One year ago today: February 8, 2018, the sound wall.
Five years ago today: February 8, 2014, 8 channels, my eye.
Nine years ago today: February 8, 2010, who's the bad guy?
Random years ago today: February 8, 2009, a true story.
A special treat for you today. I’ve acquired a short test giving to professional airline pilots, that is, the guys with 20,000 hours in the cockpit. I have no idea what the questions are, but the instructions say to rank the answers in the order you would decide them, even if you disagree with the answer. The blurb says this test distinguishes between recognizing problems and making decisions. So, let’s see how I rank with the big boys. I took a $99 special airplane ride once 25 years ago and banked left.
Okay, I’ve tallied the results. There are five categories of response and my scores out of 150 are:
Impulsivity: 41
Invulnerability: 26
Macho: 30
Resignation: 29
Except for the unusually high score for impulsivity, it would seem I have a balance between the other thought patterns. The test does not say if this is good or bad. But all the categories are a negative. Most people would probably try the first thing that popped into their heads during an aircraft malfunction. I read ahead after and the test never does clarify what a right answer would be. It’s like a civil service job application form.
I was seeking the proper term for when an aircraft makes an unexplained usually dangerous change while it is flying. The word is “uncommanded”. The plane if flying along and suddenly flips over, and yes things like that happen. I have some uncommanded weight gain. On day 435 of my stringent diet, my weight has climbed back to 188 pounds, that is, 48 pounds overweight. There is no explanation for this. The good news is the inches have stayed off. But I’m still six to seven inches too thick-waisted. In the long run, the average amount of weight I’ve lost and kept off is only 28 pounds.
So you’ll know the closets are small, but not as small as this photo makes the impression. The inside of the unit extends to were you see the transition between the two colors on the right side. It’s the closet door that makes it seem small. I put some thought into installing larger bi-fold doors. It changes the character of the room too much. I’m considering buying and modifying real wooden doors now that I have the savvy to make them fit. This photo was early in the day, it is already sanded, primed, and undercoated.
We got some morning rain, so I used the down time to pick up some more used paint and scored picking up several cans of great spray primer, including automotive grade, and plenty of adhesives. Even a $30 can of contact cement that had separated, making the other guy think it was gone bad. A shot of acetone cures that. The soles on all my work shoes are now solidly back in place. No rain, but it kept spitting all morning, so I planted some lily bulbs. This is guesswork for several reasons. This flower can bloom several times during the Florida season, so the trick is to estimate how long the flower lasts. I think lilies are two weeks. Ergo, plant up to four sets of bulbs two weeks apart. With luck, you will then have something in bloom the entire summer.
Shown here are the pests that never give up. Behind me is the newly transplanted row of mother-in-law tongues, which are “deep” fertilized. I hesitate to put up a hedge toward the good neighbor, so these striped plants are carefully moved from the north side, which is predominantly dark green versions. They seem to have taken successfully, but in move the pests. The left panel shows a caterpillar-like worm. I don’t know the species but to me all such worms are not beneficial. And the right panel shows how aggressive weeds get for that deep fertilizer. I’m holding the root system for a tiny clover-sized leaf, and the main or tap root grew almost a foot deep in the two weeks I was away.
I’ve also been donated a pecan seedling. I’ve got it planted near the shed, but it was pretty anemic-looking. We’ll know soon, they grow wild in this area, up to a foot every year. Yes, these are the commercial pecans, but you’d need at least three trees to get a decent crop.
The Thermador Classic Aire.
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To answer the inquiries about the Volkswagen air conditioner, I don’t know. Here is a better picture of the unit. My guess is it contains cooling coils of some sort. I wish I had taken a closer look, but we were at the end of a two hour walk inside the building. The car window is open and there was a duct feeding through into the passenger compartment. I did not see any obvious wiring or switches. Nor did I look it up, since I didn’t have a brand or model name and didn’t have the time. (Later, the most popular brand was the Thermador, it works by evaporating a tank of water when the vehicle is moving.)
The thrust on that seems to be that the corporations, which lived through the last programmer shortage, have pushed an agenda to train an entire generation of programming drones to prevent that from reoccurring. It makes sense to me, I’ve lived through such cycles, for instance, with computer memory. In the early days, memory was expensive and labor was cheap, relatively. I’ve told how some of my final exams were graded on how well the code conserved memory. Today the opposite situation exists with memory cheap beyond imagination and coders demanding $15 per hour. Next, those bastards will want benefits.
Mind you how intertwined these factors have become. One of my beefs has been that coding is not programming, that coding has become a watered-down version of cryptic pseudo-commands, where the goal seems to be issuing the command and later getting concerned with how the various platforms interpret it. To me, the code is no longer compiled, although it may be, but it still runs like script, each snippet performing an immediate task with little attention paid to the effectiveness of the overall program.
To cheer me up, I went to the Thrift for work clothes and saw a pair of jeans on the rack marked the size I was at age 34, the last time I weighed less than 145. I had to breathe in a bit (just a bit) but I got those pants on and loved the way they fit. Robynette was right. [She said] I do not look or act like others my age, but added I increasingly look like a Mennonite farmer. I’m aware of that and there are a lot worse things for an aging man to resemble. You don’t know this gal, that quip could mean several things. This gal rarely outputs more than a line or two, so I’m bewildered by receiving a near-letter this evening. And damn, this time she actually gave me an unsolicited compliment. What in blazes is going on? Anyway, I have new jeans and a muscle top just out of the laundry. If I go out tonight, guess what I’ll be wearing?
ADDENDUM
I must have left town in a hurry. I forgot to properly clean my paint gear and what a mess. If I look at it much more, I’ll invent and excuse to leave it and head downtown. After all, I did get a 29 in resignation this morning. Boss Hogg is drowned out again or at least I think it is. I can’t even find it on the dial. Hmmmm. So I’m listening to an anti-lib talk show with a lot of probing questions. The issue of class size is making the rounds. It seems some campuses use social media to communicated with up to 100 students at a time. Most of those students are unaware of class size. My feelings on teacher-student ratio is non-standard.
What I mean is the general feeling is that the teacher’s role is to help along the slower students and that large class sizes inhibit this. My take is that the teacher’s primary function is to focus on the top performers in the class, to make sure they get the all guidance and extra lesson time needed to propel them into big league. Such students require and deserve teaching above and beyond the curriculum, let the mediocre students limp along as best they can, and the poor performers are going to fall by the wayside anyway to become the next generation of entitlement-minded left-wingers.
I was a victim of large class size, the average in my high school rooms was above 28 students per teacher. I never received a moment of tutoring or instruction beyond what was in the textbooks, many of which I didn’t bother to read. I’d picked up by third grade that the teachers were parroting the texts and I’d already read encyclopedias on the topics. (For those unaware of the situation, I was held back by my own parents so I would not “embarrass” my older sister.) So yes, I am for smaller class sizes, but not so the effort is wasted on students who will never amount to a thing anyway.
Now might be the time to mention that of the roughly 200 different students I went to grade school with (we moved around a lot), only 10 really became what my generation called successful. And every one of them had something in common: parents who paid for their university educations. In the end, I feel I was defeated by student loans. The loans can only assist with education, they cannot make up for a youth of systematic deprivation once you leave home for a distant university. To those who say it is possible to live on student loans, I ask them to put a dollar value on where and how they learned it was possible. Many of us were not so lucky.
