One year ago today: July 9, 2020, youTube begins embedding ads.
Five years ago today: July 9, 2016, one-call career-killer.
Nine years ago today: July 9, 2012, I make an offer.
Random years ago today: July 9, 2013, my hero, Carol Kaye
What luck, even the storm aftermath missed us. Time to work under the house. Here’s a view of the work involved, in case anyone things it’s just a matter of painting that wall. This shows the washer plumbing, hot and cold pipes. My other finger points at the electrical wiring that was re-routed because of this plumbing. This will be my 6,025th post to Tales From The Trailer Court. I think that qualifies me as a hobby writer. Or a coffee addict. On the first of this month, my readership dropped by 30%. Fortunately, such things have no effect on this blog, since as blogs go, it may be the only daily that is truly free. This goes way back to the earliest Internet days, when the premise was that information would be shared for free. Allow me to tell you a little about those days, I’ll choose 1995 thereabouts.
There were many search engines, like Alta Vista, Netscape, and Lynx. All far better than Google. However, most people including users were unsure of what the Internet was supposed to do. The impression given was that you opened a website and the world beat a path to your door. The scam artists promoting these early web pages did nothing to dispel that myth, charging people thousands for websites that just sat there. The few that thrived had massive conventional advertising budgets. Hardly a week went by without receiving a free disk from AOL, who never told anybody they were not a real web browser.
The big sites were supposed to be Alt-dot, and the dot-com site was supposed to be only for those people charging money. In a sense, it still is. E-mail, I was one of the earliest daily users, was a non-starter as nobody used it for real. The trend was to take apart every sentence of a message and answer it in isolation, called the “gestapo method”. I rejected this early and my emails have always been longer than average and better formatted. None have survived and there are no pictures as digital cameras were costly pieces from Apple, Kodak, and Sony. It would be another eight years before they fell below $500 for anything that worked.
Games were so bad it was preferable to go to the arcade. The big change came not when quality improved, but when people who had registered all the really good names early were able to sell them. I had stocks in a mining company called investor.com and the only money they made was selling that name to some sucker in New York for $8 million. My share was $8,000. It eventually became an investment firm referral service. But this focused the world on the dot-com portion of the Internet. It was now evident real money could be made, not because the system was good, but because it was so new it was unregulated. This is how it works in America. Get in on the ground floor and start blocking anybody else from doing the same.
The rest, the real growth, happened shortly after 1996, when Internet companies began to get permission to go public. After that it was hype, the product was shoddy but investment bankers fanned the flames. When it died down, the only survivors were those with deep pockets and firms so bad they had not been allowed to sell their shares. The two big winners were, respectively, Amazon and Google. Wall Street had effectively quashed their competition. New giants would arise, but only “surprise” business models, such as eBay and Facebook that did not try going toe-to-toe with the powers that be. I remember the days when I was the only person in town who knew “google” was a Hindu word.
And let’s be fair. Which blog has been warning people about the IoT for years and years? Because there are people out there like Samsung. In a sense, I mean. Some kid said it to describe some of the ridiculously huge numbers in their language, often exceeding the number of atoms in the universe. Or the number of untouchable beggars in Connaught Square.
Island in San Felix archipelago.
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Ransomware threatens hundreds of businesses. Serves you right, you knuckleheads. Enough already about the collapsed condo. Unless you are going to start arresting incompetents, time to STFU. Early afternoon, I went to the market and got a half-sack of Yeung-Ling. Then proceeded to fix the last patch of flooring in the back room. Attention has been on the computer wall, but the floor underneath involved re-routing some wiring and the hot and cold lines to the washer, which is outside. The floor is also insulated, which entails stapling wire mesh to keep it in place. There is also a cutout to give access to one of the many extra junction boxes I had to install in the early days.
This drained away the afternoon, but lots of logistics got done so I may have that work station at least partially functional by the weekend. There has not been a square inch of floor space left in this cabin in years, anything extra now depends on shelf space. The crude shelves I’ve thrown up in the sheds will not work inside the cabin. I gotta live there, y’know. Pocket screws to the rescue.
I need 42 feet of shelving just to accommodate what I already have. Shown here is around half of it, seven feet off the floor. This takes longer than it should, but it is a better job than I could have done without the experience I’ve got so far. I finally quit after sunset and Friday or not, headed over to the old club for a couple. Wound up having three. No entertainment and it is between paydays at the mines. Over time I’ve gotten to recognize most of the married couples, with whom other than audience-entertainer I have nothing in common with. That’s your definition of absolute zero.
They even act so much differently than the Reb & I, so when will I write that book? The wives migrate to one corner and gossip, the husbands congregate around the pool table. Interesting, the only time I ever played pool was with the Reb. It’s curious to hear the women talk about “no secrets” and completely open relationships. That’s paradoxical, because is it a matter of real trust? If you really trust somebody, would you not let them keep all the secrets they want? I had the said three beers to ponder such philosophy, but when somebody started playing rap on the jukebox, I came home and read a chapter on celestial navigation. I know what’s fun in small town America.
