One year ago today: January 16, 2018, Miami, via Lake Placid.
Five years ago today: January 16, 2014, define “mixed”.
Nine years ago today: January 16, 2011, my first Arduino arrives!
Random years ago today: January 16, 2014, my two top quotes.
I put in the morning on the chicken coop, taking advantage of the cool. I forgot my framing hammer in Tennessee. Using a smaller hammer reminded me of a summer job I had in my early twenties out near Seattle. I was on a crew framing bungalows in the north end and they hired this yahoo from Spokane. He worked fast but did a lot of damage in the process, or at least what I consider damage. For instance, to get a piece of sheathing, he’d ram his hammer claw through the board and drag it into place like that. True, it gets covered up but the walls are full of puncture holes. One day I asked him why he did that.
She’s such a sweetheart you get two pictures of her. The hillbilly calls her Tilde, obviously unaware that it is a keyboard character. What? Yes, in the upper left on a 101, left of the 1 key. See that squiggly thing looks like this ~. That’s a tilde. You already knew that, but in the future when this blog is required reading, some millennial types won’t. Hmmm, what would you call a millennial in the year 3000? Let me think on that. Next, here are the collard greens. Everybody says they are doing exceptionally well. I guess so. I’ll look up today how to prepare them. The leaves, shown here, are bright and somewhat crispy. Not like lettuce, I mean, more like a bit crunchy. That’s morning dew all over them. Do you pick the whole plant? Or just harvest the leaves? Work with me here.
“How Great Though Art”
“What A Friend We Have In Jesus”
“Old Rugged Cross”
“Funk #49”
Okay, so I made one of those up. To see if everybody was awake. I’m not. Noon is my chosen spot for siesta today. I threw on a Sylvester Stallone movie, “Eye See You”. You know, what is with Stallone and for that matter, Ralph Lundgren, and that other karate guy who isn’t Chuck Norris? These guys all have chunky, motherly brunettes as co-stars. Come on, people. Hollywood is full of blonde babes who’ll do anything for a movie roll. So why not stick with women who are a little easier on the eyes. Think of your audience. I don’t go to the movies to see women who look like dating club rejects. Did you hear that, Theresa?
I’ve used up all the suitable scrap lumber for the coop. From here on in, I have to buy new. Strange, innit, that the chickens take priority over my floor and plumbing? I priced out the cheapest siding I could find. Gasp! Even allowing for inflation, I though I could still buy the cheapest grade of plywood for $10 bucks a sheet. Nope, the thinnest 5mm, much like cardboard, is $15 a sheet. In fact, until I can find something on sale, I might opt for cardboard.
S hown here, I’m pointing at the two icons. On the left, Ethernet 5 Public Network, on the right, CoolPad notification. I suspect there is something wrong with this new CoolPad system and they are providing an alternative service until they iron it out. The path is probably not secure, but I never send sensitive information over cell phone anyway. I know something is wrong because it never asks for my passcode.
Anthropomorphism.
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Yep, I need the lean-to. My work habits are now evolved. I tend to get a late start, but then work late into the night. That night is too soon in the winter. I would probably putter till 10:00PM it seems. The authorities appear to have finally done something about the mosquito plague. Probably the mining companies since I did not receive any propaganda from the city or tax increases. Usually by dusk you either head inside or smell like a Dupont convention. This afternoon, I built the roof for the chicken coop. It’s not done, but I’m also learning the skill. Building this coop is like a scale model. It is more difficult than robot models, but the rules are the same. Namely 30% of your time planning, the rest trial and error and plenty of mistakes until you get it.
The radio commercial that, to me, epitomizes the mass stupidity of the ass-enders is that bank that says come on in and open an account in five minutes. Why, they’ll even give you 50 million bonus points and a box of Girl Scout cookies if you give them the names and addresses of five family members. Folks, this is not progress. Be very afraid. The bank is advertising that they’ve got so much on you that they don’t have to pretend they trust you. Sign here and you’re a valued customer—and don’t forget, your call is important to them. That’s why the wait time is nearly an hour.
It was pitch black by 6:00PM, so I scrounged around to find that documentary on the chemicals in American food. Since World War Two, the family farms have been dying out because of increased production. That sounds backwards, but the fact is chemical-laced farming, which includes fertilizer and pesticides, has made yields so high that the prices drop below the cost of growing real food. And the farmers sell off. Also, the big GMO producers and corn agribusiness corporations get government subsidies.
