August 10, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 10, 2016, vastly over-rated.
Five years ago today: August 10, 2012, on the road to Denver.
Nine years ago today: August 10, 2008, northwest of Pahokee.
Random years ago today: August 10, 2009, the Florida employment Ponzi scheme.

           I came into possession of what I thought was a dime-store western, a novel called “Hell’s Half Acre”. It’s actually well-written, about a cowboy who turns 34 and too old for the trail. He lands a job as sheriff and by end of day one has seen three killings, several fights, met the prettiest dancehall prostitute, and made enemies everywhere. It is a bit corny, particularly how it embellishes the myth that cowboys possess some home-spun sense of range justice that serves them well when they ride into town. Anybody who has met a real cowboy can tell you that is all buffalo chips.

           Our hero, Jess, is up against Kurt, the murdering sea-captain turned saloon owner. This book will take a while, especially since I need the cooler mornings to work on the living room. I’ve got much of the drywall down to the studs and found more termite damage. But most of it can be fixed by a reinforcing stud. The original structure was well-built, but as cheaply as possible. The noon-day heat is ferocious. That caps my day, since after that I’m at my nice air-conditioned desk taking care of paperwork, like a sensible man does in the Florida summer climate.

           This picture is my router bit. Nothing much else is going on around here. When I move to the middle of nowhere, I do it half-right. If you find anything exciting to do today, I’ll buy. I’m tanned and rested but the only task on the agenda is clearing more drywall out of the living room. It has to be done is small boxfulls. Small enough for me to carry them. As before, most everything goes on hold while I rip up a floor. It wasn’t slated to be my big accomplishment this year, but at the rate I’m going, it will be.

           Stand by for a short but top-notch article. Hey, you’d have to pay good money to see this caliber of editorial if it was in the NYT. And even then, NYT would get it wrong, claiming I was supporting a libtard cause. I’m not, I’m just against something they also go on about so they only think I'm on their side. Duh.

           Morning chores means NPR on my Philco and today they report that Oregon is the first state with unrestricted access to abortion for any reason. Am I for it or against it? I’m against it, but not for moral reasons. Abortion is going to happen whether you condone it or not and I’m blanketly against any form of prohibition because prohibition NEVER works. See the conundrum? If I’m against banning abortion, I must be pro-abortion and therefore why am I against the Oregon law? For starters, that question is a prime example of how defective people think. The simple-minded only see two sides of the abortion issue and there are many facets. Now, let’s listen to why I’m opposed.
           I am against the law, not against abortion, because the funding for the abortion is taxpayer-based. The public at large, many of whom are most religious about the issue, will be forced to pay for the procedure. This causes widespread discontent and the countryside is already at the boiling point. Furthermore, there will always arise a class of shiftless women using abortion as birth control, never a good idea. On the plus side, there is proof that 21 years from now, crime, welfare, and teen pregnancy rates will drop. My solution is mainstream libertarian, not to be confused with extreme libertarianism, which has never existed except in the minds of terrified liberals who carry the concept to unreasonable extremes.

           The solution, as always, is to end prohibition and make the user pay. In other words, mild libertarianism. Liberals can't argue that libertarianism doesn't work because they've never allowed it to be tried. It goes like this: Women can get all the abortions they want, provided they pay for it themselves. Don't hand me the "two to tango" argument, because I can quote you back a thousand to one about situations where the circumstances already disfavor men. I totally concur there is a vast gap between men and women when it comes to taking financial responsibility over their actions, so you'd best not mix it up with me on that issue. I find it miraculous how instantaneously women get sensible when they have to pay their own way. It's a sight to see, provided you don't blink.
           What? Hold on, son. A woman on welfare or alimony is not paying her own way. Where’d you get that one from? She’s gonna die as irresponsible as the day she dropped out of ninth grade. What now? You say not all women on welfare and alimony are drop-outs? Time for you to take a walk through the local welfare office, son. I’ll give you twenty dollars for every college grad you find in there. Case closed.

           [Author's note: it is unfortunate the Liberalism and Libertarianism are spelled so closely. They are opposites. The Liberal feels that everyone should be compelled to support their pet agendas. This is normally accomplished through taxation and name-shaming (those who disagree are "Nazi", "redneck", "racist", etc.)
           A Libertarian is the polar opposite. He believes that all participation should be voluntary. Man can only be free when he is not required to conform to other people's ideals. For that reason, Liberals are scared crapless of Libertarians. You get Liberals inventing all kinds of extreme scenarios that lambaste Libertarian ideals, such as the false claim that parents could allow their children to starve. This is, of course, hogwash. What is true, however, is that Liberal agendas have toppled every empire in history. On the other hand, no true Libertarian state has ever existed. Nobody knows if it would work because it has never been tried.]

           In a related note, most press and electronic media are Liberal-biased, so you can expect no balanced review of what Libertarianism is really about. One recent example was a 2014 Pew Poll that stated 24% of Americans who call themselves Libertarians have "no idea what the word means". However, such polls are like asking a Liberal if he is a humanist. He will say yes, even though it opposes everything he stands for. If you like fake surveys, ask a Liberal if he is easy to get along with.

