One year ago today: January 8, 2019, a rambling post.
Five years ago today: January 8, 2015, my immigration plan.
Nine years ago today: January 8, 2011, a Bible-sized manual.
Random years ago today: January 8, 2012, a generic day.
The Reb & I jamming and rehearsing. Working on a few ideas, I’ll write more about this below. This is our old basic format that a hundred guitar players have told us doesn’t work. It must be something in their drinking water because it works incredibly well. Her on the acoustic, me on the bass, playing rather simple parts, but arranged to include every possible important element of the song. Here, we are playing some, for us, extremely rare jazz muzak. (My opinion is that if jazz was any good, people like Brahms & Beethoven wouldn’t have avoided it.)
I’ve been using LibreOffice a while on this tablet. It’s got a long ways to go and seems to have inherited a lot of the faults of MS Word. No matter how many times you set the default style, it sooner or later reverts to its version of “Calibri 11”. And try to set a page to landscape. Eight menu screens and 23 folders or sub-folder later, and then it's a global, setting all your pages instead of just the one you’re working with. That’s a sure sign of C+ code, all the easy stuff is overkilled, the medium stuff I just described barely works, and the advanced stuff they’ll still be screwing with if they last another ten years. The telling feature is, however, not one new or improved function or capability. Not one.
Another nasty feature from Word is application bloat. If you read the storage size of the app before and after a session, you’ll see it grows a little larger each use. My version of MS Word, which I’ve been using since 2003 (because unlike “newer” versions, it is backward compatible) and the program is now nearly ten gigabytes larger than when I pira . . ., er, I mean, acquired my evaluation copy. I’m still evaluating it and finding limitations. Can’t be spending good money on something that don’t work right out of the box.
In other news, the authorities are up to their old tricks. They are pushing Apple to give them the ability to unlock one phone one time, but this fools nobody. The terrorists are already dead, the phone calls are already recorded, and there is huge cause to believe the authorities already have a method, albeit expensive, for unlocking the phones. (Reputedly $1.3 million per unit.) The whole mess seems like a power grab with the authorities seeking a cheap and easy way to unlock all phones.
That’s not the way software works. One key will open all the doors. Myself, I’m against handing anybody, anywhere, the right to snoop without a warrant. I also have issues with the police treating Apple as if they are a suspect or a witness. There would be an outcry if police said the post office had to let them read everybody’s mail, so same with cell calls. The other strange lapse is people won’t take a few minutes off from their social media agendas to protect their communications. That’s all it would take but duh, they’re too busy.
Oh, and you gotta love the climate changers bellering that the Australian brush fires prove their contentions. All you have to do is ignore the fact that brush fires have been a fact of life over there since the last Ice Age. They’ve gone as far as charging that the climate change deniers belong to the “wrong” kind of political parties and are pro-gun advocates. Will these liberals ever run out of things to complain about?
Trakai, Lithuania.
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It was movie time. Over to the Providence to see “Knives Out”. Yeah, go see it or wait for the disk. Either way, it is a well-produced who-dunnit with all the cliches you can name. Heavy on the Agatha and the board game. I struggled a bit with my inability to remember names, but the movie heads in a familiar direction. There’s a heavy play on the Sherlock angle, where our detective always seems to know when he’s on the right track. There’s a lot of familiar faces, you might say it’s a family movie in every degree. Isn’t Jamie Lee Curtis, the pantsuit Queen, related to the producer? Daniel Craig is your protagonist with one of the most annoying fake accents, it will outlive the movie.
The theater advertised a $21 unlimited pass, so I picked up a brochure on the way out. Man-o-man people these days must be naive and unsuspecting. Be afraid, people, be very afraid. First of all, you can only pay monthly and only by electronic withdrawal. Who would tell a movie company where their bank is located and give them the account number? Could anyone possibly be that stupid? The blurb says unlimited movies same day—as long as the start times are at least 90 minutes apart. Stop for a second to comprehend that. Then stop again and ask yourself what situation you must put yourself in so they could enforce such a rule. Scary. It gets worse.
You must submit a photo when you “subscribe” and show photo ID to redeem. Showing ID is one thing, having them match ID to a database and you are asking for trouble. The fine print says the unlimited applies only to standard format, so you still get zapped extra for IMAX, 3D, VIP, RPX, ScreenX, and 4DX. But I would rate the worst part of this treacherous undertaking is that it only works with your tracking device. What? I mean smart phone, same thing. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. You are really paying for it with your privacy. Jesus Christ some people are stoopid, signing fundamental privacy rights away for a movie pass.
ADDENDUM
It’s no big deal, but because I like to record such things, the Reb & I have been toying around with a new tune. We talk music a lot and I don’t always mention it in the context of us together. We don’t perform the same style of music but we do collaborate to a degree. For example, if we ever decide to put some bass lines to her original material, we could easily play out. We jam a bit and occasionally one tune stands out over the others. This one is called, “You Must Be From Tennessee”. If it flies, you heard [about] it here first.
Additionally, we played the old Newton-John hit, “Let Me Be There”. It has a highly adaptable bass line, but there are a couple tricky parts where it is hard to tell if it is one guitar or two. As usual, I just go on-line to find the tab or tutorial. Wrong move, what I found is the typical shit-for-brains guitar goofs making every mistake in the book, most of them claiming it was their first tab. Even then, they collectively seem too imbecilic to grasp there even is a difference between a tab, a cheat sheet, and a chord chart. The fact they have different names is apparently not enough of a tip-off for some people. Even Songsterr, usually a good standby, messes up. In typical millennial-think, they get the notes wrong, but pat themselves on the back for presenting it in Braille, left-handed, and for ukelele. So friggen typical these days, extending minorities with junk wrapped as a gift. And saying what a good boy am I.
And hooray for the courts finally siding against patent trolls, in particular the firm Blackbird. This is the team of lawyers buying up patent rights, and suing companies for infringement with a view to settling out of court. But I disagree with this solution, because the courts did not go far enough. They stopped far short of putting a stop to the practice. Instead, they focused on issues like Blackbird saying they were not a law firm but actually were. That is not the same as punishing patent trolls. The hint should have been that the lawyers were not buying the full patent rights, but only the right to sue.
Still, it is a landmark $360k settlement against the trolls. Now, if only they could do the same with the lawyers at RIAA for doing the same damn thing with music rights.
