One year ago today: September 1, 2016, the amazing 4008.
Five years ago today: September 1, 2012, I visit the Nederlands.
Nine years ago today: September 1, 2008, cribbage at the Panera.
Random years ago today: September 1, 2004, that Happy Face again.
Despite it not happening until much later in the day, here is the top event. Leaves burning in the back yard. My leaves and my back yard. Note the metal burning pit, the controlled amount of smoke and flame, and the bucket of water nearby. Everything to robot club standards. Today was one of them busy days that nobody gets credit for. A few hints exist for the observant, like that plastic bag full of leaves you can see. That’s from underneath the joists. Four bags full and they don’t rake themselves. The significance of this photo is, I remind you, my leaves and my yard, and that I get to sleep in until noon tomorrow. For the record, the reason I’ve never burned leaves is I am from the prairies, basically a leaf-free zone.
My goal was to have a store-bought coffee and finish reading “The Seventh Secret”. I supposed right, the Hitler painting was of a building with features installed in 1952. Actually, the book would be not bad reading if Irving could get off the whole Jewish thing and get on with the story. The premise is that the bodies found in the shell crater were doubles of Adolph and Eva, who have been surviving in an underground bunker, the seventh of a series. With a hundred pages to go, our heroes have tracked Eva to a restaurant which she enters and does not exit by closing time. And there are “neo-Nazis” everywhere. They don’t seem to be bothering anybody, but Irving wastes no words assuring us they are evil to the core. Watch out or one of them will smack you with his cane.
Note that the Israeli secret service gasses everyone in the bunker to death. This is not illegal when Israel does it.
This was wasted work in the sense that it gets no credit for moving forward. Those were leaves blown under the foundation over the years. They appeared dry as tinder, but the photo shows I had trouble getting them to self-sustain. This process brought me unpleasant memories. Want to hear about that? Why not, it is mentioned somewhere here just by default. As I grew up, while the rest of you were touring Disneyland and the coast, I was picking roots. That sounds basic, and it was.
These roots, about a foot or so long after the rake went through, had to be gathered up and burned by hand. The trick to igniting these semi-soggy roots was to soak a few in kerosene and pile the others in teepee fashion. The downside is the aroma of the burning roots got into everything. Your hair, your drinking water, even the laundry on the line. You could tell who was a farm kid by this. The smell of the burning leaves made me remember that.
Europe’s “White House”.
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Say, has anybody seen the recent and disturbing events surrounding Google? They’ve been fined in Europe, sanctioned in China, and now (finally) they are coming under the gun in America. But the smartest Americans know that this very blog has been warning against Google for over ten years. They are one of the worst companies spawned by the Internet. Don’t write off that as harsh wording. The company hit America at the time the business climate had kicked out the last of what ethics still remained. By 1991, the only start-ups that survived were those hell-bent on using computers to shave off fractions of cents from each user account. This has been very well documented in this blog. You have to slash and grab, get your fists on as much money as you can before the government regulators catch up with you.
And they (Google) have been malicious information stealers of information since day one. I know, because I developed similar systems when I was younger but had no way to implement them. If you read back far enough, where I did not have the current terminology, I had the right idea, a database that people would self-populate thinking it was for their own good. I said as far back as 1985 that the future lies in skimming money off the top. I stated the idea was to use computers to steal so little from each person that nobody had a case against you. The case of the programmer with the interest fractions was well-known in computer circles back then, but I was referring to legal business on a large scale.
I was familiar with Templeton. Instead of seeking out a man with ten million to invest, Templeton asked why don’t I find ten thousand people with ten thousand each? His boss fired him. I remember aching that I did not have enough money to buy a share in his “mutual fund”. Years later when I had the money, the market was flooded with such funds and the spectacular gains period was over. I will offer two pieces of advice to investors in addition to the normal precautions one should take.
A) invest only in companies that pay dividends. They are necessarily run differently than the rest.
B) beware of American companies run by foreign nationals, including native-born types. I’ve been in those countries and they just do not share the same set of values and respect for strangers. I’m pointing directly at those foreign cultures that do not assimilate. You know what I mean.
The scary part is that Google proved the average American is useless for protecting his rights and he will not fight for his own privacy. They will put themselves in harm’s way to prove they have nothing to hide. There is a reason secret police over the entire world are drooling over American software that tracks people. Once you own a cell phone, there is no privacy left for you. How about that idiot lady that had her identity stolen—the first thing she did was send her new phone number to everyone on her contact list. So even if Google is slapped around a bit, the damage is done. Vast banks of memory are now dedicated to monitoring everything we say or do. Not only that, the system has become so pervasive that anyone not on the files is automatically suspect.
