One year ago today: April 8, 2020, the Kodak monopoly.
Five years ago today: April 8, 2016, remember my digital brakelight?
Nine years ago today: April 8, 2012, no more bus pass or dating.
Random years ago today: April 8, 2011, I hate the Greydog bus place.
Today’s addendum is a copy of the newsletter that went out concerning my sojourn to the phosphate museum. For entertainment only—and compared to that museum, eating half a bag of rice cakes and folding your socks is entertainment (adapted from 22 things). Enjoy because the only other goings-on this morning involve my one working headlight acting up again. Maybe I will drive to the dealer and get a whole new assembly. ($1,100). Says Chrysler, “Yes, but the bulbs are easy to replace.”
Follow my logic and comment if I’m wrong. Consider the wild dog’s diet. It contains elements you won’t find in cans, or our dog’s preferred meal of 85% ground turkey and a mixture of other items such as, yes, as pumpkin. I never saw dogs that liked that before, but getting back to the wild. They eat more bone and marrow, more gristle and a certain amount of whatever gets in the way.
Did someone say why not just give the dog the whole piece of chicken? Trick question, because have you ever been around somebody who thinks dogs will choke on chicken bones? Yeah, you duck for cover. Gotcha. Anyway, I believe bird meat is a natural for all dogs and those who feed dogs indoors will tell you they can be messy eaters. Run the food through a grinder and the area will be spotless. Nothing could clean a pot like Sparkie in the good old days.
I’ve worked this type of meat grinder back on the farm, where the sausage was made from the best cuts. Certainly not the byproduct sausage you get at the market these days. That left plenty of less fancy parts that went right into the hopper. It sounds maybe, but even that was higher quality than can normally be purchased. This grinder may never be used in the intended fashion now that the larger doggie is gone but read below.. Let’s wait and see, but I was impressed by how great shape this unit was, I was expecting by now the old and rusty. For a millennial grade video, have a laugh at this one on removing rust.
The Note this machine requires some training or you can over grind or jam it. To get the correct speed, turn the crank with your left hand. I kind of overpaid for this unit, as there are solid metal brands at Wal*mart for ten bucks more. You see, in addition to the grinder, I was supporting the local Thrift, the one with the peanut stand, and I see some of you already lifting your chins. The grinder still has uses, such as a rather unique garbage disposal unit in that it can produce super compost mixture. Watch the video.
Downtown Bastogne, nowadays.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Here’s a good spot to mention data privacy. Facebook has gone on record saying the huge recent data breach is the user’s fault for putting their information into contact fields (and so on). Egad, another conspiracy theory comes true. This blog has always warned it was the user’s fault and now Facebook, who I detest, is saying the same. You put it there, not them. Ergo, the hackers stole if from you, not from Facebook, who is under no obligation to protect anything. It works like this, bearing in mind I use database terminology, not web page jargon. You see, I graduated from a real school. Long time ago. Just not as old as this turtle fossil at the museum, though I know people who’d argue that.
Facebook defends itself by adding that the data is older than 2018 when they enabled safeguards. Did they now? Watch for a surge in phishing attacks as this information is combined with other leaks to create almost undetectable fake identities, probably yours if you used Facebook. Still got nothing to hide, anyone? Look out LinkedIn, eBay, Tinder, and just about anybody foolish enough to network with Facebook across the spectrum. You been pwned. And it is your own damn fault. I wish I was a conspiracy theorist just so I could take the credit.
In another stab at those who will not listen, Facebook is having additional difficulty explaining something. Included in the scraped data is the information of people who deleted their Facebook accounts, often years and years ago. Or so they thought. Big “ooops!” there, Zucker. Serves them right, numbskulls.
Don’t forget VPN, another feature this blog has acclaimed—as long as you do not give the provider your personal information. That’s like bolting your furniture to the floor but leaving the key under the rug. That created a paradox, because providers demand on-line payment only. I’ve expressed and defined the need for some way to pay anonymously but nobody has stepped up to that plate. There is too much money to be made letting people get screwed. I have no answer, but we all like the way this blog can explain complicated issues. There are tech discrepancies, but my goal is understanding, not education.
