One year ago today: October 24, 2020, “The Path”.
Five years ago today: October 24, 2016, The Smithsonian, some day.
Nine years ago today: October 24, 2012, finally, 85 mph.
Random years ago today: October 24, 2013x, Yeehaw Junction.
Today we get some real shed work done. I’ve released $280 from reserves to get all the necessary materials except the siding. The upper walls will be ¼” drywall which is somewhat okay at blocking drafts. It was an early breakfast of yum-yum pancakes as it is Apple Sunday. I skipped the real day last week, so today it was honey with maple syrup. And a big batch of chicken broth rice for the doggies, who I know will be over at dawn. If you like maple syrup but not the price tag, here is something worth a try. Tree Hive. It’s a big less but warning, you will probably use more of it. And, it still arrives in a glass bottle.
This procedure of dumping all in one spot originated in Tennessee and has become equally popular over there. You have to root around to find what you want, the milk chocolate is a favorite, as is Donut Shop brand. This kept me going on this unusually pleasant morning as I framed the shed door. No rush, it took hours and still has to be planed. I’d mentioned to the hillbilly to watch for curbside hardware and I think he’s got me a set of brass plated hinges.
The task for the afternoon was the kudzu overgrown back yard. The obstacle there is big tree logs. Who remembers five years ago I cut down the dead tree? I had a cut-rate deal with the guy to just drop the pieces in nine-foot sections. It took until now to get them cut into transportable sizes. This was no romp in the park, there is well over a ton of wood out there. At least now it makes it to the fire pit.
The good news is what you don’t see. The neighbor was over working in his yard all afternoon and did not see the new shed. Camouflage is as good as any permit, if you ask me. The shed has enough space to clean up the house and both other storage areas and all I need is a few more days of decent weather.
Trent called, he’s in Jacksonville again. This also places him closer to a ton of his relatives. Sometimes we don’t hear from the dude in a week. More than once it’s been near to sending up a posse to rescue the guy. One can only entertain family so long before it is time to head downtown to drink beer and chase skirt. Plus we need more video footage. I’ve discovered a way to make gifs move like old 1912 newsreels. Remember those, how they ran inconsistently? That is from the hand-cranked movie cameras. As the operator tired, the speed showed his increasing fatigue.
Back in June, I mentioned a dude named Dwayne Rarick. He was a nobody, became a cop or something. There was more to his connection with my situation that I don’t think I mentioned. It’s known I started a band when I was 13 and 14, and I had asked if we could use the school gym for rehearsal, since I had nothing but opposition and back-stabbing criticism from people who were supposed to be protecting me. Well, it came to a vote with the student union and it was a tie except for Rarick. He waited around two seconds, then voted no.
Years later, I ran into him and asked him why. We were not enemies, we did not chum around together, we only knew each other from school and we had absolutely no common interests. He never used the gym and did not even know it was available. We did not share a single resource nor even compete for the same women. So why in God’s creation would he vote no? I won’t tell you the answer, unless it is buried somewhere else in this blog. But to this day, I have no mercy or pity for people like him who wind up on the skids and golly, there is nobody to help them. I don’t know how he wound up, since he remained a nobody, but I mean in general people with that brand of latent sourness that somebody somewhere might get ahead if they don’t put a stop to it.
Harley-Davidson mining cart.
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Bryne is also looking to sell these guitars. He often upgrades regular guitars with super components and hardware so I’m not sure what the final product can properly be called. In the pic is what he refers to as a “lawsuit era” Les Paul with the original hard shell case. I warned him trying to sell these expensive units in Polk County would be a case of the old “twenty-dollar horse and a forty dollar-saddle.”
Biden has reportedly gone so far as to deny health and death insurance policy money to people who reject the vaccine. Something bad is going to happen to that tyrant, but he’s just the figurehead. The entire rotten infrastructure remains. Pop off the old fart and the Kamel woman will use it to institute a reign of terror. I’d say these people who voted for Biden are getting what they deserve, but alas, they dragged others down with them. I’m only to familiar being caught in that situation myself.