Picture of the day.
1970.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           A morning in the living room, just me and NPR. Bushnell fades so I get Tampa AM on nearly the same frequency. Both are so bad I sometimes don’t recall if I changed over. I want you to take a close look at this progress photo. Why? Because it is so easy to underestimate the amount of time and effort to clear out this old drywall. Couple that with my inability to work like I mean it, and things drag along like Orlando morning traffic. Visible along the wall seam is daylight, can you see it.

           What you see here is my daily work limit, I know, pretty pitiful. Overall, though, advancement is satisfactory because I’ve learned the ropes. This room is going to cost me $600 in materials plus the fancy air conditioner. Since it is bound to be better than the last room, it is worth every penny. I can’t hear much of the outside world unless it comes from the front yard, and the soundproofing of this room will squelch that.

           Also seen is the oak flooring, it’s under all the drywall and dust. This is the segment of the floor that will require the most leveling, it has sunk a good five inches. But this time I have the iron cross beam, the proper jack, and the know-how to fix one corner at a time until it is within half the acceptable 1/4” every six feet. This taken together makes the project appear to be really moving along compared to the months the other room required. If things go right, I may have that electrical working by the weekend. Did you know there was only one outlet in that entire room when I started?

           Let me add this oak flooring has taken on a mystique of its own. Most of that is because the oak has become so damn expensive. Isn’t that odd, they call oak a renewable resource, but they say it is getting scarce so the price goes up. I’m reminded of the French king that had all the oak trees in the land counted and then decided not to even try outbuilding the British navy. But my question remains the same. If all this scarcity is known, why didn’t they plant a few million acres back when the shortage became apparent?
           Here’s another unique shot that might amuse you. This is what advanced termite damage looks like. I shoved my small tape measure into the tunnel because I was too lazy to go get the banana. The board is a diagonal 2x4 of the type formerly used to keep an exterior wall reasonably square. I will fill the gap with bondo or something but strength-wise, the board is shot. But the building is fine. Once more, I’m finding instances where the quality of workmanship is beyond what I can do on my finest day. It must be something learned in carpentry school because I just cannot do such work on my own no matter how hard I try. Every time I try to cut angles, I always make a visible mistake.

Quote of the Day:
“It’s great to wake up to unexpected sex.
unless you are, like, in prison.”
~ somebody in Detroit.
           As luck would have it, I made a run over to Winter Haven. I stopped at the Bar and listened carefully. The staff were talking music. I got it, the band may be able to jam, but only if you know their song list. Country music is totally iffy, but my guess is because there are no country bands in the county that play these venues. They all wannabe rock stars. On the other hand, I’m more conscious of which weekends fall closest to payday at the mines. This is the same place that has that Karoaoke system I helped set on St. Patrick’s Day. The lady remembers that and says if I want to give it a try this weekend, with guitar and all, I’m in. The pay is tips only.

           [Author’s note: here’s a confession. When it comes to hired bands in the clubs these days, all the local talk is about stage presence. Who has it and who doesn’t. This was never a concern before, but now you get informed opinions from the staff flowing upward to management. How do I know stage presence has become such an important issue? Because I’m the one that started it and I’ve been gently pushing it for the past year. That’s how.]

           Is this my first break into the local business? The lady mentioned how little stage presence the house band was exhibiting, oblivious that it was me that pointed her in that direction. My motive? This is an area where I can compete and I got the audition, didn’t I? Just weeks after I decided to finally go solo. I so want another Jimbos that I must follow through on this. It’s a two-hour gig which, by happenstance is the exact amount of music I have on my list. It’s a choice location to target that after-work crowd that has done me so well in the past. A house gig there could cover a lot of ground and Friday is prime time. Right now, for me, it would be a blessing.

ADDENDUM
           I’m glad I read the 113 page book on machine code last evening. That cleared the baffles. Machine code is a love-hate subject. Those who cannot think logically long enough at a stretch to produce meaningful results will hate machine code. I describe it as a shorthand method of operating on binary numbers, and that is where the exclusive OR table I mentioned comes into play. That’s also about as far as most people get. But I was fascinated; I could go back and write my university exam on this, there’s a beauty to it. It’s one of the few academic realms that contains zero percent nonsense because that would not survive.
           One element that hasn’t changed is instructors are no better at teaching machine code today than in my day. They take the wrong approach, because you are memorizing 0’s and 1’s without knowing why. Then they teach you octal, a shorthand for binary, again not saying why. I know people who have done these courses with high marks but never knew the reasons for any of it. What? Sure, I can tell you. The memory locations are written in binary and they are sixteen bits long.

           Eg: 10100101 – 01110010 You’ve seen this often, you may not have know it is a memory address. It is usually abbreviated, but it is 16 bits in the original systems, now 64 bit in Win 10. Where octal comes in is it makes the 8-bit commands more readable, in the sense that you can memorize them. SLAX means shift left from A register to X register. These 8-bit commands are called op-codes and the one I remember best is JNZ. Jump if not zero. As before, my explanations may be not exactly technical, but they make understanding the material far easier. When you know why something is done a certain way, you can decide what’s important about learning the details. There are still many things about how computer bits work that to this day I have never had a satisfactory explanation.
           The computer architecture has changed but what is stored in memory is still bytes. As more memory locations become available or necessary, it takes more overhead to handle the addressing, but the contents are still good old 8-bit chunks. This is core memory to which I refer, not the other three types of memory in most computers. The CPU has to move fast when the address of a memory location is eight times longer than the data [that is] stored there.


Last Laugh
(Progress. When you see it.)

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