One year ago today: November 18, 2019, puttering is a good day.
Five years ago today: November 18, 2015, when to never say “Yes”.
Nine years ago today: November 18, 2011, small is 8 feet high.
Random years ago today: November 18, 1982, strings & all.
Too dang cold to leave before dawn. My car heater hasn’t worked right since Cheyenne in 2018, so no driving while frost can still form on the windscreen. It lit out once it got over 50°F and drove to the accident site of last March. I made one stop for gas but no coffee. I got the old con of McDonald’s showing no sign only the drive-thru is open. Lots of cars in the parking lot, so you don’t know until you park and walk up to the door. Up your’s, McD’s. I spotted a thrift store across the way and picked up their last two audio tapes. Books there are sold at $0.39 per pound, so I shopped them out. A novel concept considering most books these days are not worth that much.
It was a sad departure, but this blog isn’t big on sentimentals. Here’s a pic from the Factory showing an empty room that it is almost quitting time in all senses, the Democrats have announced a huge shutdown in the makings. It’s part of their takeover, a plant to regulate businesses down to the smallest level. The people allowing this to happen deserve what they are going to get. If a majority of this country has turned that stupid, let them suffer the consequences. And let them dismantle the radioscope at Arecibo for all the good its done lately.
Such a late getaway turns this into a two-day trip. That makes it into a mini-holiday, the planned stop is Macon. I’ve never been there more than an hour or two before. The Interstate is back to being one mess of a truck route again. Twenty to thirty trucks per mile, so you are constantly passing or being passed. You must take the center lane or be constantly overtaking the slower trucks, and they no longer travel in convoys. Not wishing to make the last couple hours in the dark on side roads, I stayed on I-75 right to the Macon turn-off.
75 lb. chairs.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Macon. The GPS took me to what I suppose was downtown. I parked and plugged $1.50 into the parking meter before I realized it was 8:00PM local time. Like Ft. Lauderdale millennial meters, they’ll gladly take your money any time for nothing and fancy themselves clever. It’s getting harder to find places in the US anymore that don’t have WiFi and that’s two I’ve found in Georgia. I peeked through a few windows and finally walked into a place with no sign. I think it was the Hummingbird, but let somebody else confirm that. A bottle of Bud is $3.50, the waitresses are not as young and pretty as you’d expect in a college town. Not. Even. Close.
As it got late, I was about to leave when they announced the Karaoke was starting. I put my name in and stuck around 20 minutes for my turn. The jukebox had been predominantly country, so I did a classic. Other than a couple people right up near the stage, nobody even noticed. Except the jockey, who said I was “on top of it” and said I should stick around a few hours and give lessons. I asked if it was that bad, he said ever since COVID, the crowds have been duds.
That is why you get this picture of the gate post the dog chewed up. That’s my boy, Sparkie. He can now get out of the yard again, but these days he can’t get too far. Note the system he’s got with the tooth marks. Give the guy an A for persistence. I wonder if he knows this bit of doggie handiwork is the most exciting thing that happened in Macon, Georgia, today. I found a large overnight truck station nearer my route than the Wal*Mart Arms, so I crashed there. For some reason, I can sleep soundly with truck noises all around. Clean washrooms. It was a bitterly cold night but I was snug.
ADDENDUM
One of the first things picked out of my mailbox on return was a notice that the city has tabled a resolution that would allow the building inspector to enter anybody’s property without notice to search for “standing water”. It’s the age-old English creeping bureaucracy, a foot in the door to your complete loss of privacy and freedom. I’m already pricing out a complete privacy fence with locking gate and searching for anti-trespassing measures. I wonder if they’ve outlawed concertina wire yet?
Standby for a quick study of the new Apple M chip, what are they calling it, the M1? I stopped following these creatures long ago due to the dominance of x86 chips. I never cared for that family as it was prone to errors, hacking, glitches, and declining speeds are software overhead climbed to keep ahead of millennial stupidity. That sounds a mean thing to say, until it is pointed out if you took away all the interfaces that crowd relies on, not one in 10,000 of them would have a clue how to operate a computer.
My interest in the matter is that a new chip on the market would begin to erode MicroSoft, and I’m all for that. I feel the x86 era has overstayed its welcome. It has reached its speed and compatibility limits. Thus, it is likely unadaptable to whatever comes next, including true parallel processing. Nor would I care if it brought down the entire C+ system and its advocates. If Apple would design a new language that incorporated the easy of BASIC with commands that could outdistance the very thin advantages of C+, one of which is that it can work at a “deeper level” than other code.
This blog takes the side that is hardly an advantage when it comes at the expense of readability. That makes it sound like all you have to do is read the code carefully. Nope, the problem goes far deeper. You cannot so easily “read” that a C+ coder has allowed or disallowed a certain data type. The lack of standards completely negates the claim that C+ code can be used on different operating systems. Oh, it runs, but try it. NASA did.
Another claim is that C+ works closer to machine language. True, but that is artificial, in that you could claim that is due to the compiler, not the code. Other languages simply don’t have a compiler that allows it, and that is for good reason. Difficult code also leaves the door wide open to insane security intrusions which, coupled with the inane “pointer” system, makes integrity a joke. Without going into too much detail, C+ was more shoved on us than adopted. Trivia, C+ is derived from increment commands used in the code, were C+ meant to increment a counter. If they had left it at that, things would have been bad enough.
One last thing, Marriott Hotels and Disneyworld, the reason I don’t give you any business and steer others away from you is telemarketing. You people know damn well there are telemarketing scams using your corporate names. Yet you choose to do nothing about it. At least you could code the coupons and stop redeeming any obtained by this method. By doing nothing you are abetting these scumbags—and you know it.
