One year ago today: October 15, 2021, the Florida population gap.
Five years ago today: October 15, 2017, revamping the household budget.
Nine years ago today: October 15, 2013, first with a Ural.
Random years ago today: October 15, 2007, early look at e-books.
True, this computer is set to block all manner of funny stuff, but I cannot even get the newcaliforniastate.com title to search. That’s them Google bastards for you, even Firefox has their search mixed up with that horrid system. Anyway, I got enough news to recall it was the old California Republic people’s latest website. These are the reputed 80% of Californians who do not live in the festering parts of the coastal cities and say they will separate to form the 51st state along the lines of West Virginia. They maintain the state under the Democrats has become ungovernable, which is a valid stance.
I stopped to get the doggies a special treat of ground turkey. If that stuff gets any more expensive, I’m going to start noticing. Sam especially remembers that week when the power was out after the tornado. We ate practically nothing but turkey as I’d cooked up several pounds. Yep, I suppose he thinks that’s going to ever happen again. The big dog is too young to remember that happy event.
Driving the Civic around, I’m not sure I like the car. It’s made for midgets or something. I’m not a big guy, but it is a struggle to get into the driver’s chair even with the wheel in full up position. Then a second walk around the train station, the one on Jackson with the big park. It’s chilly in the mornings and Fedex has still not delivered my battery. This probably means a special trip to go pick it up. It’s getting important as time nears for me to head back. Amazing, America. Instead of making a whole new system with computers, you computerized the old system and amplified the inherent faults.
German move theater
with free parking.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
If I did not say, my shoulders don’t like even mildly cool weather and I did not get to the fence this morning or afternoon. It has to be done, so let’s see how far I get. In case you wonder, it is a clicking sound under the shoulder blades. Cancel the heavy lifting. If I can get that fence panel down and repaired enough to keep its shape, I can have the job done in a couple of hours. Next, I checked my music ad to find only one prospective guitar player. Seems I know that guy, if I recall he works at some local supermarket around here and is over-involved with the church circuit.
I’ll need to get back to my home computer to get the news again. Everything I know of has been tried on this piece of crap. Some news gets through, like Biden’s California motorcade where not one supporter showed up, but lots of Trumpers were there. Now 46 of 50 states have recounted and confirmed that Biden was not elected. The Democrats have begun their campaign of claiming Biden is ahead in the polls as a set-up to rigging the mid-terms.
By staying up late and keeping the coffee on, I was able to install and get Qbasic running on this computer, as well as a small program to show the time and date, plus say, “Hello, JeePee”, the robot club equivalent of “Hello, world”. I’ve long forgotten how to test video cards and such, pretty much a lost art in this age, but my requirements are very low. Since the video output of what I have in mind is dots and lines, I’ve even forgotten how to create sprites.
During this process, I found files created back in early 2018 that showed terrible band performances, some of my crappy solo work, and a twelve-page report I wrote on the correct size of armored divisions employing WWII German double-encirclement tactics. Without going into detail, the armor had to keep the flanks protected for the spearheads to keep moving, a necessary element to throw the enemy off balance. I calculated this requires 412 tanks for a 20 mile pincer of the outer ring.
It reminded me what a laugh it was for people to believe the propaganda that Germany set out to conquer the world. Calculate the logistics for one panzer division and it is clear the tanks would stop by themselves after around 80 miles. That ring had to stay solid or the enemy armies could just retreat ever further, wearing down the tanks and their fuel supply. Planned or not, that’s pretty much what happened in 1941 and 1942 on the Eastern Front. However many prisoners the Germans bagged, who knows how many just walked back to the east until they were incorporated into new units. In any event, my study is not the war, but the weapons.
ADDENDUM
Later even, I got the outside border drawn, it turns out there is no Qbasic command for this, so it is a compilation of single width rectangles. Here’s the best photo I could get, as the printscreen command does not work on DOS graphics. This picture is quite revealing of the effort to get even small programs to run. For openers, new computer are far to fast to properly display DOS graphics. That is one of many items I disdain as the shortsightedness of IBM whom I’ve always held responsible for things like this that don’t work.
The camcorder caught a frame of the apparent animation. See the capital letter X near the center. This is moving left to right and you can just see the previous X fading. I intend to replace that with a sprite, now that I remember where I’ve used them. In Arduino code. The next phase in this project is to remove all the text shown and replace it with a sprite that moves in a straight line until it encounters the green frame. It will then “bounce” off the frame in a random direction toward the interior of the frame.
