One year ago today: May 4, 2019, work around the house.
Five years ago today: May 4, 2015, all the suspects are white.
Nine years ago today: May 4, 2011, our first antenna.
Random years ago today: May 4, 2007, a 144-year supply.
What a day. I spent the morning in Winter Haven sorting out things that needed it and finally ran into good old Ray-B. He’s in the town for a while and wants to stay. He’s staying with relations and is getting his pickup truck on the road. We met up away from any potential Caronavirus crowds and caught up on the past, what, eight years or so. I think the last time we met up was a gig at the Jacaranda around the time of his divorce. Although he had an employment contract with the cruise lines that spanned through till April, such documents are meaningless in America unless you have the money to succesfully sue for it and even more money to enforce collection.
For pictures today, I chose some shots of the work on the lean-to, although I was only out there a couple hours. I have the new shovel, and there should be a shot of a drainage slope level. That’s where a 1” tab is glued on the edge of a 4-foot level, so a “level” bubble anywhere along the pipe indicates the proper slope. Clever. I got it from a Reader’s Digest home improvement book.
The new shovel, shown leaning against the station wagon, is chicken approved, I have proof. If there is another picture, it is the drain pipe to which this slope is being applied, there's a better description below. None of this plumbing and wiring is connected yet, but thinking ahead demands doing it this way. I went out of my way to find authentic pull-chain lights, you remember. Well, at the Arkansas thrift today, I found a whole box of them.
We also talked women and insurance and politics and money, the usual. He’s so openly aware how right I called the situation that we will probably collaborate on something, if no music. Beyond doubt, I will help him steer clear of the local hazards and at least the worst thirty jarheads to steer clear of. His truck is in Jacksonville, so I may give him a lift up there. Like myself, he likes the lifestyle out west but finds it so expensive overall. And the convergence on how we find women after 30 or so is incredibly parallel, though from slightly different viewpoints. Sure, I’ll mention some, as guys talking women is part of the formula around here.
I tend to not like certain things about women because they are indicators bad scenarios, while Ray-B often does not like many of the same things in themselves. This would include tattoos, piercings, weight problems, voice patterns, and above all, certain behaviors. He’s squarely in the middle of that just now, since another five years will find him same place I was. If you have any standards at all, no matter how low, there are no women available. They may be out there, but you will never find them. And that is just as bad as if they did not exist.
There is also the vast disincentive to start over with both women and bands as one ages, because the odds of failures and letdowns become so great as to discourage even trying. If something does not work naturally, it probably is not going to work at all. He was on my newsletter list, so over the years he has received some two hundred e-mails and pictures, enough to keep him highly informed of the changes in my life and times. He sure wants to try Nashville, I advised him to start saving up money. Where would he fit into that musical scene? Well, here in Polk County, he’d be a hero who’s song list would be more than novel for many years.
In Nashville, he’d be above average and have no trouble finding situations. He would not be happy in that place. The competition that is good is really, really good. And much as I’ve just praised his music and show, in Nashville there are a thousand people at that level who are willing to play and help mop the floor afterward. How would we fare as a duo? We would take Polk by storm, in Nashville, we’d melt into the background somewhere.
We were out by Lake Howard, where I noticed a lot of the pubs that have food licenses have re-opened. Didn’t Agt. R say the old club where he worked is getting a food license? Hmmm, I think this blog is lucky I can type so fast. Who gives a shit if the local bar is open, except the barflies, I mean. The picture in the next section is a bubble level with a 1” plug on one end. It’s an old plumbing shortcut if you want an easy way to measure slope. Slide this anywhere along the pipe. Where it reads level, that is the recommended 1/4” inch slope per foot.
Newly arrived clarinets.
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The software is running again, it involved a crazy setting I wrote down and got the wrong parameter. I had mistook “starting lot size” with “maximum lot size”, then mucked up another setting trying to correct it. Yep, my fault, but I wound up learning a number of things about the operation that are not so congenial. One is that they use misleading buzzwords for regular accounting terms. So when you get with one of their mentors, it’s talking apples and oranges. It gets either party thinking the other one doesn’t know basics, a temperamental situation indeed.
