One year ago today: August 7, 2019, Cordele, GA.
Five years ago today: August 7, 2015, 3,500 bullets.
Nine years ago today: August 7, 2011, single with $40,000.
Random years ago today: August 7, 2010x, 805 pounds of motorcycle.
Announcement: bass player needs physical therapy. And it’s twice a week until something gives. Since I kept active with the exercises, my performance was effectively identical to two years ago. No better, no worse, we picked up where we left off. The steroids make movement itself easier but just as painful. It’s confirmed, I eventually will develop arthritis at the damaged location. My musician buddies all were correct, if I go for surgery, there will be some loss of sensation. For those who’ve not see how a therapist measures progress, it is a big protractor that aligns with how far you can move an appendage.
A radish crop does not count for much besides proof of concept. You see, radishes are the easiest vegetable to grow. I read somewhere people will often plant a row of radishes along a slower growing plant so they sprout and mark the row. And they are ready for harvest before much else sprouts. A trip in the near future is now a given. We’ll find out which plants can fend for themselves.
That’s enough, the therapy doctor always finds the limit and backs off slightly. This results in residual discomfort because you learn to avoid working those parts. Now I have an uncomfortable shoulder blade. It’s under the very muscle group I shift slightly when playing bass. If this becomes the beginning of the end, remember I never gave up in my entire adult life and all my teens.
I finished the “Sign of the Scorpion” the audio book. The only real novel concept was clone law. In the future, clones become human as soon as the original being dies and assumes his identity. Neat concept, but the insurance companies, divorce courts, and tax department will never let that happen. My apathy toward politicians is unchanged, but I enjoy a good firefight when the liberals are on the losing end. If they’ve turned an ordinary election into a fight for their survival. They are a disorganized rabble. Their lockdown has caused other diseases to soar. They can’t seem to get anything right.
The audio book was the usual disappointment. Other than a few outdated classics (pardon the clash of meanings there), it is not the A-Team who’s material goes to audio. They are more like the movies that go straight to DVD. It’s coincidence but they do tend toward leftist themes, but not the radical left. In this book, the horrors of the brain-clamped workers are exposed, but only toward a reconciliation between the US and Mexico, the one-big-happy-family ending. Folks, I’ve spent time in Mexico and Mexico City. I don’t want one molecule of the USA to adopt a single aspect of their culture, their belief system, or their way of life. I’m not for it or against it for Mexicans, but I have personally seen it up close and I don’t anything about us to be like Mexico—but I also think the same of Canada. To the small-minded even that makes me the r-word. Does this mean my account gets de-googled? Un-googled? Dis-googled? Google-goofed.
Actually, it doesn’t matter since the real harm is people who rely on Google for income. I’m dumb, but I ain’t that dumb. Why don’t they just relocate their web pages, I mean Google is big but it’s far from the only game in town. I’ve got every blog post, over 5,600 of them by now, all filed away. Reposting would be tedious but doable.
Sugar cane, Okinawa, 1991.
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Screw the rain, I was out there for three hours to get the last twelve feet of wiring run into the breaker box. It’s a messy job that will have to be polished up later, but I finally have 400 Watts of light in the new shed, see photo. As far as I am concerned, that means open for business. I can now work there any time night or day. Building materials have seriously inflated in price, my allocated $400 for the entire shed project is already $640 and the interior work has barely been touched. We still require another $100 in 12/2 cable and more lumber.
I’ve been given six new exercises and they focus on the same tissues I use for ordinary work around the yard. It’s like double-therapy. The steroid pills don’t kill pain but they makes the source areas shrink so you can tell exactly where the ache is originating. It’s in the shoulder joint and behind the shoulder blade. Deeper than I thought.
The long phone call was largely over finances. A big chunk of that was AuvoriaPrime. Looks like a lot of people got stung pretty badly. A series of other events, including outright cancellation of meetings and training sessions. There is also a slowdown in changes to the software, that part I don’t mind at all. It seems as if apps are created these days with an eye to needing constant updates. Even their revenue engine isn’t processing payments, but I’ve discovered so many holes in their system that, although I can’t trade, I can get into the charts and data any time.
If you follow the 500-day moving average, anybody who did not get out in time could well have lost their profits for the past two years—and that’s only because the charts don’t go back any further. Since day one, I’ve kept a separate log of performance on this local computer, using XP by the way. As said, the Auvoria app uses a moving average, making inter-period comparisons tricky. My weekly charts show that during BLM week, there was actually a 3.9% gain before the 38.61% plunge. Everybody got over confident and I did not switch back to 3% fixed mode as written in my guidelines. Hence the original calculation of $4,750 (roughly) is back in focus as the amount needed to pay the bills and still show a decent return—during the learning process.