One thing I’m learning is be wary of mass organic producers. I never thought about it, but how fresh is something grown organically if it is then shipped a thousand miles away and sold a week later? There is also a growing list of pesticides that are approved as organic. The same video quoted 5200 people a year in America die from eating manufactured food. They did not elaborate. A million acres a year disappear every year due to urban sprawl. The year 2000 is quoted as the point where the amount of American farm land began to decline for the first time in history. The concept here is that really fresh food must be grown on farm land near the cities.
More mouths to feed and less land. Says the video, those two lines are sooner or later going to cross. They point out farming is no longer an occupation on the census, it is grouped with “all other”. They introduce a new (to me) term, “biodynamic methods”. This is where the farming follows the lunar cycle, not the calendar. The example given was wine growing. The lunar cycle determines when the sap flows down the stems for the winter. If the grapes are picked before that stage, the wine contains some of the bitter sap.
One more item of interest was getting kids to eat vegetables. The farms in Oregon have shown the best way is to get the kids to help grow the vegetables. I can see that, but I can also see how that could quickly become, well, a form of forced labor. This I know a lot about, so don’t argue the point. Force the kids to weed the garden and you’ll get the opposite effect, both agriculturally and socially. I’ve been watching that collard grow. My back yard has different soil than the front by quite a degree. The back yard is forest soil, the front yard is sandy mine tailings. I’ll be doing some thinking on this.
I’ve lost half the twelve pounds I gained during 2019 by sticking to the same diet as the Reb. Each day involves a bit of fasting, that is, down time in excess of 12 hours. It takes that long after your last meal to trigger your system into digesting stored calories. The longer your system stays in that mode, the more weight you lose. It seems to work. She cautions that you can break the fast by eating as little as 11 calories. And you go through the usual diet adjustment stretch with the growlies, dizzy spells, and temptations. I’m well past that stage and found that I can now easily quash any unusually strong urges with a good hot cup of herbal tea.
And I think that is what I shall do right now.
Here’s some technology news that does not surprise this blog and you can guess why. The European Union is considering a law that all smart phones have the same charging device. Amnesty International has finally said it is American advertising behind all the sneaky profiling. If I was Apple, I’d be considering some new type of encryption that is based on the individual phone, not the system. The thought of handing the authorities “elevated” permission to search your encrypted files should terrify people. What’s needed is a way to unlock specific phones without compromising the whole system. That is what the bureaucrats are really after.
You know it because even after Apple handed law enforcement all the data off the phone, the cops are still pushing for backdoor access. What’s that smell?
ADDENDUM
I just had an interesting back-and-forth with Protonmail. This concerns how they cut off my service because my e-mail had a spam-like profile. Well! Upon hearing their position on this, I concluded they were trying to fight fire with fire. Wrong—you can’t do that with America. The spammers have an infinite number of millennial monkeys coding their shit. The way to combat them, I wrote, was not to monitor content, but to restrict frequency. Limit the number of e-mails a given account can transmit to (say) one every five minutes. Then you kick the spammers where it really hurts—in the wallet. Let’s see how Proton reacts.
At the same time, I mentioned how I’ve been an enemy of spam, telemarketing, and intrusive advertising in general. The American system is broken, but it still out-performs any other system the rest of the world has managed. They re-instated by service, with a note that they consider my circumstances to be unique and of interest. Except they worded it kind of yeah-okay. Give them time to think. I based by 5-minute interval on how long it took me to compose, enter, and review a valid e-mail. Hence, my proposal to Proton was that slowing down the transmission frequency would choke off the money, driving spammers toward suck-hole providers like Google, Yahoo!, and Live, dot fucking com. Do I make myself clear?
Next, I ran through the chosen song-list for my solo guitar act. That’s the second pass. I’m lousy, but my piano background gives me a steady beat. My dance instructor background tells me I’ve chosen highly dance-able material. Singing and playing is still new to me. What’s different this time is that I’ve lowered my personal standards. Sure, I know heaps of other musicians settled for this lower standard. The difference is I’m not saying I’m good.
I’ve made up my usual “30 repeats” chart. By the end, I’m determined to play in public no matter how bad it sounds. Anybody who can sing and play for three or four hours simply has to have a market somewhere. Maybe I can balance things. Maybe not.
