One year ago today: January 30, 2019, whoa, typo city.
Five years ago today: January 30, 015, drunk broad attitude phases.
Nine years ago today: January 30, 2011, the actual trailer at the court.
Random years ago today: January 30, 2013, the Barn, Aventura.
Welcome to Ft. Meyers. It was not that great a day, but I did get around. I could not find that big bookstore from the time JZ and I went swimming in the Gulf. Not even an on-line search, but I recalled there was a Goodwill book donation center a few hundred yards from the store. Didn’t find either. The meeting was not blog material, but let’s just say I signed some documents that could bring a quick solution. You want the fun parts. I visited everybody I knew in town. But it is Super Bowl time again and I can’t even name the teams. The Boston Broncobrains vs. the Sacramento Shitheads. Did you know the average man consumes, during the game and events, 10,000 calories. Myself, I can’t stand even watching such behavior, but that’s just me.
This photo is an item I bought because of the price. It’s a short range FM transmitter that plugs into an earphone jack and plays on your car stereo. I already have a setup, but it took a hit from a piece of lumber the other week. This unit is better and that’s one less trailing wire to snag on things. It is built in Viet Nam, can play on twenty different frequencies, and sells fo $7.95. This would be impossible in America, where most labor has priced itself out of the market. Nobody is building new factories unless it can operate on immigrant part-timers. You know who to thank for that.
In my own lifetime, I’ve seen the dollar plummet to a dime, and on things that matter, to a nickel. That’s a good rule of thumb for my personal experience. What cost 25 cents in my day now costs $2.50. Certain items, like the 5 cent chocolate bar are now $1.89. In theory, if competition works as it is supposed to in a capitalist system, prices should actually go down, but the system is broken. Then again, I do not view communism as the opposite of capitalism except in theory. In practice the true force against capitalism is money-lending. Think about that, because the subject is not taught in our schools.
Without credit, buyers develop an entirely different perception of value. They learn restraint and the concept of delayed reward. Without credit, sellers would be under severe pressure to maintain quality in what they sell—even if they do not manufacture it themselves. And they would have a tough time trying to sell anything for a penny more than it was worth. It is credit, not communism, that destroys capitalism. Credit displaces value on to notions that have no inherent worth. Like the worthless American dollar. It only has value as long as everybody plays the game.
Taking the scenic route back, I wound up at a Mexican restaurant in Arcadia. I don’t otherwise care for that town, but this was authentic. Nobody spoke English (how do these people get past immigration). They had the usually candy and pottery from Mexico and my one meal of that day was a combo. I never could tell you the names of Mexican foods that come in rolls or crispy shells. I took my time and read up on Javascript. It’s another “dot” language created by goofs who really don’t know much about the proper use of punctuation. The one thing about on-line businesses are they are so alike. And if you don’t care for that format, too bad. And the majority of them have a faint aroma of dishonesty about them, even if you are just looking.
My opinion is the way net businesses work is a process that evolved down rather than up. My incentive is to take a closer look at the role that Javascript plays in the transaction part. Let’s just say I was somewhat intrigued by how Opera, a browser I quit recommending years ago, started out so great and then fell into the micro-loan business to the point they were almost arrested.
Firefighting tank, Russia.
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I’m delving into Javascript. It has nothing to recommend it, but like a lot of such things around the Internet, it somehow became a standard. What I would like is to get a crack at the real code that makes Javascript operate. But I cannot find even a mention of that layer. I’m further into the language that ever before, so I’ll continue until, as happens with all Internet affairs, the advanced material outruns the systems it is supposed to work on. It only takes a few minutes to find features that don’t work right on every browser. This is a fault of the way browsers are coded. You can’t fix things without adding more code, which eventually unstabilizes the entire workings. Just look at how IE (Internet Explorer) grew to where it fell from its own weight.
I instantly disliked Javascript for using two types of variable addressing. Done right, there should be only one method in a given software product. This is hard to describe, but here’s my attempt. A variable is a location in memory. You plug a value in there and take it out when you need it. Changing the value in that location is something you only do deliberately. But these self-styled “object oriented” languages can treat that two ways, this is not a technical explanation. They can either use the value or make a copy of the value and use that. You can now change the value of that copy without changing the original value in memory. There are a number of ways this is done, in my day we called them “pointers”.
Either method is acceptable if it is consistent. The dangers and problems rear up when they are mixed. And they always are in web page scripting languages. When I encounter memory location problems, that’s the first thing I look for. But it is clear by the failure rates of airplanes, ships, and space probes that this caution is not shared by the majority of college grads nowadays. Javascript embodies nearly every evil aspect of C+ and OOPS programming. Proponents love to chime that object-oriented is the most widely used programming style because it organizes information the same way as the human brain. Fools they be, since computers were intended to help humanity get around that restriction. Just as humanity allows stupidity, so does OOPS programming.
I’ve never been a fan of unstructured programming languages. The code becomes just as convoluted as some people’s thinking. The code became big not because it was good, but because it was another case of majority rule and first to market.
Congratulations to Hawaii being the first state to unanimously adopt Right to Repair. It makes sense to me an island has less need for electronic landfill than continents. But please let this be a nail in the coffin for Sony, who brought us this mess starting with the “service contract” back in the 80s. And the Department of Justice finally took this blogs advice and followed the money. It led to TollFreeDeals, Global Voicecom, Global Telecommunications Services, and KAT Telecom. All were fraudulent robocalls with ties to India, which should give you some idea of the mentality over there. Does this mean I won’t be practicing my Urdu profanity on that prick Paki-Waki any more? Aw, too bad.
