One year ago today: May 14, 2016, they would not light backfires.
Five years ago today: May 14, 2012, it’s really $140 trillion . . .
Nine years ago today: May 14, 2008, A-roooooooooooooo!
Random years ago today: May 14, 2014, the system’s black-mail card.
What have we here? Before dawn, I transplanted around twenty of these spike-like plants from the back yard to this gap along the front yard fence. Don’t ask yet if they take to such a move. Digging them up shows they propagate via some type of root system, what’s that called, a rhizome? That’s usually a good sign they’ll sprout. It’s frustrating finding things that will grow in that shade. Visible here is also the water channel to give them a boost. In the end, it did not rain this week and the entire countryside is parched.
That’s your morning report, the rest of the post is filler. But compared to the others, it is informative, so read it anyway. There’s nothing to do, but there was nothing to do back in Miami, either, except up there it costs $22 a day to do nothing. Say, there’s a reportable item. It still costs the same here, in fact let me get you the exact figures. Hang on. There you go, the numbers are about the same for the most part.
January 2017: $23.07 per day
February 2017: $23.27 per day
March 2017: $35.69 per day (trip to Miami)
April 2017: $27.62 per day
What is not reflected is that rent was not included in the Miami figure, while the totals here include everything. I’m up $560 per month on that count alone. I don’t mind doing nothing but not if I have to pay for it. The overall quality of life here is better, but I would still like a little more fun. If there was a party worth showing up at within fifty miles, I’d find it. Mind you, while we are here I need to keep the situation updated. I’m the type that figures I’m broke all the time because I don’t have a job. You should try hanging around Florida. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m rolling in the dough. Everybody is scraping by, just hanging on till payday. How bad is it? I’m considering paying JZ to drive out here to have somebody to hang out with. That’s how bad.
You want to know what’s a joke? The government’s telemarket no-call list. They are so inept they can’t shut down simple robot calling operations. And they’ve allowed so may exceptions that the list means nothing to anyone who wants to get around it. The other day, I got a call from the Fireman’s association begging for money. Mr. Trump, all you have to do is make a few arrests and set a few examples. Give these telemarket pricks notice to find some other line of work. After the deadline, hunt them down and start prosecuting.
Good morning, America. I’m out of reading material again, so I watched “Legally Blonde” from back when Reese Witherspoon could still play such parts. Once again, near the end I realized I’d seen that part of the movie. I have a possible explanation on that one. During the years I had my house gig in Hollywood, there was usually a movie ending must as I walked in to set up my equipment. I’d catch the tale end of a movie once per week, and let’s see, I played there seven years, of which five was a house gig. Allowing for the months I traveled, that still over 300 movies with titles I would not recognize.
Then, I zip up to the market for some goodies for brunch. In one sack I had a bag of onions and corn. I drove home the usual easy pace, not bumps or sharp corners. When I got home, the onions were missing. That’s how exhilarating life in small town America is on a Sunday. Onions make mention. I should go sit in the coffee shop all day and say to hell with it. Instead, I’ll work on the bedroom, that is still not quite ready for the final drywall treatment. Things like sheds, yardwork, shopping, keep getting in the way.
The flowerbed has been replanted with “shady mix”, the same product that did not poduce a single shoot last time around. It’s warmer now and I notice the birds don’t touch the seeds. While not stated on the package, are they treated with some substance to make them unpalatable? That would be on the ball. I still spread the old milo mix birdseed around, the pigeons peck at it but it gives other birds the avian equivalent of heartburn.
Mars.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Oh boy, more plant talk. This is the plant from the other side of the back yard, now moved to the flower bed. It is definitely not a pumpkin plant because it also had a large underground root from somewhere. Again, no way I know if it will take, but evident here is the treated flowerbed soil on the right compared to the sandy mine tailings on to the left. The nice black manure dirt has proven best at growing weeds, and I mean tough weeds. Each one has to be hoed out to the roots. If you try to pull them, they just snap at ground level and in a couple days you have new plants again.
I didn’t ask him about any UFO or Elvis sightings, but to give the guy some credence, take a longer look at Ft. Meade. It is no longer a military base. There is no other reason for its existence. It has no factories, no tourism, and it is too close to other developed areas that already service the farms in the area. The downtown is a block long, mostly pawn and curio shops. There is no military presence other than a VA nursing home west of the only main road and local industry seems confined to a single used truck dealership and a tree nursery, both a few yards north of the city limits.
