September 3, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 3, 2018, me not so much.
Five years ago today: September 3, 2014, your right rear tire.
Nine years ago today: September 3, 2010, a $135 on me.
Random years ago today: September 3, 2017, don’t touch my coffee.

           Dorian, Florida’s latest big storm. Once more the media displays that strange twist. When the hurricane is on the way, it’s all dire warnings that it’s unsafe so go out and spend all your money to save yourself. Then afterward, it’s on about how it was not that bad, so all you tourists can return in safety. And spend all your money. That was JZ on the phone and he says some places nearly got flattened. In that case, the prayers of Florida are that, for the good of the Republic, the entire system heads straight for Maryland. Meanwhile, here’s my half-painted lawn swing.

           Here we go again with the web pages. What an incredible mess these millennials have made of the entire Internet. What we want is to find the nearest theater that’s playing a specific movie. Instead, you get site after site of other junk as far away as Pennsylvania, and the one site that mentions the movie (Fandango) will not tell you the movie times or theater address unless you fill out what is basically an on-line credit report on yourself. Zuckerberg has nothing on a-holes like that. Those people just can’t seem to get anything right even by chance.

           I think it’s partially a result of them thinking they are the first generation that knows anything about computers. One can partially blame the Internet itself for being a good idea with a bad steering mechanism, but that’s no excuse for not learning to drive. Take my Sony camera. It the screen does not detect movement, it shuts itself off to conserve the battery. To a millennial, that is a brilliant concept. To a thinking person who wants to record still art with his ex-wife playing piano in the background, not so much. The idiocy is not the feature, but the lack of a way to disable it.
           This is that same lame model of camera that has no recording light visible from in front of the camera (but if there was, you could not turn it off). Nor does this camera give any indication that the memory card is full unless you stand watching the screen counter. If you don’t the camera never beeps or flashes, it will let you think you are still recording until you hit the stop button. Then it says something idiotic like “no movie in memory”.

           So you delete the old movies thinking you’ll make room for new ones. Wrong. If you try to delete individual files, I guarantee you will delete something you wanted to keep. You must access a computer with the proper cable and transfer everything you want. You are not out of the weeds yet. Deleting the files does not free up memory. There is nothing about the camera or manual to warn you that you must completely reformat the disk. Back 30 years ago, every camcorder you bought had at least one major defect. Poor battery life, slow boot-up, weird format, kind of thing.
           Today, every camcorder has twenty things wrong with it, all avoidable because it is all software. I recognize the problems and the crazy fixes they try to apply. It’s the result of not planning ahead, itself a result of hiring poor quality coders, a result of a poor understanding of computer history, a result of the education system. I don’t think they will ever find a solution without painfully starting over.

Picture of the day.
Kalaupapa leper colony.
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           The Reb & I took it easy after a morning trip to the vet. Sparkie, the larger dog in many pictures here had a bout with mange, a parasitic skin mite. It’s treatable but highly infectious, so at the first sign of any skin patches, it’s off to the clinic. And nowadays, every needle, pills, or ointment is a hundred dollars. I like to joke that dog’s hide is worth more than my own. We’ve cancelled other plans for this week and may instead take in a movie. Even in the entertainment field, money doesn’t grow on trees.

           I took the evening off and went for a few cold ones at the pub. That’s when I make my phone calls and it looks like on the return trip, we may have an old boy reunion in the works. Here’s a picture of the entrance to the subdivision. The sign is missing, so the local joke is the local millennials can't find their way home. The depiction is actually of a small cemetery that the city grew around. If you look on the top of the ridge, you can see a few tombstones from the Civil War era. The planners of the area were supposed to keep the cemetery up but they never did.
           The sign has been taken down for painting. It was back within 24 hours. But the wisecracks will go on and on.

ADDENDUM
           In another move toward a gig economy, Amazon has contracted out most of its deliveries. This means no worker benefits, which is an entirely predictable company tactic when employee demands get out of hand. Why should workers get their own health insurance, save for their own retirements, and pay for their own holidays when they can vote in these juicy tidbits. As for the working conditions of contractors, what they don’t like is entirely their own doing. That situation is a step back to the industrial revolution where workers were their own worst enemies. The defining common element with every generation of entitlement types is their failure to understand they are not the first.

Last Laugh