One year ago today: March 15, 2018, "woodsmen"
Five years ago today: March 15, 2014, Disneyworld proves it.
Nine years ago today: March 15, 2010, I kept the $346.00.
Random years ago today: March 15, 1997, world's first ever:
non-commercial blog mention of a digital sign.
Not photo-shopped, dudes. That’s the real morning dog jog. It was another sub-freezing dawn and I got the boys up early. These are quiet days and I’m relaxing, so don’t compare this to my usual fun-filled travels. Does the sun ever shine in Tennessee? And it dropped to 66°F inside the house overnight. The gif is purposely small so you can't enlarge it, Ken. I’m the type that travels most when I’m discontent with the pace of home life. Here, I get mixed opinions. It’s nice, but I just do not drink six pints of tea a day. That’s all this house is kitted for. Thank the stars I brought my own coffee maker.
The coffee houses discovered that patrons would pay the same price for tea as for coffee, but the tea cost only 1/20th to make. So the single shipload paid a handsome profit despite the loss of the other vessels. Now, all of this is third-hand or more, so it could be an urban legend. One of the turtle heat lights burned out, sending me all the way up to Lebanon Pike for a 60W bulb. They’re getting hard to find and the neon types don’t throw enough heat to keep your poikilothermics happy. I got lucky and found clear bulbs (not frosted) and heavy duty, which they label ‘vibration service’.
That’s not over-stating a thing. If you’ve never touched a computer before, I could have you coding in a few minutes. But to make you a programmer, that takes a few years longer. Millennials come back when you know what a flag register is and how to read it. I was further disgusted to find that MicroSoft has even tainted assembler. I used “assembler” to refer to the concept, not the actual language or compilers or process. Assembler is the commands that act directly on computer memory locations. It is lightning fast, but not user-friendly.
And that is where MicroSoft made it worse. The coding itself is cryptic, so how could the Redmond people make that any shoddier? By corrupting it with C+ style gobbledygook. Now it is like C+, some commands have a dot, others don’t. Commands, instruction, directives, and statements are now all different, but just how, they fail to say. Repeatedly. Some are mnemonic, others are downright misleading. The examples in the book are full of “drop-through” modules, one of the worst possible procedures. That’s the type of code that presumes if A & B are false, then C must be true.
I’m old-school on real programming. I never assume C is true, and even if it is, there is no assurance it will remain so in these times of “open architecture”. I’m going to read more of this book to see what lengths the MicroSoft brand of stupidity has leached into assembler. They’ve even tinkered with time-tested commands that were best left be. An example is the Move command (mov). My coding towers above the crap that MicroSoft advocates. Their version of the command moves a value into a memory location. My version first stops the process, goes to the intended location, deletes anything that is there whether it is blank already or not, confirms it is blank, then overwrites with the new value, and confirms the location is no longer blank. Yuge, yuge difference once your billion-dollar lander has touched down on the Martian surface.
Movie set fake.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I found this map of undersea communications cables to be more revealing that it was likely intended. What do you see? Finished? Okay, my turn. Look at those cables to Greenland. There are your secret military spy bases, unless the Eskimos have all ordered T4 spans to keep connected. Iceland, I can see it, both for security and repeater/boosting stations. Seems like there are too many cables to the Azores, however, and look at that cluster near St. Petersburg.
Noteworthy is how the cables bypass certain shorter routes. Like across all those flakey countries in Africa and South America. There’s even a cable across the Black Sea as if to let Turkey know they are not in Europe. And what is that one dot in the middle of the South Atlantic. Is that Napoleon’s line? And what is that cable doing in eastern Iceland. Egilsstadir has a population of 2,000, although it is rapidly growing. I wonder if a map of communications towers or land lines would be as revealing?
I have a theory on that last item. Iceland has a national forest, you know. Below is a picture of most of it.* I'd like to include picture credits to C. L. Hess, but he'll have to find a far easier way for me England, having denuded all its real trees to build all those ships to control that old empire that bankrupted them in the end, why, they are after Iceland’s trees. Head’s up over there, Bjarki & Freya. Prince Phillip, 483rd in line to the throne, has designs on your salix phylicifolia.
[Author’s note: the Icelandic names just above are not random. Iceland has stern laws on naming babies. You must pick from an approved list or get committee approval. There are also grammar laws to prevent Afro-American atrocities like Dafiness Oranjello and Krystal Shanda Lear. Of course, with a name like mine, I should not be pointing fingers.]
ADDENDUM
Last evening I thought why not take a peek what goes on in this town on St. Pat’s Day. The answer is around the same as Lakeland. All the nearest clubs are on the “other” side of the road. I was tempted to drive to Santa’s but stopped at Shooters, since they advertised Karaoke. I might have guessed they meant shooting pool, there are six tables as you walk in the door. Sorry, cannot take your laptop bag inside, they don’t know “what you might be carrying.” The price is right, two-fiddy, but the entertainment doesn’t start until 10:30PM. That’s past my bedtime. I left at 9:00PM. The server-ladies were in their 30s.
The atmosphere is working class, so booting up my laptop got plenty of attention. A few of the men present tried to compete by yanking out their smart phones, but that never flies. Especially when they glance up ever few seconds for, I dunno, approval, or something. A 60-year-old lady started on me but I ignored her. I’m good at that. Robynette says I’m too harsh on these gals, that I don’t see what they have to offer. So, I’ll tell you what this one had to offer that I didn’t have in return. Deal? Flabby arms, horn rim glasses, elbow dimples, waist rolls, jowls, thunder thighs, and a haircut that says early release.
I order a coffee and a donut and the owner is around back hears my voice. He’s out there to say hello, free donut, free coffee, how’m I doin’. Great to see you, when did you get back, have you had anything published since January? You know me, the usual. Nope, I’m house-sitting over in the Heights, just here a while, might be singing at Santa’s, went jogging at the dam this morning.
Ms. Blondie picks up on all this. Suddenly she is back at the counter, standing much too close to me, ordering a refill. French perfume, glowing like a schoolgirl. But she killed the moment with that egghead response. Oh, pardon me, lady, let me get out of your way. Back to my table, nose in the book. I finished in about twenty minutes, which time she spent back at her table looking to see if I was looking to see. I wasn’t. Mind you, if she shows up at Santa’s. She’s totally aware of what had just happened. I’m not into hesitation with older women, life is too short. For older women, I mean.
*I'd like to include picture credits to C. L. Hess, but he'll have to find a far easier way for me to do it. There was a link, but I gave up after ten or fifteen clicks trying to get it to work.
