One year ago today: July 31, 2018, cannot be allowed.
Five years ago today: July 31, 2014, except, they were rich.
Nine years ago today: July 31, 2010, no Nashville for Fast Eddie.
Random years ago today: July 31, 2017, new Boeing interior.
There you have it, scientific types. If you want to find out how many long hours you can still put in, disconnect your bathroom sink. For me it’s been around a week in what should have been two days. Be fair, I made mistakes I could have covered over and I didn’t have to wait the full 24 hours for glue to dry. I got the work done, but I was calling upon reserves that finally shifted me back to low gear this morning. I went out in the cool morning air and transplanted some backbone plants. That’s how I found this little guy, the orange flow whose name I told you I’d forget. So I’m calling him Pete. Look at the tyke, what a fighter.
When Boss Hogg fades, there are two nearby English stations. The business news with all the lame-brain forecasters, and Tampa libtard. This morning they had the worst of the worst bleeding heart liberal broadcast. It was painful to listen to that crazy broad, but blogs rules say something that unique gets a mention. She was on about how people were not sensitive enough to the needs of autistic children and their parents. The parents needed molly-coddling as much as the children, was her position. She was advocating there be enacted a law that punishes people who “aren’t sensitive enough”.
Such laws are necessary, she asserts, because taking her autistic children to restaurants to make that weird howl only retards can make was, in her own words, “not educating the public rapidly enough” and people were “just not responding properly”. I had to keep listening because reprehensible as she was, this lady was astoundingly educated, though plainly not very smart. It’s the same old liberal tack, they want the right to dictate how other people behave. She wanted restaurants to record the names of those who complained, and be required to turn those names into the authorities for punishment and fines.
Wait, there’s more. She was an advocate of autism as a “spectrum”. That’s where everybody has a bad condition to some degree. On her scale, people like Teller and Einstein were not geniuses at all, they just had autism to a lesser extent (my wording). Her point being smart people should be more understanding, because we all have learning disabilities, handicaps, and drug dependencies that could take over any time. Pay up, you, because you are not actually smart since there is no such thing. You are simply better at pretending to be “not stupid” and people like her see right through your little charade. No need to bring my family into this.
Now don’t you dare criticize her. That would make you racist, homophobic, xenophobic, chauvinistic, hate mongering, bigoted, and who knows what else into the mix? I listened in disbelief for an hour. The message was clear, when in the Tampa area, if you enter a restaurant with a stack of booster seats and crayons on the table, get the hell out of there, pronto.
Rindfleisch.
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Yes, we have a problem. The box stated the fixture was 12” tall. But when fully opened, the handle makes it 14” tall and another inch for clearance. In turn, that blocks the medicine cabinets. I can raise the cabinets several inches, which also means destroying my nice drywall job, but you know about making omelets. Here is a so-so stitched picture of the scene from an impossible angle. You can see all the important measurements and the cardboard template [stapled] on the wall. The solution is two-fold. One is to raise the cabinets, which will take a half-day. And the other is to locate shorter faucets.
Feeling unenergetic, I finally plunked down in from of the computer and began to test ways to improve the gifs. They’ve proven popular, though I have never had a great opinion of the staying power of any links. And Googles reputation for on-going support of their offerings is less than stellar. Remember when they took away video. For a little background on this, the Reb is more trusting than I am about on-line transactions. I would use the web if buying and selling was as anonymous as originally promised. But I’ve seen the other side of things and I prefer to deal in cash only. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, take your hotdog and get lost.
Having said that, read today’s addendum for more gif information. Here’s the less useful items I’ve worked through. First, renaming the files. I have a way to get around EBCDIC collating, but have not worked out a method to arrange the originals first. The goal was to renumber the files backwards so the gifs could be used for special effects. So far, that part is a no-go. The second objective was to find a way to add titles. That came out fine. Here’s a sample.
An offshoot of this is I can now add watermarks to batches of files and need to find out what this “exif” information is all about. (It was all camera settings.) I’ve turned off as many of the hidden attributes as I know of, like the tracking feature. Overall, this is my first venture into any type of photo locating system other than filing the originals roughly by the month they were taken. No doubt there are apps for all I’m doing, but I favor older software that doesn’t install other crap without permission.
Not a word on the radio about the deportations. That’s taken by most to be a good sign, since the hostile media and political opponents of both parties would be working overtime to attack Trump. They keep resorting to worn-out tactics that only work on their own kind, which shows how unhinged they’ve become. The CBS news (Tampa again), that’s the world news (ha-ha) was over in four minutes. Something is afoot when liberals won’t even lie about something. The popular and now populist feeling is that it is not Trump who isn’t building the wall. It is the foot-draggers in DC.