Nobody could have predicted the fall of Australia and New Zealand except the sinister people behind it. To think I reported it as a desirable retirement destination not that long ago. The Prime Minister, a woman, admitted in public today it is now a society with two classes of citizen. Similar to the USSR. And I no longer laugh at men who say women should never be allowed to even vote.
If that is not trouble enough, the Democrats are proposing a tax on “unrealized” capital gains. TMOR, let me explain that. Normally, if I buy silver and keep it a few years until it doubles in price, I pay tax on the profit at the time of sale. Under the proposal, if the price went up say 40% in the first year, I would have to pay tax on that even though I did not sell. And if silver fell in price later, I would have to eat the loss.
I finally got to watching a documentary on the Boeing 737s that crashed. They gave all manner of excuses about sensors and stabilizer malfunction, but I was right. The true problem is morons hiring morons. It turns out they knew the sensors were operating but failing due to software glitches. One moron coding against another moron. I’ve detailed in this blog dozens of times how object-oriented programming starts off great, but after a certain level of complexity, it outruns the mental competency of the coders. Rather than admit their limitations, they resort to GPS-think. This is where they begin tweaking the display to make it look like the system is operating correctly, when in fact they have no clear idea what is going on.
If you go through the reports from Boeing, you see that is exactly what happened. They try to blame the pilots, saying they forgot to flip some switches after takeoff. That is bunk and confirmation of a follow-on problem to what I just described. The software morons will not, repeat not, go back and fix a problem. C+ code is far too unreadable for that, so they add more code and that is where the millennial circle-jerk begins. Each change now begins to conflict with invisible “inheritence” from earlier code.
Fact is, if you ask me, the sensors probably worked fine. A real programmer would isolate the module that controls the sensor and activate a warning alert or automatic cutoff. A coder may see the module, but he’s not going to muck with it. Even if coded it himself, he’s long since forgotten all the invisible relationships. Instead, he resorts to changing the screen graphics to display what the operator wants. Check it for youself, this is why Teslas hit trees and cargo ships plow into the banks of the Suez Canal.
All changes at this point amount to adding more code, which increases the complexity of the code and quickly passes the point of no return. This dead end is not new, it began happening at MicroSoft in 1989, when programming standards fell so low that Gate opted for “redistributability” over effectiveness. They [MicroSoft] did nto clue in even after failing repeatedly to convert their major product (Word) to C+ and failing even worse with the related C#.
[Author's note: the significance here is that a word processor is on of the simplest of the simple programming activities. It has a sharply defined way of doing everything, a real programmer's dream come true. The discipline is mature, evolves slowly, and the rulebook is handy. Yet MicroSoft and their cohorts at IBM could not get C+ to do it right. That says most, if not all of it.]
The solution is to fire 500 coders and hire 5 good programmers. But we all know that is never going to happen. And Boeing is one of the companies that plans to go to Mars.
ADDENDUM
Something I did not know, that stealth aircraft can be picked up by very low frequency radar. If you need info that’s readable to non-techies, there is always War Is Boring. It makes sense, below a certain wavelength, the aircraft itself begins to act as an antenna, re-radiating a signature in the radar cone. It works better on smaller airplanes, like fighters and fighter bombers, than on larger frames.
There is no such thing as real stealth and the technology is really to make detection harder so you can get closer before the enemy can react. I recall how early in the Gulf War, the US spent days knocking out forward Iranian stations and now I know why. To launch missles at these radar bases, you have to trick the other side into thinking there is a major attack, because he’s learned not to switch on his equipment unless he has to. So, what we need is a stealth radar antenna.
I believe there are such things in development. One solution is frequency-hopping but I’ve not heard anything on that for years. The other is having a series of dishes that randomly spread the signal. This harks back to Viet Nam, where US planes learned to fly in formation exactly 1500 feet apart. This caused the North to see a series of false echoes. Once again, I don’t know the mechanics but there repeated reports of the SAMs whooshing by exactly between two aircraft.
I guess they never thought of putting the radar stations 1500 feet apart.
