One year ago today: September 3, 2016, lots of joists.
Five years ago today: September 3, 2012, she did what?
Nine years ago today: September 3, 2008, seven tiny thorns.
Random years ago today: September 3, xxxx, WIP – bad header.
Enough for the week, I’m taking the day off. How does someone in my condition accomplish that? Easy, I read a book on woodcarving, hunted around for my box of software (no luck) and watched “Avatar” for the second time. I give the same report, that it would be a damn great sci-fi movie if they could knock it off with the Apache Zulu land claims thing, we get it already. People who think these aboriginals lived in harmony with nature are not clear on their customary tortures. But I’m okay with the concept this life is not yours, it is only borrowed and you must give it back. Because that’s kind of how I look at knowledge. Some say the worms are at the top of the food chain.
The software is important because it has MicroSoft Office. Everybody’s least favorite corporation has fixed things so the word processors are not backward compatible. The new laptop had only a few programs installed, that’s how new it was. But for your daily blog here, I need something that will open doc files. I’m heading south within 48 hours and don’t know what will happen when I arrive. I’ll even tell you why that is, because it could be hectic.
My ideal plan is to arrive, get the business done, then park the Rebel at the shop for modifications which include a sissy bar that will hold my acoustic guitar and PA system. Total weight, maybe forty pounds. Then drive back here with my pal, who I sent a letter two weeks ago suggesting this plan. We drive through North Port, visit his sister’s new mansion, then stop at the Limestone. The next four days we get some real work done.
Then early next week, we head back at a leisurely pace, I pick up some signed papers, then next day pick up the Rebel and return via Vero Beach, where I’ve never been that I remember. Should this not happen [the return trip with JZ], the backup plan is to drop off the Rebel and take the Amtrak back to Winter Haven. Then same thing next week, but on the train. The question maybe asked why don’t I just stay in Miami for the ten days? Because when I do that, I run $400 over budget that month. Why’s that? You are just full of questions, aren’t you?
Because of the way JZ chases women. Like most men, he has never learned that going to expensive places is not any assurance of meeting good women. You do meet gold-diggers of a smoother character, I won’t dispute that. I don’t care for money people, by that I mean people who don’t go get their own, they try to get yours. I’m the type that won’t even pay a cover charge. I went out every night for decades, but then, I was the entertainment. I have an aversion to sitting in the audience because that makes you just another schmeeb.
Fried ice cream.
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By late afternoon, I’ve torn the shed apart and gone through every box on the shelves. No software. It is in a distinct purple case, so it is hiding in plain sight. I’ll be griping until I find it. Looking in the boxes reminds me of all the projects I never completed. That is not a negative with robotics. Expect dozens of projects to get half done. That’s the way you learn the hands-on part. The Miami trip takes a third of the month away, so I’m hoping it works out that I can get back here and work on the floor. I still have to wait for a day when I feel up to it, which is not every day. Like the past three. I have lumber stacked up in the hallway and all I got done was burning some leaves.
Nor do I totally take that side. There is another source of iridium, it is deep in the Earth’s core. If there was enough heat back in history to cause a deep enough eruption, that could also explain a layer of iridium. I’m going to lend him my copy of “Out of Antarctica” which, although it follows more recent human times, delves deeply into continental drift and ancient landforms. I’m also curious if others will have as difficult a time following that book as I did.
Let me grab another coffee. You see, I can picture that purple software case in my mind’s eye, but I cannot quite place where. Dang, I need that software before I leave. It is not some little box that could get lost. The case contains all my cracking software so it is hefty to pick up with one hand.
And it’s trivia time. Where did the word “windfall” come from? Before the age of steam, the King of France had all the oak trees in his kingdom counted to see if he could actually build enough ships to rival the English. This prompted the English to forbid feudal lords from cutting down trees of any kind on their estates. This is why so many English houses are built of stone, but the lords could help themselves to any trees that were knocked over by the wind. Hence the word came to apply to any unexpected bonus.
“Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding.
Can dance a little.”
~ Fred Astaire’s MGM screen test.
This is the SpaceX landing platform. I’ve not been following that company too closely. I sure hope they succeed. I’ve lost all faith in NASA, first with that monumental waste on the useless Space Shuttle, and now they are pouring cash into the equally useless International Space Station. Nothing but a publicity stunt. Can anyone name me one important discovery that has ever been made in this spacecraft? I’ll make you a deal. When they finally trash that junk and get back to real space exploration, I’ll start watching news feeds for the reports. What a pity NASA lost the lead, never to recover.
