One year ago today: April 16, 2019, that’s it for today.
Five years ago today: April 16, 2015, Wthe USS Sitting Duck.
Nine years ago today: April 16, 2011, $8,500 damage.
Random years ago today: April 16, 2013, nine useless songs.
Let’s check the calendar. Water the trees day. I have two non-performers, one peach, one plumb. It’s a cool morning, time to get some work done. My schedule for today is to work on the thermal chimney, more trim work in the new bathroom, and to learn my first “instrumental” song. That’s where I play bass only. Yes, I mentioned this before, but they were only candidates. I’ll bet you by the time I lay this in Set C, nobody will notice I’m barely singing. Let’s follow along today and see how much I get done. I just know you are aching for more info on the thermal chimney, the greenest project to be seen on what is basically a non-green blog, or at least green-neutral. Hey, I’m still working on non-GMO.
I’ve devised a way to put the meters inside surplus pieces of capped PVC [piping] with markings at one foot intervals, then bury the pipes in post holes for 24 hours. They can be re-used easily to find if there are any temperature variations, much as I doubt it. Hang on, let me go feed the chickens. What a racket they make when I’m late.
The music lists have gone backwards, I am less ready than two weeks ago. The explanation is the result of input from my own sources. Some music got replaced, and the lists have been revamped to have at least on classic rock tune each set. The next phase is, you guessed it, to have a showpiece bass set. This advice stems from Elliott, out west. He’s a guitarist, but a very experience arm-chair critic of bands. And he says any guitar addict who hears my set will smugly write if off as “bass is easy”. Therefore, play something he can’t. Thusforth, I’m taking another look at the Doobie’s “Listen To The Music”. Which I cannot sing no-how.
Intermittent rain had me indoors connecting the secondary bathroom lights. Having no indoor fixtures, I remember the two “garage” lights I picked up for a dollar. Wired in the first one, then opened the second. Dang. One was black, the other was white. I made a cup of coffee and sat down, watching a video on the Falklands war, which occurred at a low ebb in British military power. They still waxed Argentine arse, though it took everything the Royal Navy had. I found it amusing that they were fighting British equipment. A lot of surplus ships and some newer aircraft were sold to Argentina. I had to smile when I saw photos of the launching deck on the Mayo de Vente-Cinqo (25th of May). Sure as shooting, there was a British Seahawk helicopter, the one with dunking sonar.
That intrigued me, so I searched for a Mark Felton on the topic. He’s a military historian who produces some fairly in-depth documentaries on such topics. He detailed the British hunt for the aircraft carrier and confirmed what I though. That the British won by the skin of their teeth. I was surprised to learn that the most aggressive Argentine arm, the air force, did not launch when they detected the British first. The pilot I met in Argentina (a fugitive accused of cowardice despite that he’d lost an arm) said he would have attacked instantly.
B ut Felton points out that the jet aircraft on this World War II carrier could not steam-catapult in dead calm. And unusual as it was for the South Atlantic, there was no wind that day. These carriers have to steam full blast into a headwind to get jets off the deck.
U-boat kitchen.
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Here’s one for you. These are eight identical slats, bought, cut, and undercoated at the same time. Today I put an initial layer of brown paint and stood them up to dry. As Florida is wont to do, around twenty minutes later there was a downpour. The slats were painted as shown here from right to left. Yet only slats 3 and 6 had the paint washed off. Figure out why and get rich. I’m stumped. I spent the afternoon working on the finish in the bathroom and installing the secondary light. That’s the dim 60 watt (2 sconces) for general use rather than the six-bulb headache rack. I get all the wiring run in and open my box of two “matching set” wall lamps. Yep on is white, the other is black. I’ll spray paint it. Insert Los Angeles joke here.
The application suffers another fundamental defect. It is written without a master plan, that is, no flow char, no fundamental central algorithm. I’ve told how I’ve been in a room where I took out a pencil and started drawing logic diagrams, while others immediately began pounding at their keyboards, looking busy. They produced a lot of code faster than I did, but it never worked right. It became too much to teach each new person the same lesson. Auvoria is still learning. Each coder that came along added some kind of workaround or patch and it is past the point where changing any one thing throws something else off. Last week when we lowered the goal to trigger the trailing protector, it also lowered the trailing amount, which we did not want. Worse, there was no apparent indication the two were so related—another of those insidious “class” bugs they call features.
Here is the Brilliant.org definition of a “class”: “Class is the building block that leads to Object Oriented Programming. It is a user-defined data type, which holds its own data member and member functions, which can be accessed and used by creating an instance of that class.”
I would not be the first person to note in that definition there are fifteen English words used out of context, eight pieces of jargon, and five terms that themselves require further definition. This is your archetypical egghead non-answer (and a circular definition that starts and ends with the same word). Did you understand it? User-defined data type? Data member? Data function? Used by creating? What is an instance? More than once I have put these people to the test and found they themselves do not have a clear idea of what all that meant. And I’ll say it again, if you cannot write it down so other people in your field can understand it, then it is not a clear idea.
That was JZ on the phone for the last hour. In a familiar situation, because there is no place to spend money, he has saved up $5,000. However, because it took externalities to make it work, I don’t base anything on it. Lots of people can, in a pinch, get $5,000 together, but for the two wrong reasons. One, it isn’t very much money, and two, without a change in financial discipline, it is misleading. JZ doesn’t know computers but has a natural knack to see the outcome of matters like compound interest. He is on my Auvoria report list and is intrigued by the 1.764% average weekly return so far. True, he could just copy what I do, but even the best communications are a precious thing. Even the Reb & I who know how each other think still get it backwards sometime.
If the system goes, I have a dozen people who would invest with me in charge just to get 1%, but I do not yet trust Auvoria with large sums of money. From what I’ve seen so far, the system will only work when computerized and that is not JZ. I doubt that he could learn what is needed in the time remaining. His memory is a bit Willie Loman in only remembering the good deals. I congratulated him, but bet him $20 when this virus fiasco is over, his $5,000 will fritter away in a couple of weeks.
ADDENDUM
Here is some progress on Auvoria behind the scenes at my place. The system prints logs, but they are not normalized. They are jumbled together in unequal fields and file lengths. And the critical information for analysis is in one big text string. I had to parse it and use text formulas to separate it into columns, which I think is the only way to get related order numbers to sort together. At this point, I am following the logs to determine the logic of the software. Um, the Reb does not share my interest in such details. But, you can often tell a lot about the mentality of a programmer by simple things like what he titles his columns or what he names his variables. Or what he doesn’t title or name them.
In a small but maybe important case, a New York court decided a photographer who posted her pictures on Instagram lost exclusive rights. I totally agree. The Internet is not somebody’s private art gallery. I’ve likened it to a washroom wall, what you post there is subject to the same treatment. You cannot dictate what happens from that point onward. Websites are the most public place in world history. It cannot be expected an ISP could begin to police everything posted in the same manner as a newspaper editor and his trained staff. Nor is it up to the ISP to enforce copyright laws, because are rarely the one doing the copying. I think it is up to artists and such to control their own distribution, just like other businesses.
The facts of this case don’t match what I’m saying, but I’m glad there is a body of law that’s beginning to address this matter. While Google has a policy that they own everything posted, I never entered into any such agreement, and I guessed right that click boxes and negative option announcements do no create such a relationship. Nonetheless, I have meticulously kept copies of every post and rarely compose on-line. My policy is different than Googles. All they could succeed in doing is making me famous.
You know what grinds my gears? “Scientists” that announce breakthroughs in solar cell efficiency who achieve it using lasers. That’s cheating.
