September 2, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 2, 2021, Is that Al, AI. Or A.I.?
Five years ago today: September 2, 2017, 17 times faster, folks.
Nine years ago today: September 2, 2013, my love-hate with guitar.
Random years ago today: September 2, September 2,, hacking Starbucks.

           Wow, nothing is happening today outside. I moved the pallets to the disassembly area and pried maybe six slats away. Nope. I’d hoped the temperature (low 80s) would help, but with that humidity even working in the shade is no relief. I must have slept thought a major downpour overnight. I can tell by patterns in the sand what was flowing and I missed a good one. I like to read near a window in the rain. Instead, I’m seriously behind and cannot find my $55 spool of pipe solder. The radios all round are tuned to the same station and I take it Biden made another few million enemies last day. I threw in a load of laundry and got back inside.

           Then we had a power failure. Since you will melt without the A/C anyway, I went out there and disassembled all six pallets. Here’s the video, be patient, it really is a video. With embedded stills, but missing the subtitles when the power returned I had other priorities. On average, six pallets yield 14 pieces of useable 2x4”s and 38 slats of lumber. At this time, the slats are still being used for shed siding instead of the boxes I like to build. There’s a nearby picture of the 2x4” pieces from these six pallets.

           Now pay attention to this. When you see pictures on this blog, they are rarely links for a reason. If links, they are clearly identifited. Why? Because of viruses. Remember the Webb telescope photos? Those were not downloaded here. They were screen copies, cropped, and resized, so even the file is unique to this blog. It seems the Webb photos were being laced with viruses. This is not a problem you need worry with this blog, and I don’t use PNG format just in case.

           The most common viruses are currently written in Golang, a coding language that does not require thinking. You merely memorize the sequence. You can easily attach it to png files, here is a tutorial.. This guy is a moron, but if you do exactly what he says, that virus will work. The guy even stumbles upon the correct way to split the code but doesn’t realize it. Golang loves Linux and sails right past your anti-virus.

           Such code is insidious because it gets into your registry and boots in Safe Mode. I don’t much follow the code because it works with the “newest” C+ variants of Rust and Go, both of which I rate as degenerate piece-of-shit “millennial” code. It encrypts your files and demands ransom up to $750,000 in bitcoin to give you the new password. It works especially well on imbeciles who put employee data, client lists, health information, and payroll all on the same network with no backups.
           Canadian authorities today concluded after expensive studies that most of the illegal handguns they confiscate come from the USA. The question is how they say “most”, in that the only country with which Canada shares a land border is the USA. The USA has legal gun ownership and that border is 3,000 miles long. Face it, Canada must be full of geniuses.

Picture of the day.
Moon boots.
(To keep sand out of shoes
In the Gobi desert.)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           The pallets are processed in two batches. First dragging them to the disassembly area and piling them. Then they are pried apart to components. These pieces must then be cleaned of nails, which is the easy part but time-consuming. I call them slats out of habit, here’s the pile from this lot. I never could find one of those nail guns, the pneumatic one that punches the nails out. Agt. M may be able to spend a couple weeks here in October, so I am pricing out siding and shingles. He’s into married life now so the break will do him good. It is hard to believe the robot club was disbanded six long years ago.

           It’s monsoon season again, the Gulf saturates the air, so even standing in the shade will get you. In late afternoon if the temperature falls more than five or six degrees, the air can’t hold that much moisture. There was a slight letup between dusk and dark, so I raced outside and fixed the kitchen cold water supply. Why, I think I’ll have another coffee. Just in time for another power outage, this time for two hours. It is too muggy to even read lying down, so I was downtown for a beer. I can see the street lights from there so I left soon as they came on, the club had no entertainment anyway. The electric returned after 9:00PM, good, because I had a load of laundry in the dryer.

           It’s making little sense again though I’m fifty pages into “The Yellow Admiral”. The language and plot are very difficult to follow. However, I have experience working with people who are like the characters in this book and I’ve read some history of the period in England. These people’s days are completely consumed by ranking others in relation to themselves and each other. They can’t have dinner or go for a walk without constantly mulling over who does or does not deserve what they have. The manors and estates of old England each evolved pretty much its own set of rules and this gives way to endless social comparisons of who has a right to do what. I’d laugh at the book, but as stated, I know people who actually live and think this way.
           The Admiral is only casually mentioned but I take it he pays rent on a farmstead that overlaps two of these manors. He is away because there is a war going on. It is nearly over and the talk is of his return. Part of his farm is undergoing enclosure and part is not. The livelihoods of the peasant farmers are at stake. From what I understand, and don’t quote me, each tenant had a cottage and up to an acre, but he was dependent on a large common area to keep any farm animals. That "commons" often contained the only forest, bog, as well as any ponds and meadows. In some cases, the cottage had historic rights to this free range, in others it was a revocable grant.

           The changing times meant the lord of the manor wanted to “enclose” the common areas and drain the land or make it suitable for growing what today we know as cash crops and later sheep farming. Read up on it if you like, it is too complicated to touch here. Most of the rights were custom and not written down. A peasant often had a long narrow strip of land bordered on one edge by a river if possible. When William the Conqueror arrived, he split the entire country up into 180 manors and promised the old ways would be continued.
           It seems this is what the book is about. The French brought the feudal system, where all the land ultimately belonged to the Lord of the Manor. The Lord could not grow crops on the open areas or the peasant’s farm animals would help themselves. To prevent this, they wanted to fence off the common area, hence, “enclosure”. So you had two general outcomes. Some Lords set about using coercion and courts to take the land from the peasants, the other Lords opposed them by supporting the status quo. Too often, the split was between those who ran their estates properly and others who had lost at the tables.
           The Admirals rent is substantial it seems, because he has an entire staff looking after his farm. Whether or not enclosure occurs is dependent on which side the Admiral takes upon his return. I will see if I have the patience to read that much of the book consisting of 250 pages. I was surprised to learn there are still large farms in England that operate on the manor system, which I find incredible.

           The second picture this afternoon is just a view of what is selling on Etsy. The artwork is $47, the raw planks are $34. The planks are sorted and consistent in size and color. They are also in wonderful shape with no splits, knots or nail holes visible at this distance.

Last Laugh