October 17, 2017

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 17, 2016, I still boycott Hershey’s.
Five years ago today: October 17, 2012, jumpstart the old Taurus.
Nine years ago today: October 17, 2008, the Aussie pinned-brim hat.
Random years ago today: October 17, 2011, my on-line dating photo.

           There he is, a baby gator at the extreme setting of my telephoto lens. With the striped tail, this little guy is around ten inches long. And he’s got 19 brothers and sisters, only one of these will survive to adulthood. This was out visiting Debs y’day, the idea around gators and snakes is to make enough noise that you never surprise them. The lake was having an outbreak of midgeflies, I can never remember what the locals call them. (Something like ‘chinzingas’.) They swarm by the billions, a fact the Florida departments of tourism consistently fail to mention. They form annoying clouds as you walk by and when they die, you sweep them off your porch like sand.

           So we talked business, plans, and drove across town to Jaxson’s, the pub, not the ice cream parlor. Where Rick the Mason ordered the fried alligator. I’d wanted to conference with Debs (that’s the president of my fan club, in case you wondered) about her business on Craigslist. Alas, in a very common situation in my demographic, she has for years been saying Craigslist when she meant eBay. There is very little common ground between the two systems. I don’t like eBay because I don’t like stores that track their customers. Are you listening, Harbor Freight? There is a reason many people insist on paying cash. I think they are about to outlaw cash in China, which should tell you something.

           Check with me later or tomorrow about the rust removal system. You already know most of the articles from the barns have been exposed to the elements for years and we are at a loss to decide whether a patina of rust adds or takes away value. My leaning is toward museum displays where the pieces, especially cooking items, have been largely cleaned up. What I do not know is if there is any follow-on treatment to prevent the artifacts from just rusting all over again. Can I get any help on this one? As usual, nooooooo-o-o-o . . .

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

           Here’s the new hi-tech bow saw. At first I didn’t like the design because you don’t hat the side with the large arc to cut 10” longs. But then I got to thinking how rare I’ve ever done that so the $9 price tag on this piece of bent pipe was okay enough for me. This is to trim the legs for Agt. R’s camp table. I took a couple hours to look closely at the HTML tags, the idea is to make our ads stand out better than the rest. If you’ve ever seen the tags, they are cryptic as hell, or you can use the ascii codes, which are tedious. The problem is, in the title fields of Craigslist, there is a character limit. Each ascii code takes seven characters. I’ll map out what I need in hex, which used fewer characters, but you know, in all these years I don’t know if Craigslist even allows this. Probably. I’ll test it tomorrow.

           In case you ever want to use these codes, you’ll need some form of what is known as a character entity reference chart. Fairly intricate screens can be designed with the characters, but the work is dreary unless you happen to like dealing with codes. I had originally wanted to make a framed box on screen, but could never get the right margins to line up. I’m about to give that another shot.

           The other question of the day was that rust on the nutcracker and the rosette molds. There’s a bucket of rust remover in the red shed, but is that the proper chemical to be using on anything that comes in contact with food? So I went on-line and watched a time lapse video of rusty drill bits soaking in ordinary household vinegar for 16 hours. The rust scales came right off. Then, you give the metal a slight coating of vegetable oil to prevent further oxidization. This only has to work for as long as it takes the customer’s check to clear. All articles are sold as curiosities and/or conversation pieces, not to be actually used on food.
           The other trick is opening the code with a browser. You’ll need to check your finished product, but don’t use Craigslist. To view your work, you have to publish, which hides all your code and displays the results instead. This can be maddening unless you know the trick of opening the code with any other browser, like the hated Internet Explorer. Did you hear about the next lawsuit MicroSoft lost? Not likely, since this type of news is normally not even reported in the left-sided American press. The Dutch found them guilty of electronic spying with their Windows 10 product. The one this blog has been warning you against since a year before it hit the market.
           These new versions are not new and improved. There have been no major breakthroughs or betterments of any MicroSoft browsers since XP. The real change is the amount of hidden, unexplained backdoors buried deep in the code. It’s purpose is obviously to allow MicroSoft to monitor something they don’t want the end-user to know about. And over it, Holland handed it back. These Europeans are on to entities that keep just too many files on people.

