October 30, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 30, 2018, a generic day.
Five years ago today: October 30, 2014, a near miss.
Nine years ago today: October 30, 2010, early pedal pub research.
Random years ago today: October 30, 2013, Wichita Falls and Altus

           Yep, the surest sign of obsolescence is when something that began selling for $600 finally hits the Wal*Mart shelves at twenty bucks. I bought that DVD player, since the unit from the Goodwill didn’t work. I took a chance on it, so the question remains. What sort of scumbag donates a non-working item to Goodwill? My guess would be telemarketers, which is the bottom of the food chain. And this DVD has every known feature and works off a USB plug. Durability is anybody’s guess.

           I left the airport at 5:45AM and hit vertical rain. Talk about cold. It was one quick shopping trip and back here near the fireplace. How cold was it? The dogs and cats curled up together. I could not even get the dogs to go for a walk with their sweaters on. Hand-knitted sweaters. Instead, I piled them in the car and went for a drive. My Florida car has no heat but it keeps us out of the breeze.

           That means nothing happened around here. The flight landed safely, so my priority was to sip coffee and catch up on my magazines that arrived since I was away. How sad that PopSci has become more of a comic book. I still don’t have the right derogatory term for people who always include stock suffixes (like black holes cannot be said without adding “not even light”, that kind of thing). This time it was about the ocean deep, not for a scientific expedition, but to break the record for the number of descents or something. They always have to add we know less about the ocean floor than we do about the Moon. Probably for good reason.

           Let’s see if the lack of activity can be made up for with interesting gifs and photos. Like here are the first three pints of tranny fluid that went into the car. It costs $5, so I’m draining the last of each can into one. And below somewhere is the picture is that crop in Georgia I could not identify. And the tree with the orange-red leaves that had did not look like a maple.

           And I found out what the 5.7/10 nonsense was on the Garmin searches. It’s a gimpy rating system intended to compete with Yelp. Except who needs a rating system to buy gas and shop at Wal*Mart. Worse, it is based on a head-count of replies, rather than content. I learned back in the aughts how one well-researched and comprehensive positive review can be nixed by ten negative slurs from morons who didn’t read the user manual. The aughts? It’s an archaic term for nothing, so the years 2000 to 2009 have aughts in the middle.

           It was quiet enough that I went on youTube to find a documentary. Man, has that site gone downhill. The worst is docutainment, five minutes of content stretched into an hour. One crappy development from years back I call the “Togla” is a series of stills posted as a video. The other degeneration is the profligate number of how-to posts that have no commentary, only a pair of hands assembling something. Who remembers Togla the Turk? If you like the Last Laff feature, it is descended from Togla. I criticized his juvenile “video” of stills and brain-dead psuedo-rap backing tracks, which it turns out he was selling.

           You can see Togla go surfing in the Sea of Ankarra on May 26, 2015 (keep scrolling). I ran a segment of his stale music and video and he complained to Google, the only time this blog has been blocked. This began a series of posts which featured a dig at Togla at the conclusion, known as the Togla Treat. The original post was blocked, but the concept evolved into the Last Laff. The blog is still here while Togla is history. Had to quit with the e-business and get a job on his uncle’s goat farm.

           [Author’s note: let’s get one thing straight. Togla did not complain to Google over a bona fide copyright issue. He abused the system to remove a negative review of his product and advertising method. If he’d had any lerts, he would have welcomed the publicity.]

           Here's the mystery Georgia crop.

Picture of the day.
Micrometer set, $12,911.63.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           You gotta love this double hairpin turn (or is it a switchbaack) in the mountain pass just east of Gatlinburg. On these longer gifs, you may notice the odd “backward” skip in the action. You can thank IBM for that. Coders don’t know the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers—from what I gather this is not even taught any more. So occasionally the collating sequence throws an 11 before a 2 and you get that glitch. Millennials love ordinal numbers in computer code. Some of their finest examples include the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, the sinking of the Sheffield, and the shallow dive of Flight 302. The bad code has to share the blame with their mentality, evidenced by how many hundreds of them die every year taking selfies.

ADDENDUM
           And a hello from Tennessee. Except for Lily. I think, overnight, she ran away with the gypsies. That's JeePee bobbing for onions.

Last Laugh