November 2, 2019
Yesteryear
One year ago today: November 2, 2018, lime trees, pineapples.
Five years ago today: November 2, 2014, 57 degrees, wow.
Nine years ago today: November 2, 2010, merely great?
Random years ago today: November 2, 1982, a year on the job.
What luck, it warmed up enough to spend time outside. Good, it was getting stuff with all the windows closed. Here’s a classic, the doggies with their winter sweaters on basking in the sunlight. And watching me seal up the gate. It’s pretty amazing how the dog managed to figure out since he could not pull the metal rod out of the eyebolts, to bend the rod. Many humans would have trouble with that one. We were up on Lebanon Pike most of the morning. That’s the top story, gang. Lucas transmission leak seal, ground turkey, some hardware, and an extended walk in the park once the sun started cooperating.
I should have known better going to the Goodwill for some work clothes. It’s right after welfare day and the lineups to the register were halfway down the aisles. It was fun trying to get out of the parking lot. Screw this, one of the defining characteristics of poor people is how it takes them twice as long to do simple things.
Back home I cooked up a week’s supply of dog meals. I’m going to have to admit how domesticated I’ve become. It has never taken much to get me settled down. This is the newest diet for the dogs, as the Reb has decided no more pellets and cans. You are looking at a couple hours in the kitchen each week, sometimes more. They get a mix that is mostly lean turkey boiled in three pound batches. The water is saved as the dogs love it for a treat. I got an e-mail back from the band manager and he has decided not to pursue the live performing. For now it is studio work. Not me. The only thing that bores me more than recording studios is the people who work there.
Picture of the day.
Anti-facial recognition scarf.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Velcro is useful, but it wears out. None of the doggies parkas or sweaters would stay on until the idea hit me. Put the harness on the outside, that’ll hold things in place. Back home, I unloaded most of my tools from the car and got to work repairing the birdhouses. The nests were clogged with old material and one had the remnants of a wasp nest. I cleaned them all and placed them in the sunlight for a few hours. That’s kind to the animals but got me reflecting on how things have changed in one year. Last November I was read to conquer the world. Today I would like to build more birdhouses. I’m aware of how quickly things evolved. I love new things in life and now what’s new has taken a turn.
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That’s why I had to grin when I read the article on the journals kept by the inhabitants of the ISS, the space station. Read between the lines and you’ve got this blog. A sizeable segment of what is written concerns the ground crew’s annoying effect of constantly telling people what to do because it is procedure. If that were the only parallel, it’s enough to show how right this blog has been about NASA and the monstrous waste of money they have become. And one thing they should have learned but refuse to is that choosing astronauts for the “likeability” in the job interview does not work for outer space.
Ah, but astronauts are already highly trained and disciplined individuals. Wrong. I won’t get into it, but NASA has long had some faulty “social mixture” criteria where each crew must contain some idiot’s concept of a personality balance. This brought back memories of my time at the phone company, where I regularly pulled 8-hour shifts with people whom I had nothing in common with, or more accurately, had nothing in common with me. I’m just not that into TV sports, lottery tickets, and co-worker gossip. This produced the screwball scenario where there were complaints about working with me because “there was nobody to talk to.”
Yet, when we were allowed to form our own teams, there was immense competition to partner with me. No, not personality, but because my team always finished the tasks so far ahead of the pack that we could take the afternoons off. At least I doubt it was my personality, though I could add women loved to work with me. Just not my kind of women, but still. Good women will listen and learn, bad women will try to get you to do their job for them. Then, I read about journals kept by the spacefarers. Possibly more on this in the future.
[Author’s note: I had been reading about NASA because of their recent decision to double the length of the flights to Mars. The normal trip takes six months, but citing savings in fuel (but presumably not food), NASA plans to take one year each way. Let me speak for millions when I say if our countries once-greatest and most illustrious agency finds itself placed on gas rationing, the bastards have nobody to blame but themselves.]
Meanwhile, take a gander at these two panels. On the left is the metal rod bend by the dog. This is threaded down to eyebolts to hold the full length of the wire fence tight against the shed. Sparkie was able to defeat any single attachment point by learning the wire itself could be bent, then spring back into place leaving no evidence. Somehow, he seems to have learned bending the rod, shown here, will pop it out of the lower bolt. Normally, that requires tow hands and a knee. The rightmost panel shows the new rod lying beside its bent out of shape cousin.
ADDENDUM
Scraping, the process of gleaning profile information off the Internet to profile users. I repeat, once you are profiled, it is not possible to change your identity, hide information, change your appearance, or lose your past. I told how the biometric signature device works. Once you sign your name once, it records the speed and pressure and 1,024 other characteristics of your hand movement. After that, no matter what you sign, it will positively ID you to the authorities, credit card companies, and who knows. That is only one example. They have hundreds of different methods of profiling, including the way you walk, smile, and even the addresses on anything you mail is collected into a database.
That’s why I chose this opportunity to tell you why you should use a two-stage password system. This is where you use one password to get into the system, say Protonmail, and a second password to access your data. The reason is simple. Have you ever opened one account where you accidentally typed in the password for a different account? It happens all the time. You just clear the field and key in the correct password. No harm done, you might think.
Unless it was a Google account. Google permanently records every keystroke and the “wrong” password you entered is now their property. They know quite well it is for a different account and it does not take them long to figure out which one. The two-password system works because by the time you enter the second password, you are no longer using Google—unless you are stupid enough to be using g-mail, in which case nobody can help you. And it does not matter if you change your Google passwords. They know how long it takes you to type your password, the rate at which you type and the pause between characters. That, peeps, is what profiling is all about. You cannot possibly change everything about yourself that they have on file. Most people cannot even comprehend how electronic profiling works.
Last Laugh
