One year ago today: March 10,2015, mmmm, Russian cookies.
Five years ago today: March 10, 2011, poor man's Segway.
Nine years ago today: March 10, 2007, vicious rumors, I say.
Random years ago today: March 10, 2010, meanwhile, in the Keys . . .
This is the inside of Tom Jones’ sitting room. It is for sale in England, if you’ve got $4.7 million, which is less than house prices in Vancouver, Canada. Except there it will get you nothing but a WWI fixer-upper in the east end. There is a country headed for a world class implosion any time now. Prices are soaring because everybody is spending borrowed money. Hoping to be the one left holding something when the market collapses. Where have we seen this before? And recently, too.
This would have been the ultimate party house of the 60s. That was the best time ever to grow up in America, provided you had an every half-decent family. The colleges were full of newly-liberated blonde virgin farm girls and the queers were all in the closet where they belonged. There was no AIDS to worry about, and regardless of what the authorities kept harping, VD was something only the worst sort of people had to contend with. You see, long before AIDS came along, there were Liberals plugging the angle that everybody was just as susceptible to gross sexual diseases as the worst degenerates in town--therefore you should accept the degenerates as your equals. It's an old Liberal theme.
I only caught the tail end of this, I didn’t even get into college until the 70s, but essentially the climate was the same. As I’ve said, it was a great time and a great generation with some real accomplishments to hand back to the world. Not this new “great generation” who don’t seem to have accomplished a thing, really. But they could start by voting in Trump, not because he is right, but because even if he is wrong, he will smash up the evil done by five generations of Liberal excess.
So yeah, I kind of liked the sixties, probably because I was right on top of it. Young, blue-eyed, blonde, playing in a band, and totally anti-establishment. It was the establishment that caused all the evil and inequities, they killed Kennedy, they were responsible for poverty and crime. But actually, I didn’t care about all that. I was too busy chasing women, which I quickly learned I could do at twenty times the success rate of my contemporaries.
To this day, I guess you could say I’m a 1960s kind of guy. You know, hates computers, doesn’t have a clue what is going on in the world. A hermit, I don’t even own a television. In fact, read on and I’ll tell you a bit of what I don’t know about the world today.
I stayed home and put in a few hours on the camper. It was 97F out in the yard, so it was back and forth all day. Inside with, well, grape juice, it’s all I had. By the gallon. I took time to also look at creating my own gifs, since I cannot find the code snippets that allowed this blog to post videos before Google took over in 2006. Actually, they were buying everything in 2006 because nobody knew what the next big thing was going to be.
Google didn’t start to mess with the blog until 2012, when they began to insist you needed an account, this “all of Google” bullshit. Because you are not asked if you want it, you have no choice, and that makes it bullshit. In fact, since the day was neutral, as I only worked on the camper, I’ll write a bit about what has changed since 2006. The way I see it anyway.
Google also bought youTube around the same time. But only recently have they begun to “reshape” (is the term they prefer) how the videos will be posted, with heavy, heavy censorship. Oops, they don’t call it censorship, they call it “digital rights management”. Dang, I keep getting those two mixed up. If you don’t want it copied, don’t post it on the Internet.
I also looked at Hulu and Netflix, again, I can’t justify the cost. I’ve got 1,800 movies on disk that I have never seen before, and that is more than my remaining lifetime. For example, I never saw “True Grit” until this morning. And I had to read a book at the same time to keep it interesting. As for the networks, they all stink. ABC, Fox, CW, NBC, CBS, plus DirecTV and that other satellite dish place, all seriously designed for brain-damaged people. The last time I looked at the 140 channels listed in the newspaper, 40 were like Oprah and Stern. Complete mental garbage.
Wiki picture of the day.
Mmmm, coffee.
I’ve looked at all the blog formats that have any chance of not disappearing. These are Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Blog, Weebly, WIX, Live Journal, and Medium. None of them have the combination of features I want to make the leap. By the way, there are 450 million English language blogs, and if you remove the “news channels”, 99% of them are smaller and less informative than this one. But that’s still a half-million competitors for your time.
