One year ago today: September 13, 2019, a generic post.
Five years ago today: September 13, 2015, a typical NPR personality.
Nine years ago today: September 13, 2011, some weird Calibri font.
Random years ago today: September 13, 2013, resistance is futile.
I may have succeeded in getting JZ out here for the first time in 37 months. Until he actually shows, there is no celebration. I’d made a habit of whenever he mentioned how slow my renovations were going, I’d point out that broken tile in his own bathroom that sat there for some eleven years. He finally fixed it so perfectly I could not tell where the gape used to be. It was caused by leaking rainwater, which resulted in the condo’s first special assessment of some $20,000 each. However, other than maintenance fees, which have skyrocketed, JZ’s condo has never cost him a cent. I talked him into fixing my shower. My fear is that he will turn it into a two week job. I’ve allocated $550 for materials, he says he has all the tools, but that often means he knows where to rent them. We are 235 miles away from that option.
Another item which you could take either way, just remember that I have an ego and unlike too damn many others, I worked hard for mine. Bradford has given me a partial song list, and he is making some critical errors. Topping that list is playing the version he likes instead of what the crowd likes, or sometimes sneered as “the Zydeco version”. He’s got some b-sides in there as well as draggy slow ballads. Yeah, I know, it sounds like the Hippie all over again.
If so, he is playing right into my hands. I had best tone it down but I can tell you right now, I could walk all over the guy on stage. He’s making The Big Mistake, trying to educate the crowd instead of entertain them. The second biggest screw-up is thinking of music as an extension of his personality, type of nonsense. If it was, he’d be playing nursery rhymes all night. I predict I’ll have real problems, you know, trying to learn any of the original tunes he’s bound to spring on me once he thinks I’ve committed to much to the project to bow out. But if he insists, I’ll take it as a cue to play bass like he’s never heard before, hey, original is original. I may have to fix his “bass is easy” attitude. Actually, I did that with the Hippie, but he missed the event, thinking [it was] his guitar playing got better.
There should be some general yard work pictures around today. I’m working on the large shed door. And my bad shoulder is giving me a rough time. It’s the therapy, they say never exceed the pain threshold, but with the steroid shots, all too often you hit and pass that spot before reacting. I told you how the regimen has pulled my shoulder blade into the action and my rib cage injury returns at times. I’m a wreck—but I’m getting better at building gates and doors. I cannot find any replacement 18V NiCa batteries for my Wal*Mart drills, so I’m going to try a robot club lobotomy. And we have some new veggies getting planted, wait for those picks. This is the new batch in the enriched soil.
What’s this mounting investigations that radical leftards are lighting the forest fires in the west and blaming it on climate change. According to the Democrats, more than 100% of scientists agree the middle class causes climate change. That’s remarkable. I mean, more than 100%. No wait, that was Tucker Carlson, but more people listen to him that the top
Hawaii.
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This cluttered area is the inside of the new workshed. It isn’t normally messy, but there are several roof leaks near the window, so everything is piled out of the way. Both new doors are on the right side of the picture, they swing from the same post. That Gulf disturbance is still sending storms across the area and that is another milestone. The new door was built during a downpour that would normally have stopped everything. Instead, it was me and Boss Hogg, and one of those pre-recorded top hits of the past syndicated broadcasts. To me, it is not rock if it has a four-piece horn section. Some of the band names I recognized, but how most of that crap ever made it on the rock hit parade is beyond me. I swear, I never heard 90% of it.
This [radio] history show is a regular feature on weekends and today was a lot of music from the 60s. I recall bands like the Osmonds and the Partridge Family, but there’s a category foul-up calling those big hits in the rock arena. The show mentions it is based on record sales but that has only succeeded in making me question that source. It kept me occupied long enough to finish the door and I finally found most of the pieces to my tube birdfeeder, the one the squirrels knocked down. Some of the pieces had rolled under the house. It’s now in the shelter of the scooter shed.
This is neat, getting a whole project done so I don’t have to go start again after siesta. I watched a terrible movie about Ringo Starr as a blind man going to rescue 50 women from the Mexicans. The all-Italian crew actually found 50 good-looking women, all slim and white, something the poor millennials of today don’t realize they will never see in real life for they have no idea what they are giving away. The script has such precious lines as the mad Mexican general asking why the gringo likes money so much, to which the gringo replies he likes to buy things. Duh.
