One year ago today: May 3, 2019, long-winded.
Five years ago today: May 3, 2015, babes in cowboy jeans, yeah!
Nine years ago today: May 3, 2011, it was slang.
Random years ago today: May 3, 2007, security my eye.
I turned up one shovelful this morning and found a brick. The neighbor, I’m fixing his gate now, came over to say there had been a two story house beside his garage. I did not know Union soldiers came this far south, but he says there were all over the place, so it may be a vintage brick. I hope there is a whole foundry to be unearthed because I bought some fancy bricks to make an edging around one of the agave plants and they were $2.38 each. You see, when the factories here switched over to free trade mode, they killed two birds. They hired illegals, but kept the prices as high as if they had American workers. Now the supply has dried up, they have to start paying medical and benefits again and the prices go sky-high.
The lumber for the shed floor is here but do I have the energy today? I used the early morning to work on that fence, which I know sidetracked me. Hey, Sunday. I can slack off. But I didn’t, and I got to the stage of burying a drain pipe. I struck some kind of metal grate in the ground. It is big, it is heavy, and it broke my shovel. It underlies the exact spot where I left the huge sections of tree trunk several years ago. The ones too large for my chain saw, so they are still under all that kudzu. Now I have to move them to get that grate out of the way.
I also finished the frame of the roof section on the lean-to. There was a small stretch working around another tree stump, but it’s done. I got into the dirt a bit and dug some shallow troughs for the ground contact wood floor. This is the second wooden handled shovel I’ve broken in this yard by trying to pry up objects, the point is I did not apply that much pressure. It’s them cheap-ass Wal*Mart shovels if you ask me. Nearby is my uprated storage for birdseed. I think this is a three-gallon bucket of black oil sunflower seeds.
Ray-B is up in Winter Haven, as he puts it, enjoying the social distancing. He’s in the generation behind me, the ones who are supposed to be heavily into computers in the sense that they are not forgiven if they aren’t. He’s put together some web pages using HTML & CSS. Those who create web pages look at those two products quite different than a programmer (such as myself). Having never used or seen real code, they often mistake these over-punctuated scripts as a true programming language. However, real languages have at least one important thing that scripts don’t. It is called structure.
[Author’s note: the lack of structure is what eventually dooms a scripting language. I know there to be some 30 different coding languages out there all vying to be the next big thing. But they are just variations on the same theme. To see how bad HTML has become, bring up a list of commands they no longer “support”. They have created so much of their own junk, they even have a term for their libraries of out-moded commands: deprecated. And each so-called fix or workaround creates even more.]
One of the reasons I let HTML lapse was lack of standards. Every other month some new idiotic set of commands or reserved words came out that were not improvements, but just the next half-wit stab at trying to fix the thing. Except you know that cannot be done because each set of code quickly reaches the stage where every “fix” throws something else off. I’ll have more to say about this later today, because I’ll soon have money at risk. Many beginners with these scripts don’t realize these are sourly outdated bad concepts from the 1990s. You can make a web page but that’s all it is. People have no more reason to look at your page than anybody else’s. Because neither of the scripts makes the page interactive. It kind of just sits there. This is a criticism I leveled at web pages back in the early 2000s.
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People came into the shop, having paid a small fortune for a web page originally advertised for $99.99, only to find out the world did not flock to their door. Usually they were shocked to know that just like a regular “store” you had to pay for advertising. Search engines are not designed for your convenience; they are designed for Google’s. And if you think Google is your friend, you probably like the cable TV company as well. They made their page and wanted to know how to sell stuff on-line. They had been led to believe once you had your web page, people could click on a button and buy your shit.
Most web pages are bulletin boards and I can’t tell you how many people got scammed on them. They pay for a web page, then find out you need a domain, then an ISP, then a two year-contract, and away you go. This blog in the mid-2000s details the crap I went through trying to get straight answers and finally walked away from it. Web pages are the breakfast special of the millennial mind-set. No matter what the door sign says the “special” is going to cost you full price. They call it clever, I call it fraud, but it’s another majority rules situation You don’t be telling your average millennial how to run a restaurant. These people grew up eating pizza by the slice.