Quote of the Day:
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
~Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton.
Possibly the real quotation is the guy’s name?
           Taking another look at Craigslist, it is more highly restricted than ever before. But a lot of my old hacks still work, like embedding a URL. I worked in the shed, you know, I’m going to install a small red outdoor light to let me know when the interior lights have been left on. I cleaned up a couple of the items to see how that went and it is too labor intensive. Unless these react well to something simple like an overnight soak, they get sold as is. Actually, everything is sold like that. What’s more, they are sold a curios only, since we don’t intend to guarantee their suitability for any purpose, original or otherwise.

           I see CL has also issued the warning that they can delete code that bypasses their now fairly established standards. They advertise getting 50 billion hits a day, which seems excessive, but they are an unbelievably successful operation. What I have in mind is a template that makes our listing unique and advertises a single item or at least a limited number. There is a link to a secure e-mail, which then sends an automatic response telling them we need their shipping information from a real e-mail, not a CL link.

           Before I go further, I’ll look how other people are dealing with their sales. By default, I’ll give each item for sale a unique identifier and have them specify that on their purchase order. First come, first serve and we are pretty certain about the minimum product price of $20 or we can’t be bothered. This photo is today’s mystery item. It’s not a hat box. The sides of this object are wood and hat boxes are made from cardboard. Give up? It’s a cheese box. Give me $20 and it is yours. My hackles tell me we are entering a very competitive field but I also know the majority of items we have for sale are rather rare. I’m hoping we stumble across something that sells which has a steady source. Maybe something that pays enough to hire somebody under the table.
           Here’s a local story, but it would easily qualify as a tale from the trailer court. This guy bought a storage unit at auction and found he’d gotten a few hundred bags of old guy clothes. The rumor is he tran them through the laudromat, folded them up and took them out to the orchards on payday. As the illegals got off work, he sold them anything they wanted for 50¢ each. Shirts, pants, anything, 50¢ and the rumor is he made a couple grand where others would have lost money.

ADDENDUM

           [Author’s note: today’s big feature on MSN.com concerning shipwreck treasure is pure coincidence. Again?]

           This pirate shipwreck book turns out to be very well-written. Not just the plot, but the presentation. The material has an appealing style without getting too flowery. My favorite passage is where the phrase appears stating that finding a pirate ship is “rarer than walking on the moon”. That’s correct and a remarkable way to word it. Um, since two pirate ships have been found, the only rarer thing I can think of is a bass player writing an enduring blog.

           From what I gather, the wreck had already been found and well known, but was assumed to have been a local merchant ship full of sugar. Many people who reviewed the book felt, as I often do, that it was overlong about the backgrounds of the treasure hunters, what schools they went to, their earlier careers, and failed marriages. In general I dislike authors who do that, but this book has some extra element that made me not mind in this instance. Here’s a cannonball marked with the distinct Royal Navy “broad arrow” of the period.

           I’m barely half-way through the book, but it is consistent with the four or five other stories I’ve read on the topic. Mel Fisher and the Atocha, the book about the Deep Blue Sea, and smaller booklets. The real treasure hunting is done in the library. But not the local library, where they have begun to let noisy crazy people hang out. How long before the government gives the nutcases a bus pass to bum around all day, Canada-style. None of the staff will discipline anybody who’s learned to play the crazy card. The worst is Ga-hunk, I’ve told you about this mother-daughter team. The daughter is spoiled and stupid, but not crazy at all, I recognize the act.

           They have around six library cards from that, you guessed it, single parent family, so the two of them can log on all day past the two-hour limit. The daughter is the stinky brat I told you who watches cartoons and every fifteen seconds grunts out, “Daaas funnnie.” The staff says they can’t do anything because she has “mental issues”. Bullshit. All that’s lacking is a damn good whacking. Even retards can be trained [incentivized] how to behave in public. Besides, the staff is doing something; they are playing favorites, that’s what.
           But you know the staff types. All glowing liberals all day because they need their jobs, but fire-breathing rednecks when they get home. I can’t tell you how many left-wingers in my life I’ve met like that. As long as they know they are being watched, they are kind and compassionate over any cause you can imagine. By night, they are anti-immigrant anti-welfare devils. There are other terms for this type of people, but you’d best visit a non-union construction site to hear them.
           This book was written in 2015, so it was no surprise to me that the treasure hunters never communicated location information by e-mail or cellular phone. They only held meetings in random restaurants and never spoke any details in their cars. Being treasure hunters, they ain’t that stupid, see. Like, maybe they had something to hide?


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