January 19, 2020

Yesteryear
One year ago today: January 19, 018, ‘family’ bands usually suck.
Five years ago today: January 19, 2014, my “no-Mars” list.
Nine years ago today: January 19, 2010, it should be seller beware.
Random years ago today: xxxx, 2017, boycott? What boycott?

           It was telepathic, but I got this message to take the morning off and go for a pancake breakfast. That, and because Android, if you use it for work instead of just goofing off, has a nasty habit of shutting itself off after the slightest typo. This is why I know nobody who uses Android is a serious user. It shares the same major fault as Windows—you cannot disable the gimp features. Millennials only feel sorry for gimps, never for the people trying to get work done. But the pancakes were good. It was my usual restaurant in Winter Haven, the one found by train so very long ago. Cost me $10.

           I thought, while up that way, why not drive the extra to the inconvenient Home Depot location on the north end? Good move, I scored $140 worth of lumber for $36, almost enough to finish the chicken coop in style. It was a full car load, but the car is a bad design. The only way to get any 8-foot lumber into the car is by folding down the back seats and putting the boards in the gap between the front seats. The problem there is Florida drivers can tell when you are hauling lumber and start to cut you off and slam on their brakes. Happens every time so you have to brake hard. The lumber slides forward and smashes your car radio. I saved on the lumber, but now have no tape deck. That’s Florida!

           This photo is just part of the lumber piled up. I also worked the crossword and noticed the community even calendar on the next page. Do we want to take a Florida gardening course or another alligator tour? There are some square dancing lessons, but I’m more comfortable being the oldest guy in the room instead of the youngest. There was a music recital over in Bartow this afternoon, but I opted to work on the coop. The chickens just will not stay here on their own.
           Once again, politics caught my interest, because of people making asses of themselves. Trump brings out the worst in the Democrats, but it also exposes them for what they are. A bunch of sub-educated liberals who have convinced themselves that most Americans are idiots who just don’t know what is good for them. How dare Trump come along and prove them wrong, no wonder they are infuriated. Their problem now is their pathetic roster of candidates. Rumor has it that 9 million extra people intend to vote for Trump just to make sure none of the Democrat candidates gets in. The Democrat party has been reduced to Canadian-style vote auctioning.

           They have one shot left, and that is to promise everything to everybody. The downside is somebody always calculates the cost, and the tab for promises so far comes to $93 trillion. Free college, free childcare, free medicare, reparations to descendents of slaves, $15 minimum wage, these Democrats are really hitting bottom. They claim it will be paid for by a 70% tax on incomes over $10 million and a 4% levy on paychecks. Sadly for them, the working class remembers how quickly 4% becomes 14%. These liberals have become unhinged.
           How about that porno database breach? It says 4,000 “models” working “adult websites” got their names, birth date, ID photo, fingerprints, and emergency contacts posted on a server in Virginia. Ha! Serves them right. I like that category “emergency contact”. Hello, mom? I thought you told me sis was working as a meter maid. (This actually happened in my family.)

           I see that Opera, the browser, has gone downhill and may be kicked off some servers. I got off Opera a few years ago after recommending it. But when they got bought out by Chinese, I retracted that pretty quickly. The Chinese are threatening to retaliate against Germany for blocking 5G networking in that country over concerns about backdoors. The Chinese point to the huge number of cars sold by Germany to China. Ha! Let them try to ban quality. Few things would foment rebellion quicker in China than having to use their own products.
           Agt. R has disappeared. It is Rendezvous week and he’s off camping. He is staff and the show and they pay him well, but I need to know how the mortgage is going. The reserves are far below acceptable levels. That’s all for now, I have a chicken coop to finish. Hey, once you get into real retirement mode, building things can be pure adrenaline. I’m also reading up on some articles about PACs, those Political Action Committees that are largely funded by rich corporations. They make it impossible for any grass roots political movement to make gains without contending with PAC opposition. The interests of big business have become increasingly misaligned with what the American people want. I’m finding lots of groups claiming to be libertarians who are using the term wrongly. We need a different term for real libertarians because there remain so few common interests. A real libertarian wants smaller government to enhance overall personal freedoms. The corporations want only to increase their profits without regard to others.

Picture of the day.
Edinbrurgh @ sunset (Reddit)
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           I’m going to ignore that joke of a fine handed to Equifax for letting bad guys access their server for three months back in 2017. What do I have against Equifax? That’s easy. I’ve never owned a credit card but they are keeping a file on me. That makes them AOLs.
           I read part of the CoolPad manual, and it is useless. I took out my bag of spare cables and tested the unit over a spectrum of computer situations. The device has some kind of chip that allows external access. Whenever I connect it to an Android device, I get that weird “Ethernet 5” connection. But if I go wireless, it gets a real CoolPad link but allows MicroSoft to try downloading their shit onto my property. I had to repeatedly go back and disable update segments of the registry. They kept reinstalling themselves. MicroSoft even sent me a threatening message to the effect the operating system was their property.

           Here is the best pic of the chicken coop yet. I shut down because of dark. Note the tarpaper over the sheathing. I used a thin layer of paneling instead of real sheathing, but hey, right now the chickens basically live outside. I cannot seem to tempt them or get them to stay in the yard. They only want to be fed and leave right after. Kind of like dating women in California. I spent five hours on the chicken coop, but that’s an easy pace, listening to Boss Hogg, and looking around for my missing staple gun, then discovering I had the wrong staples. I never could figure out why they don’t emblazon the correct staple right on the tool.
           I went on-line to see if there has been any improvement in drum boxes. Nope, still nothing that is really suitable for stage work. Remember the Beat Buddy, the guy I talked to years ago about developing such a unit? He never called back. And the Beat Buddy morphed into just another studio gadget, with 200 recorded beats of which less than 8 are of any real use. I wonder if I could use MP3 technology to slap together something that works?

           Here’s a picture of a drone jammer. They are illegal, except for police and such, another situation that is not supposed to occur in a free country. These things are damn expensive and all seem to have limited range. This box is priced at $2,700 and has no feedback whether it is working or not. Most drones are programmed to return to base if the signal is lost. Other drones are programmed to fly a path, and the makers do not specify if the jammers are effective when flying only in GPS mode. The real jammer, the one you want, is $18,000. These illegal devices are available on-line, but only a fool would make such a purchase. I had been looking for schematics. Camouflage is far cheaper than any type of jammer that is likely to work right. It was with great interest I looked at those guys who draw those amazing designs on sidewalks. Or the dazzle camouflage of WWI to confuse U-boats.
           Mild insomnia. I awoke at 1:30AM unable to sleep at all. I did the LA Times crossword and the cryptoquip. Then I threw on a weird movie called “Melancholia”. That could put anyone to sleep, except me. So, I went for the ultimate sedative. Music star interviews. They should stick to singing songs because most of them have spiceless personalities. It’s always me and the boys had nothing to do so we called up Willy Nelson and we recording this song. Why don’t they tell the truth? Just once I’d like to hear one of them say they can’t believe how lucky they got with that one stupid song, so they got drunk and hired fifty prostitutes in twenty days. Then they ran out of money so they threw together another stupid song you never heard of and still made more money than God. It’s a racket and they rolled the right dice a couple of times.

Last Laugh