1957 Mercedes 300 SL Roadster.
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I dry-fitted a lot of the piping for the sink in the shed. That will be a great improvement over using the fancy indoor washbasins to get dusted off. Amazing how porcelain doesn’t react to grease, oil, sawdust, you know, working man byproducts. I want a tub back there that I can degrease without guilt. I’ve decided to shell out for a fiber-glass handled shovel. The wooden replacement handles cost nearly as much a new shovel, so that’s enough planned obsolescence for me. Here is a view of the ceiling planked with cedar fence panels. It’s a lot better-looking and cooler than metal and for a work area, it looks quite fine.
Agt. R asked about hurricane strapping. The rafters are all strapped but not the entire structure. The shed have only minimal bolting the concrete base. But those are so rusted through, the sheds will be long gone before any wind takes the lean-to down—I think. The rafters are only 2x4” but they are 12” O.C. That’s all pressure treated.
Auvoria Prime, the Forex trading software package. As my understanding of its nuances grows, the more I see it as an unwieldy product with nobody in charge of the coders. I warned of this so many times, it is like letting the fox guard the chicken coop. Coders act in isolation when it comes to modules (subroutines). Coding is not so much non-linear, but more concentric. If somebody codes at one level it affects the concentric levels surrounding it. Hence, I was cautiously smug when a few of my suggestions were acted on, the result is nothing l would put my name on.
The system is stalled. I was right about it not stopping trading as specified in the control window. That was a mixture of global and local commands, which should be well separated. I think they realize what was wrong and tried a quick fix and now it is stuck. You see, to get the software to stop trading on Wednesday, they had to trigger the “Weekly Goal Reached” subroutine, which shuts down everything. They either restore the bad code or face the daunting task of reading through the entire printout (I still call code listings by that term) to find all the latent dependencies. That could take years. Meanhile, five hours into trading and I’ve received no trade notifications and the only active orders are from last week.
Another poor performer is the reports module. It is plain the programmers know very little about accounting standards. Or database design. Every proper accounting system needs a known and regular point at which things “freeze” for a momentary snapshot. It’s called a balance sheet and is not only needed for comparisons to budgets and performance, but is a legal requirement. You know about this from many things I’ve said, the ending balance of one period becomes the beginning balance of the next. Well, I’m right now looking at this week’s trading records and despite no trades, the balances have changed. If you want me to invest, you have to instill me with confidence in your reports.
A glance at the musician’s listing shows that bozo from New York is advertising for another band in Lakeland. Fat chance, his idea of a band remains you learn his worn out song set. How about this other guy claiming 30 years experience and plays “exact renditions”. That normally means he can’t play rhythm.
ADDENDUM
A message from Trent whose firm helps broker equipment and supplies. Even if it were not for tariffs and trade deals, it is always unwise for any nation to outsource any service or product that would be of national concern if the foreign supply is ever cut off. It works both ways, however. The USA is burning Saudi oil in anticipation of a war. My concern is the USA has allowed its refining capabilities to lapse. That can’t be turned up overnight and modern war tends to be short and to the point.
Trent points out how once any industry ends the growth phase and enters the plateau phase, the one remaining savings is to follow the cheap labor. Mexico gloated after NAFTA how US industry flooded south, but not for long. Mexico thought they had it made until China geared up. All we hear now is a howling sound from across the Rio Grande. I’ve always warned about losing core capabilities from the personal to the national level.
Have you heard of Moovit? It’s a company from Jerusalem that claims to let you get around anyplace in the world using the most efficient transportation available. I might go to Tokyo and get across town with a combination of taxis, trains, busses, or bicycle. However, Intel just bought them out for a billion dollars. The app is just not worth that kind of money. So what is Intel really after? What does the software do that creates such demand? Something tells me we will soon find out.
