One year ago today: July 30, 2018, no Nashville for Twood.
Five years ago today: July 30, 2014, new, and last, club shed.
Nine years ago today: July 30, 2010, the 15% sneaks.
Random years ago today: July 30, 2016, perfectly level.
The picture is your progress report. I need a break, like a half day. Someplace nice and quiet, how about the library? The bathroom remains our top story until, well, until what? Until I get my first nice close shave in my new mirror and sink. Deal? Shown here is four hours of work for me. I still have to do the mud in two stages, which represents the unpainted spots on the bottom half. The top half is sanded and spot primed. That’s regulation drywall primer, I add. Do you like the color? It’s that $85 per gallon product, and it was free from the used paint place. So you’ll learn to like the color. That’s just an undercoat on half as I want to set the vanity [cabinet] back in place by later today.
What’s that? Well, in Canada every four years, they have a vote auction. Candidates are reduced to going around the country making elaborate promises to minorities, the two favorites are the French and the Indians. Over the years, these two groups have raked in enough cash and favors to pretty much do as they please. Since these are government hand-outs, the most kiss-ass liberals win most of the time. This doesn’t work so well in the USA, where everybody is some kind of minority, but that doesn’t stop people like Bernie Saunders from promising free everything.
Did I mention Brent was threatened by blacks when he drove through Baltimore. The predictable outcome over Trump was the politicians screaming all the usual leftist reactions to criticism. But taunts of racism, xenophobia, all have lost their edge from over-use. The one thing they didn’t utter was a denial of the state of the city. Liberal Democrats and the Truth have a very special understanding with each other.
Another shooting, this time Wal*Mart employees. Hey, the majority of Wal*Mart customers don’t exactly hail from the country club set. For once, I want to hear the other side of the story. I’m not buying that it was random because the first reports brought up that the gunman had “recent white-supremist leanings”. The cover-up has begun already. No mention of the color of anybody except the gunman. How do we know he was white? Because they didn’t call him “a legal American resident”. What’s that smell, Tampa radio?
TMOR, this is why Trump is doing so well. Not because he is right all the time, but because he fights back. He fights back whoever attacks him, including that third political party called the news media. They all hate Trump because he’s an outsider. Before him, presidential candidates were supposed to have years of experience at lower level operations, like governors, senators, and be ivy league grads. That explains to me the repugnant political consultant industry. They were dealing with candidates who owed everything to the hacks of the old system. Each of the original 16 candidates that ran against Trump felt they had “earned” the presidency and were incensed that an old man with zero experience was, well, trumping them.
I’m pleased with progress, I was busy for eight full hours. No further plumbing was installed, but I dry-fitted all the pieces in place and have a list of what is needed. I may get away with only having to modify the top set of drawers. I’ve decided to buy the medicine cabinet as planned any modify the cutout as needed. Which may also mean moving the electric box. But I learned.
Boss Hogg pipes their news in, so don’t blame them for left-biased coverage. My coverage was more paint, and I decided to reinforce the counter top as well as the cabinet. Shown here are “not enough” clamps. I have to go to
Ah, here’s a picture of the clamp, the long metal piece leaning on the door jamb. test your spatial skills to see why I can’t use it. I’m pointing at the clamping part, the other piece is lockable anywhere along the four foot rail. So what is the problem? Got it? To use this clamp, you must have a minimum of four feet space behind or beside your work-piece. No, you can’t just turn the clamp around, or your mechanism is behind the work-piece and under the rail. Look at the other picture again. To use this clamp, I would have to cut a hole in the wall for the rail to poke through. The other clamps, as you can see, just overhang the space in front.
Barn, Arkansas.
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I have the plumbing pieces. Considering I’m hardly the first person who needed to connect drain pipes of this sort, it was surprisingly difficult to find the right parts. I finally went home and got what I had, myself and a Lowe’s employee arranged them on top of a convenient dryer and pieced together all except the one last critical part—the union between the thin plastic of the sink trap and the thick-walled PVC of the drainpipe. We both thought how classic Florida is that? Around the same moment, we thought, what if the entire assembly is sold as a package? It was. $6.98.
This called for a celebration, so I drove over to the Fubar and chatted with my lady friend. The highways people are getting serious about buying her out, so we are shortly holding a big sale of everything on the interior. The one that interests me is the booths on the north wall, where the stage used to be. Old style restaurant booths, and I’m going back there in a couple days to measure them. But my eyeball tells me one of them, sawn in half, would be that ideal breakfast nook I’ve wanted for years.