Not so great news with encryption. The non-elects in DC, led by that wretched hypocrite Lindsey Graham are pushing for mandatory rights to read your encrypted communications. I use Protonmail from Switzerland and that is one company they would target. Graham seeks to require electronic backdoors and is once again packaging it as anti-child pornography, his favorite tactic for pushing horrific bills against privacy. The guy is unhinged and will do or say anything to keep what he considers his permanent job, being a senator. Let’s hope he shot himself in the foot this time.
ADDENDUM
You get the long version of this next item. It’s a reminder of the origins of this blog as a journal and my own bad memory. Couple that with my agreement on the statement that if you really done something, it ain’t bragging – just hold off on the embellishments. This concerns my singing, something I could not do until one day in around 2009, I “figured it out”. I grew up thinking it was a talent you had or didn’t and it’s now one of those things I wish somebody had told me the easy way. But, in my life anyway, that’s never happened yet. Same with money, budgetting, and other important things, no mentors in my time. This will take some wording here because what happened next ties all this together.
When I finally could sing, I found I could also do decent imitations of other singers, even yodeling. But the old saying that bass players can’t sing has solid reasons behind it. Critics will point out how some bass players sing, but they have not noticed the tradeoff. When the bassist sings, his bass lines suffer, and vice versa. What I did to combat that was force myself to learn to keep the bass lines going and it was so much extra hard work, I’m not surprised not a lot of people do it.
However, the unexpected benefit of this was I found I could bass solo, something I’ve never seen anybody else do. It’s out there, but I never saw it, that is, my act was independently derived. And by 2012 I was soloing in Colorado. My last solo was in 2018 at the pavilion in Winter Haven when my guitar player quit without notice. So, where is all this going? While in Nashville, I paid close attention to the ads and what other bassists were doing. And a lot of the ads specified harmony vocals. Hell, I thought, singing melody is tough enough, I went out to see how harmonies were even possible.
What I found was predictable. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of these people have what I don’t, it’s called real talent. I witnessed how so many of them were faking it by reverting to simplistic bass—in the worse cases, they played the same dull bass line every time they sang harmonies. I further noticed it is hard to spot unless you are looking for it, but imparted that dullness to the overall sound. Now let’s look at those harmony vocals. Over the previous 18 months, I’ve been trying to learn this. The process was the same, I just figured it out same as melody vocals, but got much worst over the same said limitation—bad bass playing. And it gets worse before it gets better. Yes, but. I may lack the talent but I have the experience on how to force these things to work together. Keep reading.
Forget books and Internet lessons, they have the tedious “it’s easy” approach that doesn’t work for me or most people. And I discovered lead singers do not like to rehearse with harmonies. And they themselves don’t like to do harmonies. That is important to the understanding we’re working toward. What they want and usually expect is that you have separately learned the harmony parts and show up ready to accompany. Thus, I had no person to practice with, not even the Reb. I dealt with this the same as my bass playing. I sang along with the recordings, but this created another problem. If you have ever sung along with a recording and the recording stops, you discover how badly you sound and that you don’t really know the material. You know what I’m talking about.
I kept at it anyway, as was my habit. This was an almost hopeless task and I made it worse by playing solo bass the way I do. The result was a year later another discovery. There was one version of harmonies I could do while playing real bass lines. Who remembers my reports on how I play a lot of thirds on the bass? Well, I could do that one harmony vocal as well. Thirds are the sweet-sounding vocals you hear in so much country music. And, I could do the thirds an octave lower with practice. I’m getting to the point.
The lack of a practice partner found me doing something peculiar and music-wise, seemingly useless, which I say because I’ve never seen it. Since most harmony vocals occur during the choruses, I found I could sing melody along to the verses, switch to harmony thirds for the chorus, then back to lead vocals for the next verse. It’s just the way I practice. This seemed such a non-starter that I never gave it a second thought. Until last evening. Charla fired up the Karoke machine for some friends and asked if I wanted to sing. Sure.
My act is extroverted, and the lady singer before me was still on the stage with the mic in her hand. I often get the whole room singing along, and gestured for her to sing. Guess what happened? She sang the melody and I semi-automatically switched to the harmony line. What a sound! I looked around to see where it was coming from. I reverted to lead vocals for the next verse, and next chorus I was ready. It happened again. And, if done right, nobody out there notices the roles are inverted. I’m not very strong at it, but this is a repeat of how I learned to sing at all. What have I stumbled on here?
It’s only thirds, but I can play real bass lines to them. I wonder. Up to now, I assumed what everybody else does—that the lead vocalist sings the whole song and if there are harmonies, they are added on. That is, a given singer either sings lead or sings backup, no mixture allowed. I sang three more tunes to make sure it was real. This would be something if I discover I don’t need somebody else to do harmonies if I want them in one of “my” songs. Is that clear enough? I let them sing the melody to the chorus and I do my own harmony thirds.
Since most people know the lyrics to the chorus, this means little effort on their part. It increases my workload, which is hardly a surprise. Give me a little time to pursue this.
