One year ago today: September 8, 2015, military age men.
Five years ago today: September 8, 2011, he made $32.
Nine years ago today: September 8, 2007, pre-GMO Kraft Dinner.
Random years ago today: September 8, 2012, Pike’s Peak, Colorado.
MORNING, NOON, & NIGHT
A generic day, quiet, no action. I’m looking forward to an increasing number of these. It doesn’t make for thrilling blog entries, but until I settle down to life in the small city, I have no idea what an exciting day around here is going to look like. If you’ve noticed my links back to 2012, I told you at that time it could be the final big adventure of my life. It still outshines most of what I’ve done since, except maybe for buying this house.
This morning I tried the three most used plagiarism detectors for this blog. Grammarly, Plagium, and Copyscape. Forget Grammarly, they want a membership. And they also said that they detected plagiarism, which if a fake-out since nobody else said so. Boo, Grammarly. The other two did not detect any instances, but also want money. Note the snappy copyright emblem in the title now.
Want a laugh? Read the content of this article about China Air. The actual content—it is the opposite of what the publishers intended. While China apologizes for being “racist”, all the Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) responses confirm they already know you don’t go into the non-white areas of London. Or Stockholm. Or Brussels. Or Paris. It’s a milestone. Previous to this, only white people ever apologized for telling the truth.
[Author's note 2021: that last passage is not clear. What happened was Chinese media published a list of places where it was not safe to travel in certain "white" cities. They later discovered they had described all the immigrant non-white sections of those cities and tried to retract the article, saying, whoops, sorry, we accidentally told the truth.]
Don’t you hate those old coots who’ve been doing something wrong for so long they think it’s right? They’ll never admit they were wrong. Well, this is your lucky day; I’m going to admit such a thing. I’ve been wrong about something since I was 18. That’s when I first learned about two computer sorting algorithms, the bubble sort and the shell sort. Both take a list of numbers and sort them, usually into ascending order.
The bubble sort is taught first, since it is easier to grasp. Apparently, though I’ve never seen it, the name derives from watching a list being sorted and it appears as if the “lighter” numbers are rising to the top of the list. So, when the instructor described the shell sort, I presumed the numbers would resemble some sort of shell shape. Wrong. That’s not shell, it’s Shell. Donald Shell. Harrumph!
On the topic of programming, if you’ve ever tried it you found the first parts easy. Funny, but you know, most programmers never get much beyond the easy parts. Anyway, when you continue past entry level, you get impression the rest of it is an insane kerschmozzle. I confirm it is not your imagination. I’ve read enough textbooks on the topic to know the exact point which things get complicated. And I was just reading a work on GW-BASIC. That is the brand of BASIC that shipped with Windows in the early days.
I don’t know what the GW is for, but back then you needed to program if only because there was no ready-made software you could buy that suited every purpose under the Sun. I used to say how the texts were never proof-read past “chapter four” and that is a good rule of thumb. They don’t expect many will ever get that far.
I never learned GW, but I do know how to program in BASIC. I don’t like it because of the complicated rules on interacting with files. You really need to be careful, a lot of the horror stories from the early days involved wiping out files. Don’t be fooled by labels like Visual Basic, those are convoluted versions the way only MicroSoft can bastardize things. Even their IDE interfaces are an abortion. If you bother to learn their adaptations, you are gaining a host of bad habits that will cripple your programming style for life. No, I’m not exaggerating. You cannot unscramble the programming egg.
Somewhere in Argentina.
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My phone finally gave out, the unit and battery lasted twelve years. I had to occupy the day finding a replacement which finally occurred at Wal*Mart but still set me back sixty bucks. While these emergencies don’t bite into the budget they still subtract from the available total and that is always a concern. I spent some time in the library looking into my idea of RJ-11 cables as an Arduino accessory, but as usual, I can’t find any information about anybody doing this before. I can’t be the first to come up with the idea.
And another irrelevant photo, to keep this blog pretty. This is the power strip at the counter over at the local Dunkin. That’s my coffee beside the outlets. Here, they encourage people to stay longer, while back in Miami, they had to bring in a three hour limit to the cheapskates who were sitting all day with one coffee tying up a chair. Same planet, different worlds.
Okay, who likes it when those same old coots talk about aches and pains? That’s what I thought, but I do have something to report. When I began with the relatively heavy labor of fixing that floor, I could feel myself getting limbered up. Using muscles to the limit has a direct effect on your heartbeat, so never overdo it. But be darned if I can now walk quite a distance without the usual sore hip. Explain that one. I know that lifting puts emphasis on the exact muscle groups, so there is some beneficial relationship.