“There are more fools in the world
than there are people.”
~Heinrich Heine
Another first for me. I played guitar tonight at a cafe. Not everything went wrong, but eleven or twelve items need attention. A good place to start is that out there in the field, it required nearly 20 minutes for me to set up. It must be trimmed to less than 3 minutes. It was sprinkling rain, so I opted not to plug into the other musicians channels. This made my act stink, but I learned a lot and of course, there were always a few in the crowd that applauded. There always are.
This is precisely the experience I need. I went through it with bass playing so long ago and now guitar isn’t any different. There were no surprises, instead plenty of reminders of how complicated putting on a show is compared to just playing the music. I took careful note how the band “imported from Tampa” ran out of material and began repeats on the fourth set. And how they quit an hour earlier than advertised. Fun as it is, until I iron out these guitar logistics. I have nothing to back up my intentions to do a better job of it.
Besides, cheer up, a lot of what went wrong was non-musical. For example, my headset battery was dead, the guitar pickup has to be moved closer to the strings, and I need tabs on my lyric sheets as it took too long to between songs to turn the pages. I have trouble with the minor chords when I’m standing up and the print on my cheat sheets is too small. I forgot my tip jar. Both my mic and instrument cables are too long. Not all my material is sidewalk-appropriate.
Rest assured, as long as I don’t get distracted, each of these troubles will be set right. There’s nothing on that list that can’t be solved. There’s another aspect of entertaining that is similar to having a job. You have little say over who you have to work with. Crowds tend to be less than interested in things cerebral. When I get home, sometimes like this evening, I’ll read a few pages of Sight Reduction Tables just to get the old brain back into functioning mode.
What? You don’t know about Sight Reduction Tables. They are used in navigation to “reduce” the amount of calculations by looking up known values. You want the quick explanation, do you? Okay, just like the Almanac has calculated the spot where the Sun will be overhead every hour of the year, the Sight Reduction Tables will tell you its height above the horizon and direction from your viewpoint. That’s why you only need compass to tell you your bearing. You don’t need a compass to calculate your position.
If that piques your curiosity, I’ll even tell you the way it works. There are two positions you need to know to use the tables. One is where you think you are, called dead reckoning, and an arbitrary position you choose nearby that is contained in the tables. Neither the Almanac or Sight Reduction Tables contain every possible position, but enough that you can always choose one near to you. The trick is then to measure the sun’s height above the horizon using your sextant. Then you compare your results to what the book says. If you do it right, you will never be more than 30 nautical miles off.
(In the future, I may or may not capitalize the words Almanac or Sight Reduction Tables.) Here’s something to ponder. Suppose your dead reckoning was way off. Then the arbitrary position you chose from the tables will also be wrong. What happens then? It’s peculiar, but navigation still works. You will still find out where you are, but you’ll be more than 30 nautical miles off, which can land you, well, on some land. Which tends, a lot of times, to be full of unfriendly rocks and really jagged coral.
ADDENDUM
Yep, if there was ever a time to long for the good old days, it was the days before this wired in generation arrived. Collectively, they don’t grasp that having a hand-held device with everything you need to look up is not the same as having the brains to use it. Nor can you blame it on the electronics, since I’ve been around such toys since I was 17. Yet, unlike today’s crop, I still managed to learn to read and write, and possible how to think a little. The attitude that nothing is your fault if you don’t pay attention is the only novelty about today’s existence. I have an example.
A few days ago, I mentioned the crappy millennial nails. They cannot be pulled out and re-used. Well, this morning I was working in the pit and needed something. Remember the backing blocks I put into the bathroom wall? Each secured by four millennial 3-1/4” spikes, and after several summers of construction work in my university days, I know how to drive spikes. To get up to floor level, I grabbed one of the blocks to heft myself up.
Well, okay, I’m 60 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight, but that still brings me in well under the average fat broad on the talk shows. Grabbing a block, I pulled myself upward, expecting the block to pull back. Instead, it came out in my hand. What the hell? I tried the next block. Same thing. I could pull them out with one hand. I went out to the shed, got some real nails, and hammered them back in place proper.
You can tell these nails because they look funny. They seem to be coated with a shiny black finish, who knows. The way they don’t hold anything could mean it is Teflon. They are marketed as ordinary nails rated for general construction. Fact is, they are as useless as the people that invented them.
Last Laugh
Ken, Hector, watch this video.
Robots aren't the only thing you have to worry about.