Where’s my hoe? Sit down, Theresa, I mean my garden hoe. I broke yet another shovel handle, it is a waste of money buying wooden tools in Florida. The first root I hit snapped it, but I got three experimental rows of seeds in the new soil mix. Carrots, beets, and onions. The tuber crops should be fine but the onions will need to have the protecting screen raised before maturity. There are less than eight plants each as we are watching for real improvement before going larger. Theresa, I said sit down, the last thing we expect is any work out of you, and gardens are work. The soil this time is twice as deep. So there are two variables. The depth and the tomato fertilizer.
Later, I’ve located the $63 manual on installing mySQL and s-l-o-w-l-y re-reading it. As usual, it makes more sense once you’ve already figured things out. I remember warning myself about the lack of standards in programming back in 1982, when IBM really started pushing their PCs. More to the point, I meant the “open architecture”, while great for some things, threw the entire programming scenario into disarray. The more you know about IBM, with its employee songbooks, this situation makes sense. They threw open the door to messy code to gain on the compeition like Atari and Tandy, and created the mess that the world is still paying for.
This brought us crazy ideas, like IBM versions of COBOL and BASIC, and who remembers expansion cards? I still have a drawer full somewhere, all made by now-defunct third party outfits and useless for anything else. The real bitch was the software, which IBM rarely produced by itself. Instead, every whacko and half-baked “developer” leaped into the fray, a consequence still found today in the “app market” that effectively ruined the Internet for scientific use and turned the phone into a tracking tool. I’m on page 26 and stlll have not got the PHP procedure straight in my head.
ADDENDUM
[Author’s note: this is a view of the shelter I helped the Reb’s neighbor put up in Tennessee last month. I don’t know if I showed you any pictures, but this is the finished product, except for one ground stake which somehow got positioned over the biggest subterranean boulder in the yard. We’d need dynamite to sink that anchor. These tents, in my opinion, cost more than they are worth, but enter a twist.
Today’s segment concerns COBOL programming. I told you it was nearly unhackable and was not surprised to learn 95% of ATMs use COBOL. Think Google is big? Everyday there are 200 times more COBOL transactions that Google searches. And there are one and a half BILLION new lines of COBOL code written each year. I’ve convinced myself to take a refresher course. This information all comes from a regular IBM “getting started” free PDF file. They quote many front-ends and wrappers, remember IBM hired all those bad programmers so expect a lot of jargon. The point is, since 1959, COBOL must have proven to be a very stable system if all that banking information runs on this single core program.
The course begins with some 46 pages of how to set up a mainframe account, or maybe it is a simulator. I did not read that part as running the actual program was somebody else’s job. I may get back to it, but if you think C+ code is an abortion, you’ll love Unix and DOS command lines. COBOL isn’t a product, but a standard. Many outfits, like IBM, have modified it to suit their needs, so one version is as good as another. As far as I know, it is the only computer language where sentences end with a proper period. The course, it turns out, is heavy on labs where a command line interface (CLI) is required on the Zowe Open Editor, which I’m thinking is their IDE. An IDE is like a mini-word processor that is designed for programming.
I suppose I will eventually set up an account with Zowe, normally a tedious process with always one more thing to get right. My specialty was the actual COBOL language, not support staff. The only person I know with mainframe experience is RofR’s brother. He’s three thousand miles away, retired, and probably never wants to see a mainframe again. So for now, I’ll garner what I can from the parts of the download that concern programming. This means skip ahead to page 66. There is an associated language reference link, if you’d like to read 700 pages of IBM-speak.
The first manual I bought, I remember it was $63, or about ten cents per page, did not even mention that Apache was a web server. Only that, kind of in passing, Apache was needed to make things run. I found the server in the shed, but won’t use it. The software is that MicroSoft Information, I forget, MI or MSI and you know the reputation MicroSoft has around here. Rather than the usual write off line and run on line, I may simply set up and entirely self-contained system after Thanksgiving when I get the XP back from Fred. In my opinion, the best servers ever built were the 2000/XP models where MicroSoft had not yet learned to cram it full of cheat-ware.