And I ran into that gal who is still looking for a place. Careful, these women will tell you they are single and then expect they are going to move it with the boyfriend. Must be a trick they teach them at Millennial school. Tell the landlord you are single so once he finds out about Tyrone, he has to evict.
Anyway, once I knew that I was not going to get to the floor [repairs] today, I got all my chasing around done. I still don’t know if this represents a different pace of life at the new house, but I hope so. It took me a lot longer than most to acquire a place full of peace and quiet. I’m still not used to the quiet at night although it is not exactly quiet.
Cicadas, owls, insects, nature can be noisy. The point is, you can hear them.
Which brought me to stop in for a brew at sunset. You watch the crowd that gets a Thursday paycheck roll in. And their attendant baggage train. Interesting these gals, they always drop in looking for a man. Not men, but that one man. Problem is they get used to the locals over the years, so when a new guy arrives, they’ve lost all their charms. There was a nice brunette, but one of the first things I notice about a gal is how familiar she is with the other men in the place. A friendly hello is fine, but I draw the line at full frontal hugs.
And the new phone reveals I’m in a very weak cellular reception area. Argh, I just got out of one of them and right back into another. It causes an inordinate number of incoming calls to route to voicemail, and Virgin has the worst imaginable version of that. Nothing appears for a week, then the entire list of voicemails flood in at once. But the worst feature of Virgin is how it subtotals and collates your missed calls. There is no way to tell who the most recent call is without scrolling through the entire list.
Okay, here’s another photo for effect. This is the view from my stoop. I was watching for the female northern cardinal to find the feeder. She has, and they must be territorial birds, as she has a sharp warning chirp when other birds approach the feeder. The cardinals are still jumpy about movement inside the window. As soon as that settles down, I ll see about some pictures, as these are extremely well-fed perfect specimens.
Although the feeder has two ports, they never both feed at the same time. They love dried orange peel snacks. I’ll be getting some of that black sunflower oil seed for them. Anyway, back to the photo. That’s a feral black cat crossing my path. I moved the bird feeder a foot higher y’day because of these critters.
A note on money. It’s official, buying this place wiped me out. I had to revamp my plans to year end. No, I have not forgotten the Smithsonian. But I had planned on making a down payment in 2016, not buying a place outright. Don’t misunderstand me, a year from now I’ll be ecstatic I bought when I did and I damn well know it. Prices have already surged.
Still, when I ran the final totals this fiscal (October 31 is my year-end) things once again had come frightening close to zero. Between June 19th and June 23rd last, I was down to less than $200 in the coffer. Worldwide. I just didn’t know it at the time. (We are talking strictly about cash here. I’m way, way too smart to rely on money alone to survive.)
That’s the second time since my heart attack I was down to essentially nothing. I don’t like that feeling any more than people who live day to day. However, let’s put this in perspective. Having a cash balance of zero dollars is still infinitely preferable to the negative equity of a mortgage or being in the hole with credit cards. I’ve seen people live that way, operating along like nothing is amiss whilst being eight or ten thousand dollars in immediate unsecured debt. Insanity.
Myself, when I’m broke, I can always quit becoming more broke by the expedient of stopping. That’s impossible to do if one is paying 21% APR. Now, don’t compare me to the poor little rich kid. I know precisely what it is like to work next to some jerk who says he is broke but meanwhile owns an inherited house in the countryside. I’m broke because I recently plowed my last penny into equity, not because I overspent before payday. Big difference.
ADDENDUM
Tsk, tsk, my fickle readership. During that five-day dry spell over the weekend, I lost 66% of my average daily readership. But they’ll be back or replaced. I’m indifferent about the competition from the social media, whose numbers anyway have begun a long, slow decline as at least some of their users grow up or clue in that posting what you did at the last Xmas party may not have been the wisest career move.
Besides, it is again the matter of content. This is one of the few blogs that doesn’t exist for newscasts, politics, and cheap thrills, but I repeat myself. At least here most of the time, you don’t just read, you learn a bit. Where else in the same day are you going to get information on robotic microcontrollers, repairing cabin floors, and helpful pointers on driving sidecars to the Washington museum? Where’s your source for Amtrak prices, obscure book reports, and south Florida annoyances?
This blog was non-PC before Trump came along. To hell with the Millennials, they are wrecking a system that was actually starting to head in the right direction. Feminists, you go right ahead, but quit squawking when you get your half of the bill. This cowboy does not want to be assimilated and neither does anybody else I know. Making people afraid to speak out in public is not the same as convincing them you are right.
Other blogs lack that element of new knowledge, almost as if when there is nothing funny going on, there is nothing interesting going on either. This blog has survived and will survive. About the only thing I see that could stop me on purpose is if somebody bought the rights. Or maybe one of the conspiracy theories turns out there really is a wolf. Your turn.
Last Laugh
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