That’s interesting to the voters who have been on to Establishment trickery for years, but were not allowed to vote on real issues. The Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are banking on the failure to get the wall built as the key issue of the next year, but it is not about the wall. They think it is about undermining Trump and his voter base. In reality, it could be the death knell of their reprehensible political philosophies. They’ve spent too many years and dollars going around telling people they are too stupid to grasp the really important issues.
And I’m not even all that political a person. I do, however, dislike people who show up and start rearranging the furniture without being asked.
ADDENDUM
I may have a breakthrough. Reb sees advertising potential in the way I can produce gifs within minutes of an event. I was not satisfied with the results. I found the pictures to be too jerky and if the pictures is enlarged much, it gets hard on the eyes. It goes without much saying there is no way in bloody hell I would send my videos to one of those on-line outfits. I examined their sample posts and discovered they are running into the same limitation. It is not the original quality at fault, but the speed at which the gif software can capture stills from the footage. And you can’t do much about that.
Ah, see the smart bluejay? He’s not eating the seeds from the feeder. The clever bastard is throwing the seeds onto the ground. He emptied the feeder in a minute. He’s a bully, keeping the cardinals away. I’ll fix that, but look at the video again. I think I’ve made the awaited breakthrough. Look how smooth the action is. The bird’s movements are almost natural and you can see the seeds flying. Formerly, trying to catch individual scenes like that was hit and miss.
This isn’t movie-quality, but I’ve just discovered the trick. I’m not saying I invented anything, only that I derived this independently. Using only equipment I have on this old 386 running Win XP. To my astonishment, it takes very little extra effort to add this feature to the clips. My goal was a more flowing result, and you can see for yourself how I’m doing. Give me a few hours to see what I come up with.
With music today, I got maybe an hour in. I began learning the third Charlie Daniels tune of my life, the other two being “Long-haired Country Boy” and “Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye”. This time it’s “The South’s Gonna Do It Again”. As always the bass lines are difficult and dynamite.
Going through my oldest computer music files, I found the actual date on which I began to convert everything to MP3. It was February 13, 2006 just past noon hour. Seems like a late date, doesn’t it. Prior to that, I had a mix of files, but learned most of my list by ear and the odd time I found sheet music. I’ve lost too many times buying the newest rage, so it was not an easy matter of grabbing some computer files and popping on the headphones. I thoroughly checked out the sound, since I was skeptical that such small files could have the desired qualities.
I also had to completely go over what software was available, was it free, could I manipulate the files, and importantly, could I change the key. I finally decided on Audacity, which I still use to this day. I don’t have a huge music collection because they are a learning library. My estimate is maybe 1,835 tunes counting duplicates. I know of a dude who downloaded 130,000 pieces before Napster was informed that sharing was no longer an American custom. I rarely listen to my files. Most are favorites and many are tunes I’ve learned because of the band I was in.
Do I have an all-time favorite? Nope. As for performers, I grew up liking The Beatles but not once they broke up. For that matter, I never liked McCartney. He’s cranked out a lot of crap that would never have got listened to but for his former fame. Beginning in 1987 I began a long conversion to what was then considered country music, but my choices were individual songs, not any given artist. The most tunes I’ve played by a single entity would be Johnny Cash at six tunes. I’d have to check, but of the top 100 pieces I’ve played on stage, probably more than 80 were only tunes by a given artist.
Off the top of my head, can I name twenty people where I play one tune by them? Here goes. Jimmy Buffet, Don Williams, Elle King, Linda Ronstadt, Freddy Fender, Merle Haggard, Miranda Lambert, Rolling Stones, Waylon Jennings, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Diamond, Faith Hill, Alan Jackson, Hank Junior, Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Creedence Clearwater, Vince Gill, Conway Twitty, George Strait, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Chuck Berry, Patti Loveless, Marshal Tucker, John Denver, Travis Tritt, George Strait, Doobie Brothers, Johnny Rivers, Don Gibson, Jim Stafford, Pistol Annie, Nancy Sinatra, ZZ Top, Garth Brooks, Bruce Springstein, Otis Redding, David Allen Coe, and Dwight Yoakum.
Likely another dozen tunes who I don’t know who recorded them. This list shows both my demographic and my audiences. Since new country is basically old clichés strung together, I can play it in my sleep. It’s okay for jukebox fare, but the classics expose it as anemic for stage work. But it’s here to stay, since even bad music develops a following.
My music completion index today is 38.281%.