Problem, all the bigshots who suddenly clammed up afterwards shows they had not learned as much as they thought, either. Also, it taught us that although at least a few of them might have seen the crash coming, none saw fit to toot the horn for we newcomers. Duly noted. I still feel there is money to be made with a conservative approach and the feeling that from the bottom there is nowhere to go but up. I’ve committed funds for another six months both to continue developing my own trading philosophy and to find out how the international brokerage system has changed since I last used it in 1999. I’m expecting a totally cashless, heavily monitored, US-based data collection system more interested in profiling than financial efficiency.
Here’s something. It was actually 1983 when I began pointing out the deficiency of the IBM (MicroSoft) way of working things. That’s the era I issued the first warnings of the dangers and enormous costs down the road that would ensue if those squid-brains ever influenced the market. In fact, I recall my first topic on that. They could have, I said, early in the game, taken one of the many under-used keys on the then-new keyboards to establish a unique EOF (end of file) marker. I suggested the F12 key. In the old days, you had to tell the computer when it got to the end of a file and to stop reading. They never took my advice, and this has cost future generations plenty—which was the heart of my warning.
Well, I have a prime example of that and it cost millions to fix. If you ask me, it accounts for IBM’s decline and the ultimate same thing for MicroSoft. It’s the sordid practice of passing costs on to the end-user, usually in the form of “updates”, but also in the manner of incompatibilities that later cannot be fixed. This time it has to do with DNA, a study that lends itself to the use of spreadsheets. Windows computers in the USA still today have huge numbers of antique pitfalls carried forward in this manner. Thus, when the conventional DNA naming system is entered into a spreadsheet cell, it is interpreted as a date.
Instead of designing a flexible date system that could be set by the user, IBM opted for that idiotic number of seconds since, what was it, 1971 brain-fart. So in the end, although the cost must have been phenomenal, not to mention the inconvenient, it became was easier to change the entire DNA naming system that fix two or three lines of IBM code at the start.
[Author’s note: I’ve already got inquiries on the EOF marker. I can’t go into much detail, but there were two initial methods. One was to use a length command, the other was a dummy marker. The length command is very easy to hack, if you reset it, you could keep on reading data that is past the end of the file. The easiest way was to be to simply open say, a spreadsheet program using a word processor and start copying. It worked because the spreadsheet reset the length after every cell entry, the word processor waited until the whole document was closed.
The other method was the dummy marker. You entered a value like -9999.99 into the last record, the idea was the program stopped when it read that. It quickly became convoluted, because people would try to use the word STOP, forgetting it was a reserved word. So they resorted to spelling it backwards, POTS. However, that was not a good solution. Figure it out on your own what happens to dummy markers when the entire three follow-on generations are populated by dummies. Something to do with an infinite number of monkeys.]
ADDENDUM
Ha, did you catch that article from Hertz, the rent-a-car people? They are in hot water for reporting cars stolen that were properly rented. They have an antiquated computer system that does not update customer payments in real time. They found it cheaper to issue a stolen car report and pay the occasional settlement to wrongfully jailed customers. And a lot of the actually stolen cars were inside jobs by employees who know the credit card verification procedure. That makes it a millennialized crime and it serves Hertz right for so blindly getting in so deep with the credit mafia. Hertz lost the ability to do real business with real people, you had to argue with the bastards to accept cash. It’s not the cash, but their incredible blind faith that credit info could replace any need for good judgment.
Hertz has 700,000 cars, most of them leased—another lunatic credit-based antic. It makes the books look better in the short run but dims anything long-term. It’s a sucker’s paradise. This blog has pointed out many times how all businesses that base their inventory and growth on borrowed money eventually go bankrupt. That is how the credit system is designed, by tempting unsuspecting people into over-borrowing. It works until something goes wrong, like a virus boondoggle.
I’ll tell you what is scary. The reaction of youth to events like the TikTok being little but a front for data farming. The application is so sinister, MicroSoft is trying to buy it for $10 billion. TikTok is not that much worse than other data collectors, but the problem is most users stay on it for hours per day. Only 37% of the ass-enders (stat from The Guardian) are even aware they are being monitored and their general attitude is they don’t care. Now that, peeps, is successful indoctrination. They say they are used to being tracked so that is okay. This blog has pointed out the fallacy of this argument.
They actually do care, but suffer from what I sometimes call the “Sabbota Syndrome”. This is where a person has totally screwed up by thoughtlessly giving away all his personal information, so he thinks the same should happen to everybody. He promotes the concept that if he’s on file, put everybody on file whether they agree or not, hoping the crocodile will eat him last.
