One year ago today: August 18, 2019, 93% lean.
Five years ago today: August 18, 2015, cancel the wagon idea.
Nine years ago today: August 18, 2011, Wmusic 805, the essay.
Random years ago today: August 18, 2013, 1/200th of a cent.
I’m soaked but I got the majority of the scooter canopy in place. Finally, a dry place to park. The casual observer would have thought I was bonkers. It was too hot by 10-ish, but I noticed the western sky was clouding over early. The afternoon shower doesn’t happen all at once, you get up to two hours building cloud cover and lower temps before the deluge. So I flew at that roof like a banshee and got the back third boarded over and another third covered. At the first crack of thunder, get off the roof, this is Florida. I’ll have this canopy finished in another couple hours. This picture is the steroid pills they gave me. I’ve never seen this [card arrangement] before, but everybody else seems to know how this works.
One can imagine two thumb typists trying to solve a syntax problem by tele-commute, then making things even worse by phoning, “You said CaT! “ “No, I said cAt!” Whee. A lot of the javascript examples in my single textbook on the topic contain embedded HTML commands, making punctuation a dog’s breakfast. I’ve read other texts and the final chapter tends to be a gimp attempt to sell the reader on OOPs, the old initiate instances of a class bullshit. Psst, folks, they are called “variables” and you should have one variable for each parameter, related only by a common variable root word and scope.
Using my programming method, that would be vCat-1, vCat-2, vCat-3, etc, although I would tend toward descriptive names. Plus, all my variables begin with the letter “v”. Thus when you encounter it later in the program, you instantly know it is a variable and usually don’t have to go back to find its declaration. I read through OOPs and just as quickly forget it. The big selling point is their claim that OOPs more closely matches how humans think. I’ll correct that for them. It is the way mundane, weakly educated, two-dimensional, irresponsible humans think. I have little doubt the hodgepodge of code they produce represents their true mental state, if that’s what you’re asking.
My position is the last thing you want is computer code that works the way most humans think. Bad programming seeks its own level. I’m not even going to supply an example. If you want to witness the application of mass stupidity, I direct you the nearest DMV.
Makassar City Hall.
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Let’s take a look behind the scenes, the great American mortgage scam. Convince two hundred million people that they must borrow so much money for a house to live in that they will pay for the rest of their working lives, and you get awfully rich. Myself, I’ve never made a mortgage payment, but I imagine it is lot like paying rent. You can never take any real time off because the next payment is always due. And that brings a new situation into focus. It seems the terrible mortgage on Agt. R’s place, the one that keeps him paying until he is 81, is not that rare. The nearby picture is there because I thought it a nice spot for a picture today. It’s irrelevant to the post. Who would take a picture of replacing a stove liner? Who knows? Maybe there was drinking involved?
It’s economically fascinating how he’s arranged his affairs like my own, but for totally different reasons. He has his phone and utilities under a different name. He gets his mail at a remote address. He does not buy certain things locally and so on. His motive is the same, he likes to be let alone, but how or where he learned how to do all this so comprehensively is a mystery, even to himself. He says over the years he simply ceased doing things that were causing him grief. I suppose that could be--but what a contrast to my deliberate decision to drop off the economic grid.
Another difference is his approach to women. Ha, some guys never learn and he’s a prime example. When I first met the guy, he shows me this picture of some gal he met on-line and asked what I thought. So I told him. In three days, she’s going to say she likes him and ask for money to pay the cable bill so she can keep writing to him. In six days she’ll say she wants to meet him, but first she wants to see his house. Oh no, he told her he owns a house. I said try an experiment. Tell her you don’t have any money. He was blocked and unfriended faster than Amazon can say “free offer”. Then he tells me she’d already got him for $150.
In an exclusive first, this blog will now tell you what I told this guy a week ago about what I think the latest dating scam is on-line. I was guessing, but I guessed right. This is the older person dating scene, the younger one has not changed since the day social networking arrived. It’s the old people who took time to adapt. These ladies are always in their late 30s, early 40s but post a picture from their 20s. They will always tell you they have their own money, around $1700 per month. The motive seems to be to make you think they are self-supporting. They’ll tell you they have a kid, they won’t tell you he is 6-foot-3, weighs 320 pounds, he’s 17 in reform school, and taking court-ordered behavioral control drugs.
She’ll say she’s divorced. She won’t say the ex is still in the picture and crashes on her sofa between jobs. But the tip-off is how they now ask for money. WiFi money so they can text you. Gas money so they can visit you, prescription money so they won’t die on you. There’s one working the websites over here in Lake Wales, I’ve seen her picture around town. She’s got several suckers on call, but can’t seem to keep her stories straight.
This is where my advice from 40 years ago comes into play. Ask her to think to herself how she paid for these things before you came along. Then tell her to keep on paying for them that way. Watch her bolt. This, folks, is why I believe in very long pre-marital relationships.
ADDENDUM
I don’t mind the lack of quality radio because I like a lot of the reruns from Internet Archive. That’s one of those free libraries the DMCA people are trying to run out of business. Go have a look, no link here but it’s a huge selection, of which I go directly to the old radio broadcasts in MP3 format. Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police, the Lone Ranger, and Tarzan, all corny old material but it beats Michael Jackson and the Spice Girls in my book, small pun intended. Who cares what I listen to? There is a relevant connection here. Now that I have the shed, which has no WiFi, I would like to download the radio programs to disk and play them while I’m working.
Not so fast. Internet Archive, the great purveyor of sharing copyrighted material, has disabled their download button. Ironic that an outfit whose content is other people’s material would go through such pains to stop you from doing the same. I’m working on a way to get at the MP3s but it looks like they are streaming them, so unless you record the audio in real time, you never get the whole file available. But I’m looking. Their indexing system is crap, but eventually you can find a complete collection like James Burke’s “Connections” in one spot.
[Author’s note: these old recordings hold no fascination for me, but I never heard them when I was a kid. I find out later in life this makes me somewhat unique in that it is all new material to me but old to everyone else. Wait, there’s more. Compared to today’s output, a lot of the ancient material is far better written and researched. I doubt one podcast in a hundred thousand could compare with your average 1950s radio broadcast.
I used to tune in to re-broadcasts, like Armed Forces radio, but the government has licensed so many foreign language stations that you cannot get consistent good reception more than 40 miles, maybe [without some major non-English interference]. Darn rights I would rather play back something decent from before I was born than put up with most contemporary Facebook-grade blither.]