The shuttle was supposed to reduce the costs of orbital lift, but like any government program, it wound up costing just as much as it did before. My best guess is the first people on Mars will be heavily dependent on exoskeleton suits and robotic pack animals. I remain of the opinion that if NASA had not been allowed to become another golden goose bureaucracy, we would have a third generation being born on Mars by now. What NASA did was unforgivable. Now we have to get off this planet in a panic.
ADDENDUM
Much as I disagree with the concept, I’ve been looking at Arduino libraries. This is going to get technical a bit, but read on if you want to hear me again insult modern “coders”. The difference between a real programmer and a coder is that a programmer loathes C+ and the people who use it, the “count the feet and divide by four” crowd. I’ll run over what libraries are before I criticize them. In regular programming, certain repetitious snippets of code are ideal for placing in subroutines and called whenever needed. It cuts down on sometimes massive repetition in the main module.
This is as it should be but look a bit deeper. A good subroutine uses the identical commands and format as are available to the main program. And importantly, the subroutines are self-contained in the body of the code. There is no need to wonder if they exist or to go hunting for them on the Internet, even if there was a single source on-line.
However, libraries have all these vices. If you turn the idiots loose they will rapidly create a free-for-all. And that is a damn good definition of coders. Wahoo, let’s turn computers into a guessing game and we’ll all have entry level jobs. They take ordinary subroutines and bastardize them. They are not in the main code, they may or may not be on the Internet, and you have no idea how many of them exist or don’t exist. Worse, they change the coding structure to the dreaded “dot notation”. If you are not sure what dot notation is, consider this sentence. Food.plate.put.dog.eat.let. It’s a backward way of thinking very popular with coders who believe this kind of thing makes them into mysterious individuals. I’ve dealt with them and that is the only universal explanation for why they are like that.
Worse, the coder can make up commands and change the way the code is written, but remember, these people are indoctrinated to believe this is “elegant” and superior to other types of computer commands. The reality is unless you use it every day, you are flying blind. You must carry around in your head or in a manual a list of every C+ command so that you can recognize anything that is not a command, thus guessing that it might be a library. You have to be able to spot it if some idiot you never heard of has invented a command called, for instance, “plus”. There is nothing to stop a millennial from using the word “plus” as a library command. Quick, is “plus” a reserved word or not and if so, in which languages? This is why I consider them to be morons.
And it is that mess in the nest I’m talking about. Real programmers don’t shit in their own nest. Now, unlike subroutines, libraries are not self-identifying. With C+, you have to find out if “plus” exists. If you don’t have it, you must go get it and good luck with that because you have no way of knowing if it is even there or just a typo. There is nothing to stop some other half-brain coder from calling his library the same name, so make sure you find the right version, which can usually only be accomplished by trial and error. Somehow, I don’t consider this progress.
Once you have the code, remember it has weird names like “class”, “instance”, and “construct”, but that is really more gobble-de-gook. I’ve read the examples for over twenty years and there is no advantage to using weird words except that those people like them. The results are, pure and simple, nothing more than needlessly complicated subroutines without the rules that make them useful. They are mostly undocumented and even if you find them, they contain lines of code that cannot be viewed directly
I’ll say it again, there is probably nothing wrong with C+ code if you could get rid of all the nonsense that has been used trying to make the code special when it is not. C+ uses the same seven core commands as every other language. There is no need for “shorthand” like the “i++” or “++i” crap, or the overuse of punctuation marks. That last one, abuse of punctuation, is your sure sign of a brain-dead idiot. He’s covered the ground but he can’t cultivate it. C+ could be made to look as readable and understandable BASIC programming that it is really a copy of. But the coders fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
Note that the main argument against making C+ readable is that it accesses a different parts of computer instructions than are available in BASIC, because BASIC is a compiled language. But that is not to what I refer. I’m referring to making computer languages more readable and self-documenting wherever possible. And C+ takes the opposite tack. Here’s a little explanation a few people might want.
What is “i++”? In many computer routines, control is accomplished by adding a counter, which in computer talk is known as an “increment”. The counter, called “i”, is normally increased by one each loop until some pre-determined limit is reached. This means on the first loop, the value of “i” is 1 and on the fiftieth loop it “i” is 50. You can change this, but that is how it normally works. But this is not good enough for the C+ people. Here’s how they contort things.
Sometimes the value of “i” itself is used in the code as just another variable. So it becomes important when “i” is incremented. Do you increase by one before the subroutine uses it, or after? So the C+ people came up with “i++” and “++i”. Clear thinking people would, instead, control this feature by the simple expedient of placing the command in the lines of code at the position where it is logically needed.
By the way, the BASIC command for the same thing is “i = i + 1”. Now you decide which method was created by smarter, friendlier people.
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