It works like this. VPN providers record all your “sessions”. These contain the information used to get in and out of the “private” part of your VPN and cannot be encrypted for that very reason. (Well, they can, but read the last paragraph.) Various hacking tools can extract these transmissions which contain your readable password and account name to enable the VPN.
Since many users now operate a VPN to work from home, it is easy to use stolen VPN data to get into company computers, that is, establish a session. At that point, they introduce an “update” to the system security, which the clone-minded graduates of today will install without asking questions. They are busy people, don’t you know. From there, they simply encrypt and lock your data. You will need the encryption key to unlock the data and the usual ransom is two bitcoins.
One more laugh for me is an IBM announcement. They released a new Linux compiler for COBOL. Um, didn’t they tell us 1960s languages are dead and we should study C+? This flies in the face of that. And Linux? IBM bowing to Linux? Well, not entirely, only the Linux that runs on the old x86 platforms. Now, is IBM dumb encouraging an ancient format or do they have something up their sleeve? What is really going on? I know, I know!
COBOL is the language of the original massive government computer files. By the way, happy birthday COBOL which turns 61 this month (April 1960.) As long as that information is sitting on mainframes, it is hard to get at. Notice there are no Facebook-esque data breaches on those? Enter the compiler. This kind of mini-operating system needs to translate the underlying data which is COBOL-specific. It’s a sort of ASCII comma-delimited format that if it could be extracted, could then be placed on the Cloud, the next big scam being perpetrated on the public. Alert, conspiracy theorists, you were right about that, too. Each COBOL database requires a trained programmer to design a custom program. Applications won’t work, you need a program.
[Author’s note: COBOL is something I looked into a year ago, April 5, 2020. I balked at the offering for a number of reasons, of which I will tell you two. The overall objection is they are trying to hire COBOL programmers with the same standards as they hire C+ flunkies, and get told to go to hell. Plus, their habit of calling us “greybeards” doesn’t help when that is actually the color of their imaginations.
My first reason was the incredibly low pay, something like $36,000 per year. You want me to touch a computer you are looking at five times that. To start. Second is related to the hiring practices. You can own a millennial for $36k a shot, but not real programmers. Read the hiring criteria. They want COBOL programmers but want them to obey the rules how the baloney gang-bang coders do their jobs. When I write a segment, until you sign off on it, none of your underlings are allowed to touch it. Modify one character and it is your neck, not mine.
(Gang-bang is the way real programmers refer to software written by “teamworkers”.)]
ADDENDUM
Here is the newsletter version of y’day’s excursion to the museum.
After a certain point and excluding Democrats, I was lulled into the illusion I had already experienced the most boring episodes of my life. Before April 7 this year, I honestly felt I had endured the heights and depths of such boredom as this planet and Sacramento can render. I have evaded boredom at level 99 and have bested it in near-combat. Yet, the world knows there are opportunities for boredom right where you'd least expect them.
Enter Central Florida. Behind the police station and library you can find the one-room Mulberry Phosphate Museum. Lots of parking. There are two somewhat interesting abandoned railroad cars with old newspaper pictures on the walls, but the museum itself is five tiny display cases of fossils plowed up in the phosphate pits. By now you can hardly contain yourself. So I have included below the two display cases that did NOT contain mastodon mandibles and dinosaur dentures. Did I mention--tons of parking?
First is a (non-working) model of a crawler, the bucket crane that scrapes away overburden to get at the phosphate. Then a display of tubes of said phosphate, varying mostly in color and grain size. No labels or descriptions, so I presume it is phosphate, like, what else? This concludes our exciting tour of the best Mulberry has to offer. It was a real challenge to find lower potholes of boring, but hey, I'm no quitter. Nor a stranger to the mind-numbing monotony of a cubicle job, I have qualifications to recognize boring when I see it. I’ve watch my brothers get a haircut, I once read Moby Dick, and have preferred white noise on the car radio across the Dixie bible belt. Today, believe you me, set a whole new standard.
