August 12, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: August 12, 2018, spyware in 1998!
Five years ago today: August 12, 2014, depressed billionaires.
Nine years ago today: August 12, 2010, same crime, different time.
Random years ago today: August 12, 2013, none were available.

           So, I was talking to my old contact at the phone place. When you call and hear an Asian accent, you are probably talking to someone overseas. I can confirm something—they have a posting on the wall telling them what the weather is the day you think you are calling locally. I started asking that question so long ago I hope I was influential in making then institutionalize the lie. Here is my progress report, the jigsaw puzzle. Yes, the one sky piece left of the mountain is missing. Otherwise, the landscape is coming along nicely. This works, since I have not gotten my second wind yet. You are looking at my heavy lifting for the day.

           And the video, with Hackman, always a good bet. “Chamber” is about a grandson defending his grandfather on death row. These films can be eerie in the sense the original intention was to present certain factions as saying things that were unreasonable. Then twenty years later it turns they were in fact, more than reasonable. Whoops, there Hollywood. The plot is a good portrayal of why politicians cannot themselves obey all that many laws.

           Have you ever heard of a dog allergic to chicken? I’m unconvinced. It’s like with people. When I was young, allergies were rare. Now every other person’s got them. Of courses, if these are true allergies, I blame the artificial food they’ve been eating. Especially people who develop these allergies later in life. True allergies don’t work that way. There are two sorts of people who have allergies. Those who keep it to themselves, and those who do not. Those who do not want warning labels everywhere, which adds to the cost and annoyance. And of that group, I have yet to meet a specimen who is allergic to something they like. Way too damn many people allergic to things they don’t like. Is what I’m saying.
           Who recalls the story of the comedian who deposited a fake sweepstakes check for $95,000? His name was Patrick Combs, and, Internet-wise he has disappeared. To be exact, I wanted to find out what the banks eventually did to the guy. He had just begun to describe how the banks went wild on him. His book is “Man 1, Bank 0”. Then zing, the story ends. He gets a few sentences in Wikipedia referring to him as an occasional media personality and tax cheat. That’s disrespectful in itself, considering the guy once delivered a stranger’s baby on the sidewalk. His web site plugs him as a motivational speaker. Fine, but we want to know when and how the banks got the money back, considering it was the bank’s error.

Picture of the day.
Alpha Chi Omega barn dance crew.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Yep, times are slow. You can tell when a burnt out refrigerator bulb is top story of the afternoon. Face it, the guys took a vote and decided they needed to rest up for their pre-siesta nap time. It’s not like I get a lot of help, nomsayn? And I got a note from the band manager. He needs me “100% on all 64 tunes”. Or he gets their old bassist back. I told you, this is a brutal business. The hitch for me is that I could do the show, but not to any degree of professional satisfaction. Don’t start packing, there’s still 17 days left to get off my ass and learn the material. Or, like this lightbulb, my Nashville musical career could get really dim really fast.

           On a normal day, 90 minutes music practice is my limit. So I took a break and investigated some of the software I’ve collected over time. I tend to zero in on what I need and overlook useful features. One I like in PhotoScape™ is the batch feature. It’s limited but I can finally watermark my gifs. Scout around below and see if got motivated and uploaded a sample for you. It also seems to have a picture-in-picture option I haven’t had time to follow up, but of courses, the first thing I would check is if it will imbed a gif in a gif. It may not be the final format, but you should see a gif with both a watermark and datestamp.
           Yes, there is a motive behind all this but allow me to keep you in suspense some of the time. I’m not in music for the money because there isn’t any, but you might say I’m in the blog affair for the readership. This wouldn’t apply to you personally, but it is always nice to know somebody’s life is duller than my own. BWAAAa-ha-ha-ha-ha. Even the dog is laughing.

           CD ripping software has become slower. This is not an intensive operation, so I bench tested several new applications side by side, as in on-line and off-line. The off-line was faster. There’s your tip-off something is fishy, but there is no way I’m using Windows Media Player. I don’t have time to follow up, but my guess is whenever you are ripping, if you are on-line, there is some kind of database comparison going on. My advice is, thusforth, don’t rip while you are on the Internet. Turn off any ID3, that ridiculous “music organizer”, and rename your ripped files after each session. One brand I sort of liked was Express Rip CD Ripper, which I promptly pirated. Why? Because they advertise it as free and it isn’t free. It is a trial version. Trial versions that say free are a waste of your time.
           This is stealing. Not me, them. They stole my time, knowing damn well I would not have even looked at their wares if I thought it was limited to 5 rips. And my fee for my time is to take the software for free, just like they said. Please, nobody hand me that crap they only said the download was free. When I see the word free on-line and it isn’t free, I help myself. My needs are basic, so often a limited use version is fine. But I don’t like con artists, and people who place conditions on free fit that definition.

ADDENDUM
           Here’s a mini-lecture for you today, and it is really free. For now. I have a box of CD audio books, but not only does my 20+ year old car lack a CD player, the disks are bulky to store. I rip the CD tracks to a single MP3 that fits on my little Eclipse. This player is much maligned by people who plain expect too much for $16 or whatever they cost these days. I’m converting big files to small files. I purchased the CDs from the library for 50 cents each. I will spend up to a dollar at the Thrift. Many of these audio books carry price tags of twenty times that. Which is just too bad. With the advent of electronics, book prices should have dropped. Since the authors aren’t getting any bigger a cut, we know where the money is going.
           And they want more. There is a movement afoot to stop libraries from lending books currently in print. They say read it in the library, a move meant to inconvenience most people. It’s then a short step to all books, even out of print. Some people even want to ban the library practice of buying multiple copies of new books at a discount. All theses emerging problems are a direct consequence of a coupling between the DMCA and surveillance capabilities. The end goal of that industry is to charge a user fee for each individual use, which at first glance seems “only fair”. It isn’t. You would still be charged full price for the book or the music, but it would become illegal to access it a second time without paying a fee. The intrusion into privacy to make such a system work is unthinkable. Give anybody that kind of power once and you will never taste freedom again.

           The protest is overtly a move to stop on-line “lending libraries”. Those outfits, calling themselves “open libraries” let users borrow scanned copies of physical books. The solution is already in place, the law that makes it illegal to make the scans, is already in place. They need only enforce it properly. What’s nefarious is the industry is not pressuring to enforce the existing law. Instead they are pushing to add a clause making it illegal to “obtain” the scans. Most of us know what the authorities do to innocent people to unknowingly come into possession of stolen property. We don’t need to give anyone, much less the police, that same power over comic books.

Last Laugh