One year ago today: August 24, 2018, by my 7th year.
Five years ago today: August 24, 2014, enhance, dammit, enhance.
Nine years ago today: August 24, 2010, young Jagger’s audition.
Random years ago today: August 24, 2012, Golden, Colorado.
How about a post about good old-fashioned learning by experience? I’d give you more, but such articles can only move at the pace I cover the work. To start, let’s talk creating MP3s. I mentioned last day my preference for ripping individual tracks from CDs to place on my MP3 player in the car. I should have included why the bother. It’s because my MP3 player does not have a memory. If I record an entire one hour track, I can’t come back to a given spot after I shut the car off. Audio CDs tend to have chapters that are four minutes long, like music. By ripping those, it makes long road trips more my style.
With all the new laws about what you can or can’t do while driving, listening to the radio is back in fashion. The hitch being there is nothing to listen to. American programming has gone for a royal dump. What about podcasts? Podcasts I find to be iffy and shallow. One source you might like is OTR, meaning old time radio. Inspect carefully, as many of these sites are hosted by bullshit artists. For example, at
Download Free Old Time Radio Shows, the one thing you cannot do is download anything. You can play it and record it, but only in real time. The show I wanted was 44 half-hour episodes. Screw them lying bastards. They are really selling pre-burned CDs. Of course it is illegal bait and switch, but the authorities are too uneducated to catch even the simplest Internet con artists. There may be some way to download the files, but it is no simple matter of clicking on the download button that says MP3. I’ll try some unzipping, but the reason for MP3 is so you don’t have to compress them.
Myself, I was no more a fan of radio than TV, but in 2016 found I liked to listen to old episodes of Tarzan and Jack Benny while working on the house. The Boss Hogg influence. This expanded to downloading some of the shows, which snowballed into another effect on my bass playing. Interested? It has to do with the background music.
While no patron of swing music, the backing tracks for these old programs is more harmonic to my ear than the actual hit songs. It has flourishes between the vocals, usually blaring trumpets or clarinets. These riffs are adaptable to bass runs that flesh out the tune where it needs it. When played on bass, they are novel because, being jazz music, they don’t just echo the melody like a lot of new country. I directly copy a lot of these tags and feel pretty safe I’ll never be discovered. I mean, the places I play, who listens to the radio? They’re all to kewl for that.
During these downloads, you always run into liberal leftist broadcasts. And they are still milking the mass shootings in El Paso. Trump did call the illegals an invasion of criminals. The media is twisting that into him referring to women and children as criminals. Nope, he distinctly said he was talking about the criminals. I’m for partial gun control (pistols and automatic rifles), but the liberals know they can never take over this country without total gun control, so the issue is intractable.
Nobody is going to hand over everything he worked for to make some lazy bastard equal. The liberals don’t want to just govern, they want to shove their agenda down everybody’s throats. As long as they persist, the shootings will continue. They don’t seem to understand their cutting off every dissenting point of view is the same as cornering any animal. The tighter the corner, the more violent the fight for survival. These liberals are picking a fight and blubbering when they find it. They have so lost 2020.
Later, I think I have a format that will work. Before, each disk ripped produced files with the same name. This meant (with Windows) having to go through each file and rename it in the proper sequence. But I noticed there was an option to include the album name. Ah, just rename the albums as Disk 1, Disk 2, and so on. It seems to be working—as long as you understand EBCDIC that 1 is really 001. What a pathetic thing that MicroSoft still has no instruction to look at the last file number and start numbering up from there. Nor will it number backwards, which would make for interesting picture files.
Two million years.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Trump is doubling down on the tariffs. Good. With prices returning to what they should be, the people who will mainly suffer are those who were, technically, getting away with something. If Trump gets high-skilled manufacturing back on track, the US still has a shot at regaining its former position. This position was earned, and far from being jealous, the world at large should appreciate that for all it’s imperfections, the US is the only candidate for that slot. Let the Chinese counter-embargo, the fact is their economy is not market-based and they cannot possibly win any efficiency contests.
And I hope it carries in its wake another housing tumble. I compute that if houses drop in price to match the jobs people have to buy them, it would wipe out all the largely imaginary gains since the last bust. This is the situation that’s described in this blog many times. Prices going up while sales are stagnant, banks refusing mortgages that would reflect a downward trend, and constant hype in the newspapers masking the downside. Once again, those with a even a small pile of cash will win. Remember, I got the last good deal in Florida. Let’s do it again.
It looks like most of Clarkesville is for sale. It’s like people are clearing out of there. There’s a houseboat for sale in Old Hickory, but does that include the water? Get it, the water? Hey, I tried. Here, take a look at these buns fresh out of the oven. They are not overdone, this batch of dough has to be left in a bit longer. The Reb has a slow oven. At least it’s a dumb oven, so Facebook has to read this blog to find out what’s cooking. As for my newly invented term, “creep list”, you know all those surveys and tests that people answered too honestly because they thought they were anonymous? Wrong, people who have their info on social media can be identified from that dataset with 99.98% accuracy, according to Business Insider, no link.
ADDENDUM
Some of you can sit back and smile knowingly, since my momentum to keep busy has begun to accumulate me a complete set of duplicate tools in Tennessee. Wrong, this happens to me any place I go, you would be more accurate to conclude anything is better than watching TV. With me, you’d be right. Here is a picture of the box I’m building for my oscillating tool. I get to tell you what I learned that wasn’t in the instructions. In this picture you can see me beginning to glue, clamp, and drill the lumber. This is a progress report, this is what I’ve learned.
What else have I picked up that isn’t in the textbooks? Measurements, no matter how accurate, still won’t fit together by themselves. This picture doesn’t show the chronologics of assembly. The clamps are holding the wood into place while I drill the pilot holes. Why? Because the act of drilling can cause a slight offset that you do not want. Here’s an instance where I use touch, not sight or corner clamps to keep the wood edges aligned. They do wiggle and squirm by themselves. There may be methods to stop this, but I find keeping clamps handy works. You may notice drywall screws, which rust, being used despite it being the mark of an amateur.
I’ve further learned that wood isn’t the rigid material I thought. Every cut produces a slight warp, which can be reduced but not removed by keeping your saw blade very sharp. I want to move to using rabbet joints, a choice over others like dovetail, box, or various dowel and wafer arrangements. It might be my technique, but it seems the tiny amount that wood will shrink and swell, weakening the joint unless I use glue. Like I said, I’m learning. Did I just say “chronologics”?
I don’t have the photography equipment to show you the closeness of fit with these joints. It is accomplished by feel, not visually. I didn’t come up with this myself, but by remembering the old Chinese adage about the blind lady who would only buy eggs laid by black chickens. The people laughed until they learned how she could tell. Same thing here, these joints are the simplest “butt” style, but they are flush to the thousandths of an inch.
These are the best pics I can get you and they don’t reveal what I’d like you to see. The joints are completely smooth to the touch across the different wood grains. I’m able to place the hinges right first time now. This is my fifth box, so there isn’t much distance to get here. Mainly I learned about the wood and what they mean by a 1” hinge, things like that. These few boxes turned out to be the lab part, and the only way to learn most of the repetitious basics. I’m ready for better joinery. I’ve already spent a hundred dollars on tools.
