not seated are on purpose. They are actually alignment screws since the headlights on these Chinese scoots get thrown off aim every time you replace the bulb. That could be because the factory bulbs could slightly wiggle in the mounting. My wooden ring is not going to move around unless you force it to. I tested the wood and it does not get as hot as metal, but I still bothered to drill press an extra vent hole (dorsal).

EVENING
           There is your triva. Ship pollution. Apparently all the controls and limits on other forms of transport don’t apply to ships. Some say the 16 largest cargo ships, the megacontainer types, vomit out as much sulphur into the air as all the cars in the world combined. Apparently this is because they burn the lowest and dirtiest grades of diesel oil.

           I handily won a bet and got myself free coffee and a reduced fat blueberry muffin. Or at least it tasted like blueberry. The bet was a shoo-in. I don’t care if zillions of people like and use Android, it is not an interface for getting anything done. So the contest was who could find things faster, and Android user, or me on a regular laptop. The bet was because the Androids said they were faster and I only thought otherwise because I had not taken the time to learn the system. Nonsense.
           I learned it and I don’t like it because it takes so long to get anything done. And it produces predictable excuses from the users. They are still swiping and pinching at their screens long after I have found what I’m looking for. I counted these screen touches, when one guy lost his place, it took him 15 or 16 taps just to get back to where he was—and he still claimed it was faster “if he hadn’t got lost”. I never got lost.
           Understandably, I have a slight advantage over these Millennials, in that I have a pretty good idea how long things are supposed to take. And that’s why I mentioned excuses. These Android types have all kinds of excuses for why everything takes so long. Usually, it’s something like “you don’t know what I’m doing” as if anything more than twenty years old, including knowledge, is out of date. Well, he was right, I didn’t know what he was doing—but neither did he. However, he was supposed to be racing me, and he failed miserably at that.
           This went on for a fun half hour, during which I was able to prove time and again that I could locate and accomplish things around five times faster than Android users—except screenfuls of useless app advertisements, which I don’t even look at. So I savored that coffee. It always tastes better when it’s free. They even had a built-in excuse for that, saying it is because I was familiar with Windows. More nonsense, these people spend far more time with Android than I do with Windows on my best day.
           I pointed out that I knew none of them had blogs. How do I know that? Because I typed this entire days entry in the time they were still flicking around trying to find the punctuation marks on their screenboards. I noticed they could not even consistently go back to a certain symbol like the asterisk twice in a row without getting lost and having to swipe several times to find it again.
           I was truly amazed to watch these so-called “Android experts” again and again swiping, poking, sliding, pinching, and splaying to get the simplest things done, while deriding anybody who doesn’t as behind the times. You might say, “Out of touch”, little joke there. I noticed this type of “MicroSoft-think” when Windows 98 came out. Oh, it’s easy they’d keep claimin, you just have to do this, then this, then that, then this and that.
           And they call it progress? Anyone who thinks text messaging is something new should have to explain how so. Because they also don’t know the difference between old-fashioned and difficult to fool. Tell me again how tweeting is an advance?
           Text messaging: the hipster's answer to drunk driving.


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