My main dislike? The fine print. They own what you publish. Myself, I have complete full backups, but a lot of unwary fools publish only on-line. You can be shut down, you know, for any reason and they don’t even owe you an explanation. I’m not too worried, this blog has had zero negative feedback. I consider photos a blog requirement, that’s the major change in the past ten years. Trivia, 80% of pictures taken nowadays are digital. Kodak sure missed the boat on that one.
I’ve watched the various technologies come and go since the rip-offs started in 1980. Apple has been the only consistent and reputable computer company, although they have fallen into bad habits lately. I do like their security features, for example, apple still refuses to support Adobe Flash player because it is, at its core, a virus that corrupts your computer for its own purposes.
One blooper was Blu-Ray. (It has no “e”. and the ray is red anyway.) This was touted as the newest and best, but I found it to be basically a fancy hard drive. And it was as slow as one. I opted against special players long ago when Sony started to screw people around. Another rip-off was all the digital e-readers. All of them have serious drawbacks and I accurately predicted they would start charged more for the files than a hardcopy of the books. That’s how you spell s-c-u-m-b-a-g.
There’s a drawer full of e-readers here, help yourself I’m classified as an “active” reader, which includes anyone who reads more than 50 books per year. My annual reading budget is $448, so you can rule out the bestseller lists. But I do consume an additional $70 in magazines each year and another $40 for Almanacs. You should be aware that e-readers can only be loaded on-line, and every copy contains a traceable ID number. You only think your reading is private, in fact, they watch what you read very closely, almost with a ferocity. And Kindle, which plasters you with advertising, in addition to overcharging you, well, Kindle can kiss my rosy red.
Nor am I ready for an iPod. Because they are toys and cannot be made into anything useful despite the availability of 460,000 apps. There is no app that is a simple standalone word processor. I heard what some of you said, and you obviously don’t grasp “standalone”. Stay away from the cloud as long as you can, and when you can’t, have a complete cover story ready. The cloud WILL be forced upon all users I predict in about three more years. Keep your old equipment in running condition.
It was also 2006 when the Feds cut off analog TV. I’ve looked at the flat-screens sporadically, but none of them justify the cost for me. None of the programming that’s available is going to get me to shell out thousands. Remember, it is not just the TV that gets you, it’s the extras. I did like plasma, but it is only available in large, as in over 40” or so. Less than that, you settle for LCD or LED, which artifact (checkerboard) when playing classic movies with side-to-side action.
Somebody gave me a Sirius radio and I tried to patronize Pandora. The pay-per-play is a trap for fools. Fools that haven’t figured out the average “smart” phone user gets sold $1,000 per year of useless junk, most of which is available for free if they had the brainpower to look for it. Spotify, iTunes, are overpriced by 10 times. Besides, if your IQ is above 98, the novelty in all of these wears off very quickly.
And for being nice and reading all this information, here is your trivia. People think that “ripping” a CD is bypassing copyright. Nope, RIP comes from Raster Image Processing.
ADDENDUM
Never trust Windows. Always go back and confirm everything. I didn't this morning, since it was a simple file copy. I'm at the library because the Frenchies crashed to local router with their MagicJacks again. So I get here and today's file did not copy. Never trust Windows. Never. I've lost a year of my life's productivity at least by not following my own advice. Only complete morons work at Microsoft, complete utter morons of the worst stripe. Window 95 actually worked better than Vista and later. It certainly searched faster.
But they slowed it down. And they changed the algorithm so that it searches the entire drive (even if that takes hours) before it reports the results. You know why they did that? Because they knew one social media brought morons into the computer marketplace by the millions, they could sell those morons a "faster" computer. It worked on the nerds in the 80s, the geeks in the 90s, the hipsters in the 2000s, and it is the biggest sucker punch going for the Millennials.
Wait, there's more. When I got home, the file was not on my computer either. I did a Windows search on the filename and it came back negative. I widened the search to include all subfolders and the recycle bin. No results found. So I hauled out Agent Ransack. Found it in 30 seconds in my music directory.
Up yours, MicroSoft.
And don’t we all love the asshole at MicroSoft who fixed it so when you highlight the last word in a sentence, the F7 link tries to spellcheck the period at the end of the sentence?
Last Laugh
This guy again.
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