One year ago today: September 14, 2019, plastic bread clips suck.
Five years ago today: September 14, 2015, fiction-based autobiography.
Nine years ago today: September 14, 2011, to-do list.
Random years ago today: September 14, 2009, Genie, she disappeared.
Here are some photos of progress on the new shed. This is out of proportion to other things going on, but turns out to be my most important accomplishment around here lately. I’ll say it again, if I knew then what I knew now, I would have built this shed the first month I got here. I’ll get into more detail this afternoon. Meanwhile here is your view of the security system.
That’s a government system that needs a wake-up call. They’ve done some amazing bout-faces, but they are stuck with the 2,000 year old concept that once in, you not only deserve to remain in a more permanent fashion, but you must exclude groups who, although they may be right, are a voting minority. Invented by the Greeks, fine-tuned by the English, and brought to a fever pitch by the Zi . . ., oops, can’t say that. By the radical left, their political arm. They never actually do anything wrong themselves. That’s what the you-know are for.
Ah, you want proof. Well, we all know that after the last Big One, we brought over boatloads of German scientists in Operation Paperclip. Everyone presumes they all went to NASA, but half of them went to a different US government department. When you figure out which one, but I’ll give you one hint. The Germans were scientists and the department that got them had no scientific agenda at the time. And for the record, the largest ethnic group in America is not the English or Spanish, it is Germans. Like 44 million of them. Work on where so many of them went in 1945, I’m going out to buy more 2x3s. I need more shelves in a fast hurry. If JZ shows up, that spare room has to be ready and I admit, I’ve been using it for storage. There isn’t even a bed in there yet, but the sofa, hey, I crash on his sofa when I’m in Miami.
How about the claim that vinyl records have overtaken CDs? It’s based on sales, folks, not number of units sold. And vinyl is as equally over-priced today as when it hit the market in the 60s. Now the Justice Department hands us this crap that 27 phones got accidentally wiped. Hillary must be so flattered. What got me was the one lady who obvious did not even know what buttons to push said she had accidentally deleted all her records. That reminds me to pick up more fertilizer.
Catskills cabin.
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This shows the sliding lock on the back yard gate, my first effort. That’s the door type gate I practiced on, it is likely to be little used as it just leads out to the neighbor’s back fence. I thought this mechanism might jog a few memories. Anybody recognize that metal slide now used as a door bolt? Yep, years ago that is the first piece of metal I ever welded, the one that set my pants legs on fire. I, uh, kind of kept it as a souvenir, type of thing.
Then I went shopping, but damn, I hit retard day. Every gimp in the county in line ahead of me at the checkout. Nearly three hours to do an hour’s worth and now I’m tired. Listen, I know according to some sources, this country was built by immigrants. But now that it is built, we don’t want no more. For crying out loud, how does it take some people five minutes to pay up after the total is rung? I swear, going through the checkout counter is, for some of the lower orders, an social outing to be slowly savored, no matter how many others are waiting in line behind you. Wal*Mart doesn’t help by randomly shutting down the self-checkouts to cash.
And, being this is Florida, it always takes longer to pay big totals than small ones, even though all thye are doing is pushing the OK button.
Again, the workshed insures that at least some larger project gets finished every day. While the coffee’s brewing, let me rattle off today’s list. I finally finished that one remaining corner of the big shed, where I was four boards short. This meant bringing out two ladders and while up there, I put extra hurricane screws in every rafter. This meant hauling lumber up and down as I did not bother to rig a saw up on the roof. The tarpaper is done, I imagine it isn’t easy to see the efficiency the shed provides, but trust me, I should have built that first.
Next, I removed all the temp siding that was slapped up just before leaving for Tennessee last month. This gave me space to frame in a better jamb for the big shed door, and install the hasp and lock. The locks are more for looks, I think they retail for $1.23 each. Since I can now line boards up and cut them in a batch, I had time to go buy another load of 2x3s, which means more permanent siding by this time tomorrow. Another asset is I can now store related tools handy to each other rather than before, where I had to put them where they fit out of the rain.
Sadly, he’s resigned to living until he dies. This is a better view of his barn from my new shed window. It’s built from salvaged hurricane materials, can you see the huge sliding door way to the background? He’s apparently got a sailboat in there. But he has become mostly inactive. I’ll probably drop in the field or make my final exit stage left, but some folks just kind of give up. He still finds things amazing like how I build that door from scratch. To me, it is what it is, a combination of simple shapes and angles, with twice as many wood screws as necessary. He thinks I bought it ready-made.
ADDENDUM
That clears up one mystery for me. My studies were focused on mySQL, the database. It’s like all other databases, you just have to memorize the screwed up way the same seven basic commands are labeled and follow some idiot’s idea of what punctuation is for. But where I was both right and wrong was this PHP. Intelligent people don’t look at things the same as others and I was right about the lack of standards beginning in 1984. When there are no standards, or just poor standards, things that should be transparent to the user suddenly become big deals. Because you get idiots writing the code. And the result is things like PHP. I’ll explain.
The two rather large books I’ve read on database on-line mentioned PHP did not really specify what it was. This left the impression that it was some sort of computer “translation” service that was loaded and forgotten. The said lack of standards meant the people designing web pages and the people designing on-line databases had no friggen clue what each other were doing. I guess I thought if one was going to use a database on line, one would format and formulate it to use web commands, or at least commands that were compatible with the two systems. Sure, it is extra work, but it would prevent things like PHP.
What I mean is PHP turns out to be—and don’t laugh because I got the wrong impression from two highly-touted authors on the subject—a complete scripting language of its own. I could be some blithering idiot without a clue what is involved, never discount that possibility. But I never liked HTML from the day I first scripted it back in the 1990s. It’s a messy thing the opposite of WYWISYG written by a moron who apparently had no clue that computers could transmit pictures. The world has spent the next 30 years without fixing the problems he caused. Have you seen the syntax of image tags?
The point is, I somehow got the impression that PHP was like a set of keywords or assignments. You loaded it, configured it, and forgot about it. I knew HTML was static, so to get things moving it made sense to me to simply translate database (and other commands) directly to each HTML procedure, telling it how to react. I mean, why make it any more complicated than that? Ah, because in millennial-land the race to be first is more important than to create something that works right. Turns out, to my disappointment, that PHP is yet another layer of scripting, simple and primitive. A step-by-step repetition of every command line between your browser and information on the server.
And I can tell you why I missed that bus. Because it is a bus, that’s why. To me, who in their right mind would sit down and take the worst coding practices from HTML and C+, then contort them even more? People who are not doing their job, that’s who. PHP is just another confusing layer of jumbled syntax in yet another difficult to read format. It’s similarity to other bad coding styles almost ensures the majority of time spent on it is debugging, probably mostly punctuation marks. I can tell you what today’s coders should really be doing with all those “curly braces”.
PHP now seems to me to be nothing but a tedious line-by-line process that does little more than require even more tag symbols around HTML commands to send to your browser. Smart if you can do it, but stupid if you do. I see now why it was necessary, but fact is in the long run, some standards would have worked better. I swear, if they had left me in charge, today you would be able to walk up to a computer and say, “Here’s my database, now make it a web page” with one click. As it stands, getting the damn database to work on-line is as complicated as the database itself. What’s with those people?
I get it and may try to get something working as an intellectual challenge. Because if their database design is as bad as their coding efforts, I may create something the world can use.
