One year ago today: February 24, 2017, the band I didn’t join.
Five years ago today: February 24, 2013, on student loans.
Nine years ago today: February 24, 2009, tax the lucky ones.
Random years ago today: February 24, 2012, Five hundred dollars!
Ha, I don’t have a picture of that dork drive who was purposely blocking traffic on Highway 60. As I pulled into my driveway, I forgot to turn off the camera and it ran overnight, overwriting everything I had not specifically saved. So, he gets away with it this time. Instead, here is a surviving photo of the student overpass at Miami University. I get confused by all the university names, like is that Miami, or Miami International, or Florida International? On that last one, whenever somebody tells me FIU, I tell them well FIU, too. Notice the lack of students on this overpass. Some Miami safety committee obviously thinks slower is safer. So nobody uses it.
The study means I understand the theory, this is the opposite of JZ who hates electrical. He won’t go near any switches if he can avoid it, even and end run single bulb overhead fixture. Nor can he complain because he is pretty slow at the plumbing he says is his forte. He never admits it, but he regrets not taking my advice ten years ago to learn to chug the guitar. The Titanic pub we went last Wednesday is just to the left side of this overpass, and although I chatted up every pretty gal, it was a no-go. The makeup of the campus crowd has changed.
However, there was a top-notch but overkill bar band. Drums, guitar, stand up electric bass, and a harmonica player doing the fills. I seemed the only one who could appreciate the group, their expertise was sailing over the heads of the crowd. Then, most of the music they played was for the parents, had any been present. Note my prediction that once a pub becomes known as a hangout for younger women, it will gradually fill up with old married men, divorcees, and urban cowboys. Such was the case [at the Titanic], but it never intimidates me to be surrounded by pick-up artists. That situation only enhances my chances because I’m an expert at making them look foolish by my just being present.
The beer was good, but expensive, one of the few craft breweries I can recommend. By all means, take your time and savor the free samples till you find your match. I found mine on the second shot glass, JZ always seems to, ahem, require twelve or more to find something he likes. I stuck around and spent $40 because I saw something that impressed me. That stand-up electric bass. Alas, I could not identify the brand. And the pictures I took got overwritten.
Impressed? Me? By a standup? Yes, this one was like I’ve not seen before. It was full length, but the fretboard was compressed to a workable length and the player, that guy was academy trained on that instrument. I’ve always found the standup bass to have a limited sound because rapid runs are beyond most players. Not this dude. He was able to do some pretty incredible sequences not associated with the instrument. He could match my mid-tempo stuff, at least, though that was around the cut-off point. But he was polished and made no perceptible mistakes. He had me there. He never missed a note or a rest. The abbreviated [and shortened] fretboard allowed him to get some truly sophisticated passages in there.
You’re darn rights that has me thinking. Now I know it exists, and since I can play countless runs on an electric bass, more than I see most bassists play, it is time to re-look at such a standup. It had a conservative design, so did not look as out of place. The musician, well, that’s double why I have to research this. He did not sing, had no stage personality, and barely moved a millimeter. It was that instrument and his technique that carried the show for me. I’m pretty much compelled to do something about that now.
I used to sleep under that bridge.
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Yep, Google has really screwed up the blog template. With my luck, they will force changes that make it impossible to keep my known and trusted format. They turned off the beige colored background or caused the body to not inherit it from the head. This change for the sake of change has been a perpetual problem with computers ever since IBM got into the personal computer side of things.
While trying to fix the problem locally, I stumbled across the video feature of the blog. Now, it was some years ago they took it away, so it could have been just about any time since then they put it back. You see, I don’t know of a single person to ask about computers in this situation. So literally a hundred thousand people could know I wanted to post videos, but not one of them left me comment how to do it. The explanation? Not one in that many people actually know enough about computers to have helped out. Yet I’ll bet every one of them considers themselves to be computer literate.
A word about “age appropriate” dating. There is a lady at the library my age, still working for a living. I often buy books on sale from their out-of-circulation desk. Your average dummie would probably conclude I have a ton in common with this gal. Besides age, she’s at the library a lot and one could conclude we must have a lot of life experiences in many ways. Yet, she cannot for the life of her figure out why anybody would want to read the books that I do. She’s mentioned this many times. Who would want to read an encyclopedia, or a dictionary, or in the instance today, a book about Algerian history during the French colonial period. Why, indeed.
I finally got Trent on the phone, he’s got a new client out this way so there’s a chance of visiting. I’ve got some theories on the mortgage bailout company [the housing cooperative] that could involve the bigger picture. I mean, if this thing goes like I think it will, how do I create myself a foreclosure? Tell me to get off my haunches and get that spare room finished. I did some minor wiring and some drywall mud today, a couple of hours. Somebody has to get up in the attic and spike the top plate to the ceiling. It parallels the rafters, so blocks have to be put in place first. Be my guest.
ADDENDUM
Despite the new band and the new wall (a lot of work believe me), I manage a bit of intellectual activity. Years ago, around 2003, I read some details on the Enigma machine. That’s the one the Germans (not the Nazis, Wallace) used for encoding their war messages. Alas, these historical accounts are rarely any good for learning the process. They go over all the easy codes, the substitutions, the bigraphs and digraphs, but the Enigma mechanized the process and was on another scale altogether. In my travels,
It contains some gems about the Brit intelligence operations. But like gems, they are hard to find and you have to dig for them. The author makes the book a pseudo-spy story concerned primarily with the health of the characters and vast descriptions of the housing and terrain of Bletchley Park. (Built by a Jewish stockbroker, who unless he was actually named Bletchley, is as well-remembered as the rest.) You might get a snip of useful information every forty or fifty pages.
My point is that code-breaking, while it is a mathematical nature, often involves a lot of less than academic behavior. In 2003, we talked about ‘kisses’ and ‘bombes’. Until now, I had no idea how they were accomplished—but I as much as suspected the mathematicians may be taking too much of the credit. Here’s what I found out. First, one major tactic was called ‘gardening’. You plant something you know the enemy is going to report in code, such as over-flying a naval base or bombing a rail yard. Once you know the content, it is possible to work out the key.
This gets back to the basics of spotting patterns that escape most people. I learned the enigma had a flaw that it could never code a letter as itself. That is, an ‘a’ would never print out as an ‘a’. So the kisses were a process of finding a known piece of plain text, from the gardening technique, and sliding them along lines of code text, much like using two racks of Scrabble™ tiles. Keep going until you found a stretch where no two letters matched, called a ‘crib’, I think. Now you know some of the letters, so keep going.
Yeah, we’ve all had the hype about Turing and the computer. But he was not the decoding expert. Much of the process was humdrum, such as listening for the German E-bar, a code that told everybody else to get off the air for a priority message. You might not know the location of the U-boat, but you would know the location of the convoy it just sighted. (The E-bar is dot-dot-dash-dot-dot.) Another source of cribs would be listening to Berlin radio traffic. German commercial stations have a D as the second call letter, much like American stations start with K. Any non-D message out of Berlin on a holiday is likely to contain Hitler’s name. Now you’re getting it.
It’s all a vast and complicated business, even before computers arrived. I would have liked to delve into it but I had to go to work for a living. There are definite parallels between the tactics above and the way I write computer code. I never just line up command after command until something works. Did you get that, Bill? That could be why I draw such a distinction between C+ and good computer code. I can code C+ but you can’t make me like it. The point is, I tend to code more in line with good theory than strictly what works, and that’s why I like deciphering other codes. At a hobby level only.
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