[Author’s note: the pieces sporting a strip of blue tape are to indicate which parts al ready belonged to me when I walked into the retailer.]
I got the latest schedule from Nashville, and the only gig I’d be interested in is way ahead on August 30th. If so, that’s the breathing spell I need to ace the entire song list. And I mean Deliver the Wow. I’ve already begun what I call “scraping”, which is to go back over what I’ve already learned and change certain bass notes to match the dominant instrument of a given passage. Like, if there is a piano riff, I’ll alter what I play so my semi-famous thirds parallel the piano left-hand. This goes far beyond the bass player who merely fills in the background.
Because, and don’t be a goof when I tell you this, I saw the call-out list and I’ve been bumped. To third. The top name I’ve heard of but never met, second is some unknown, and I’m third. Living 750 miles away has its challenges. There are other terms for placing third in the entertainment world, most of them unbloggable. I’ve already developed a strategy. Want to hear it? Okay.
That gig is Labor Day weekend. Bass players who converted from guitar are flakes. The band rehearses once a week giving me at least three shots at winning over that piano player. I don’t just make guitar players sound better. Here’s where I figure the odds. Odds are floaters (hired guns) will get other offers that pay more as the deadline approaches. (That’s why there are three names on the list.) Odds are if a floater knows I’m available to cover the gig, he’s more likely to wobble.
My immediate goal is to get one full set of that gig. Eight songs.
ADDENDUM
Did you get a load that FAA warning for small plane owners to “restrict” access to their aircraft? It seems these increasingly “connected” devices are vulnerable to a small hack. Come on, let’s hear it, which blog has been warning since day one about the IoT? We do not want an “Internet of Things” that has anything to do with the current crop of coders working for the corporations. Where computers were supposed to be almost a salvation of mankind, the millennial culture (a generous term) has screwed up every last aspect of it they could lay their soft, callous-free hands and brains on. They have messed up the system so badly it cannot be fixed. Today they can steal your airplane. Tomorrow?
The government also advised people to “make sure” nobody could steal their identity by using only two pieces of ID that are kept in a secure location. That shows you how out of touch they are, totally inept. Your identity is not stolen from you. It is stolen from the government and corporations who are keeping files on you behind your back. Most of you have already had your information stolen a dozen times over and who knows how many more that have never been announced?
Read my lips, when you give your information to your insurance company, your doctor, your grocer, your banker, it is as good as stolen. The old days, they kept a card in a locked drawer. You probably have no clue how many people are tracking you behind your back. (As of today, guess around 90 to 95.) Want to hide your life, anyone? You can’t. The complacent masses allowed the surveillance state to get too big to do anything about it. City dwellers can’t order a pizza, make a phone call, buy a plane ticket, or spend a penny on-line without their identity being compromised. And they think going cashless is going to improve any of this? Man, talk about brain-dead.
I heard the peanut gallery saying we can’t run the system without giving out this information. To that, I say pooh-pooh. We can so, because we did it before. The answer was given in this blog thirty years ago, had anybody listened. In fact, I can tell you where the nonsense started. One of the earliest abuses of computer networking was credit information. I was looking to buy a townhouse in 1984-85.
Where real estate agents used to politely as your first name, they began insisting on your identification, and that you make an appointment to see them next day. It wasn’t long until I figured out they were using the info and time to run a credit check on you, even though you had not applied to them personally for any credit. What tipped me off was the real estate agents would not show me the properties I wanted, but only those that maxed out what I could have borrowed. In those days, around $400,000.
Yes, the IoT is a good idea. What’s a bad idea is leaving the power to design and implement it in the hands of the mental midgets, the clueless squads of indoctrinated goofs who call themselves programmers. Anyone who codes in C+ is a candidate for that. They don’t have a grasp on consequences, deny all responsibility, and seem baffled when you call them out. (Because they have been told they are the pinnacle of programming.) This blog announced in 1983 that anything coded in C+ (or its follow-ons) was vulnerable. As far as I know, not one person listened. All I heard was praise for C+ because it “gave access” to the real power of computers. A power that came back to bite all my disbelievers in the ass.
I will say it again. Few people are as much for progress as I am. BUT, as they exist today, it is not Artificial Intelligence, it is not the Cloud, and it is not the IoT. Stay away from them unless you want a self-driving car that can “arrest” you or a gun in your house with a trigger that can be pulled by a terrorist in Tehran. And do not trust anyone under forty around your personal computer. Even if they are not dishonest, they don’t have in-depth knowledge, and consider bad-guy updates as something missing that you need installed on your computer like it or not.