As for Sand Mountain, it is nowhere near the size of a real mountain, but it takes a while to drive around it. The shape is your typical uninspired flat top trapezoid of mine overburden, though it appears to be the largest in the vicinity. It would survive a low-yield detonation and tunnels through mines are not unknown in the area. I’ll read up on it, but it seems a most unlikely and insecure spot for anything you’d want kept hush-hush.
Ready for a little more gossip? Okay, the okay-looking gal used to clerk at the hardware store has moved to the apartments a mile west of here. She’s taken to riding her bicycle past my window. My place is between two lanes, which while not dead end, are not a shortcut to anywhere. Maybe I’ll invite her in. And I told you about the Mexican parking his work truck on the street? Rumor is he’s a dirty old man.
The same rumor says twice now he’s followed the good-looking gal who rooms nearby. She walks downtown once a day, I just say hello when I’m in the yard, nothing more. He’s followed her all the way downtown and she says, propositioned her both times. As in money for sex. (Whoa, what a coincidence, that’s her walking past right now.) Anyway, I’ve said nothing to anyone, but he’s going to get in trouble parking that big truck on the residential roadside and I don’t want him thinking I turned him in.
“"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
ADDENDUM
I was up late writing spreadsheet formulas for the various projects. Agt. R has finally returned the verdict that there may be no gold in the rivers in Florida. He found that website of the old prospector who publishes a map by state, and Florida shows zilch. But that got me to thinking, how come you only find gold in the rivers, never silver? I mean, I know silver is normally a byproduct of other mining, but does it never occur in natural form?
There’s one for you, 36 years after I got my first spreadsheet, called “VisiCalc”, I still write my own formulas. I don’t trust the whole generation of coders that came after C+, or really any object-oriented programming. Why? Because those a retrograde languages that make it possible to code without a thorough understanding of what the code is doing. There is no good reason why an entire generation of today’s programmers could not collectively overlook something that mucks up the entire works.
Hence, I still prefer to code my own formulas rather than use generic formulas, and I certainly don’t trust the “Function Arguments” modular window. Nor do I trust calculators much for lists, since you cannot see the intermediate values. Here is the function I use for my balance sheets, a formula I developed in 1985 and to this day can’t figure out why it is not one of the standards in a list that includes such helpful selections as Weibull and inverse Fisher. My long term people have seen this formula before, but I’ll still step through it.
The formula looks at a worksheet named Ledger, row by row, that has account numbers in column C. In this example, it is looking for the number 1010, which is my standard Cash account. If it sees a 1010, it then adds any value in column E , my Debit column, and subtracts any value in column F, my Credit column. Most people would have to see this in action to grasp how it totally captures the double entry accounting system. Only the difference of each matching Debit and Credit is carried forward to the Balance Sheet. Here is what the Ledger looks like:
This example contains an intentional error, but you get the idea. Column A, the leftmost, autonumbers each line for communicating by phone. The numbering system is well evolved from textbooks I studied long ago. I know accounts starting with a 7 are expensed out immediately, and 7115 is my standard sales tax accumulator. I have records with tens of thousands of these ledger transactions that are as accurate as you can possibly get.
If there is any entry error, I would cross-reference the Lowe’s transaction number and find the actual receipt. There are all kinds of checks and balances, for instance, if anything does not balance, the cells in question turn bright red. I know the crowd these days would say this system is labor-intensive, but I say I understand every part of the entire accounting entry—harking back to my statement that today’s coders mostly lack this level of comprehension of what is going on. With C+, you make anything appear to work. And that is not good enough.
I’ve just met too many programmers who cannot go back and read their own code, or worse, cannot proofread the alleged expert textbooks they spew out. As for the labor involved, face it, idiots on computers generate entirely new categories of garbage. I know people who still do their books by hand rather than trust accounting programs. Some of the worst code I’ve ever seen is the apps written for smart phones.
To this day, I do my important accounting on spreadsheets, not accounting software. Especially software like Quickbooks, which suffers a real disjoint with reality by following tax law rather than sticking to accounting principles. If I own a piece of software, I should be able to reverse a transaction, or delete it. Otherwise, the program owns me. Quickbooks also has a foul tendency to split transactions in ways that correcting errors takes longer than doing the books by hand. That’s a shame in this day and age.
[Author’s note: nor does my coding stop with accounting considerations. It is virtually impossible to enter a wrong date, and there are fields that datestamp the important segments of each transaction. Any duplicates show up in yellow, and certain fields, once they become non-blank, generate a hidden spreadsheet of analytical tidbits that over time learns when something is left out. And on my spreadsheets, never assume a blank cell is blank.]
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