How that issue got resolved is I was reduced to, in my view, explaining what a report was and from their view, asking for something nobody ever had before. It worked, because when I said it was “a document with the date in the upper right-hand corner and a title at the top of the page”, oh, they said, you mean a report. Yes, thank you. Turns out they exist—and in the format I described with all the fields and control breaks (subtotals). It’s there as a template and what do you know, it matches exactly the format I had created on my own. (My oath, it is nothing but the ancient Microsoft Access format, haven’t seen that in twenty years.) But the potential for oil and water established now. Each party went through the phases of thinking the other did not have a clue. Until we discovered we both new spreadsheet terminology, we were constantly off on tangents.
Progress is not a smooth process. From this meeting I have a considerably stronger sense of what their labels mean. Top of that list is the number called “Net Position”. It would more accurately be called “your account performance this week, based on your beginning balance, expressed as a percentage”. In one of those situations that did not help, when the account apparently froze, it did so at the same number (0.16) as the figure I had entered in error as maximum lot size. That explains why I could not find the ratio that was causing this number—and they had a few choice expressions to let me know they thought my looking for the ratios to be a waste of time and overthinking the situation. Causing me to think they don’t understand ratios involve other numbers, and so on. I’m robot club, no experiment is a failure if you learn something. Friction means progress.
The other lesson from this is I had best not expect a lot of help from people who may conclude I am a smartass who nitpicks to the fifth decimal point. But then, I never did expect a lot of help of the kind I need. The account lost 11 hours of the critical early week buy-in period, and that wrong setting exposed the entire balance to a leveraged loss. You know me, I immediately conclude that if that is possible, why is the setting even accessible to beginners in the first place? Password the damn thing. This fuels my contention that the coders, while likely the cream of the crop from today’s schools, are still inexperienced teenagers doing basically what they are told. I recognize it because, in my day, you had to work so hard at not being that way if you wanted to pass the course. I swear these days they let the students vote on which exam answers are correct.
I ran out of comedy DVDs this week, so I switched to watching youTubes of old Al sharpton being questioned by Gowdy & Gaetz. Two fed-level prosecutors up against the past-master of the shifty non-answers. I was on the floor howling. Sharpton has honed his bat radar so he recognizes questioning patterns and has become almost slicker than a New York City police chief on the six-o'clock. I can just hear Trey Gowdy saying, “I want you to answer the question I asked, not the one you want to answer.”
ADDENDUM
The Forex trading software is complicated. I suppose all software is, but I mean it is complicated to use. This is normally the result of trying to “computerize” a manual procedure rather than applying brainwork to see if there is a solution that maximizes the computer’s capabilities. This takes longer and requires skilled labor. So now, we have Auvoria Prime. Here are my thoughts after this week. I repeat, it is not true Artificial intelligence, but its evil cousin called pattern matching. Thus, there are countless snags to run into, countless setting that need constant tending.
I’ve made mistakes, some of them risky, and they have a pattern. It is usually when I run into labels that are not descriptive, or worse, have the opposite effect of what they say. I’ve already given examples and I keep finding more. The standard procedure is to use the on-line tutorials and often this is the only recourse. These have all the defects of Internet postings, lots of information but only an inch deep. And the usual hour of listening for five minutes of information. This has already given me headaches, so it is those tutorials I have comments on this time.
Likely, I will not really understand the operation and displays until I can relate them to ordinary accounting terms. This is the biggest headache at present. It is understandable that those making the tutorials would have an aversion to words like “Ponzi” or “pyramid”, but that has spilled over into the field of accounting terms. They don’t like them, plain and simple. They also don’t know them and have substituted buzzwords which are a pain to learn, particularly when they put a spin on the definition to avoid certain, um, aspects. Like I said, they don’t know their own accounting period is one week and don’t have a balance sheet.
Thus, when I’m at a meeting and ask questions, I get a lot of flak for “overthinking” when it is really a question they don’t want to answer. Well, that’s unfair, let me reword that. Rather than directly answer such questions, they prefer to “bring you along”, which is something I have an aversion to. I was there when one of the attendees asked if Auvoria was a company. Darn rights it is, and it is also a business, but you should have seen them play dodgeball with the answer. I understand the guarded answer, I just don’t understand why. A simple yes would have sufficed.
I’m plodding along at their speed, so plan on at least another month using the demo. The lack of common vocabulary means too often communication gets reduced to describing things. It’s that scenario where neither party is going to appreciate the other’s choice of words. They bat around a term “CHF” and have a laff, but to me that means congestive heart failure, I don’t laugh and they presume I don’t get it. By the time the question period opens, I’ve forgotten about it.
