One year ago today: October 24, 2021, good old Dwayne.
Five years ago today: October 24, 2017, $12,000 each.
Nine years ago today: October 24, 2013, YeeHaw Junction.
Random years ago today: October 24, 2011, gold-plated silver.
What am I still doing in Tennessee? It’s a bit more than the planned ten days. People will get the impression I live here. I add, snarkily, that impression is reinforced by all the yard work. You know how I love burning brush piles and getting that burned wood smell in my hair and clothes and van and blankets. Let’s get back to where beer is a civilized $3 per bottle and where all my tools are hopefully where I left them late last month. I’m up early, let’s read the news. Holy buggy whips, there are complaints the electric cars are hurting the established auto-repair businesses. Then again, it should surprise no one if these “new” cars took them all by surprise late last week.
Here’s the doggie now trained to do a good run, enough to get really winded. This dog is late middle age and has had a leg joint operation. It is doubtful he was ever taken for walks before, he spent the first five years chained to a pole. Watch him go now. You see the best views, but I should fill in the blanks by saying there is no such thing as a quick walk with the dogs. It involves stopping what you are doing and finding the dogs, they are not trained to come when called, not trained to be guard animals, and not trained to obey commands. Once you find the dogs, they must be struggled with to put on the harnesses. If it is too cold outside, add sweaters. Then, get them downstairs. Ut-tut, don’t leave without making sure you have enough doggie bags in case they want to go. Usually they do.
Then, down the hill, the dogs are not trained to heel, so they constantly fight the leash and be ready to practically lift the big dog off the ground if he spots a cat or squirrel, and he cannot be walked past other dogs. You must change direction or cross the street. Reverse this process to get them back home, remembering to hold them steady inside the front door and use your other set of arms to wipe down their paws for any damp, sand, or leaves. Remove the harnesses and now you can get back to your chores a minimum of 40 minutes later. Just so you know. We have Chooks trained to do a run by himself and have found the limit that tires him. I like a completely tired dog, they are so much more obedient. However he still cannot be trusted off the leash near a road or other people.
An article in Psychology Today associate mental disorders with the use of Facebook. Folks, this typifies the generation of wimps the public school system has cranked out. Poor babies. It seems the cause and effect is nothing but the overblown tendency of all teens to compare themselves to others. If you really believe all the want ads and profiles on line, you are probably a bad bet to begin with. Don’t call it a mental condition and try to shove the cost on the system. Like all losers and weaklings, they should count themselves out and find some niche where they can live out the rest of their life “in quiet desperation”.
I f that sounds harsh it merely shows how out of touch some people can be with reality. The world cares about those who work with what they got, but the world is dominated by these types who whine about what they don’t. They make an industry out of charity. They consider people who work hard as “lucky”. Why if they could work hard, they would, and if they had a car they’d lend it to you, blah-blah-blah. This is why Psychology Today psucks.
Amador Islands, in Panama.
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News from Bryne, now in Texas and living in the boonies. He’s miles from anything, the nearest I’ve been to his place is Texarkana. Thus, travel there really is two options for me. Drive or ride the train. I hesitate going anywhere in the USA without ground transportation, so the train is in iffy thing at best. The idea, however, reminds me of the times I’ve driven past the Texarkana railway station thinking it was a warehouse of some sort. You can research the place yourself. Know little about it, but that’s still more than I know about any other Amtrak station. (Amtrak did not even stop there until the 1970s and even then only a small ticket office with tiny restrooms. Not even a coffee machine.
I have a rare term I use, “computer discord”. This is people who in any combination did not begin using computer until they were over 30 and it was past 2000. This situation is meant to describe a batch of computer users you might call post-Boomers or pre-Millennials and I’ll elaborate. These are the late-comers to the computer age who lack a background in computer systems, but they own and use them every day without realizing they are behind in critical areas and have missed an important boat. The ones you are likely familiar with is Apple users. They know their computer is slick and expensive. What they don’t allow for is that 84% of the world does use Apple.
How is this a problem? Easy, they consider themselves elite power users, but if you can’t open a file they sent or anything of the sort, it is not only your problem, but they have utterly no clue what they are sending in any technical sense. Some do (to be fair) but most don’t. It becomes your problem to open the file because it is not their fault you are a no-tech. Ah, there-in you find the discord. I go out of my way to be able to produce all manner of compatible files based on what the other person can work with, not my own self-satisfaction. Who is right? Probably nobody, but here’s where you find the discord. Those Apple users are still working for a living well into their late forties and fifties, decades after I retired.
I’ve speculated why this is and I believe it has a lot to do with the lack of well-written software. For instance, there is no such thing as an address database that can both record every address format you can find and allow ease of usage. The phone company has such an address database, it has 17 fields for entering exact specs. And it costs them millions for data entry because most of those fields have to be skipped over in actual usage. Interestingly (for me) I got the last laugh on that because I warned them in advance not to use “IBM” equipment. At that time, there were two big systems, Apple and IBM-compatible.
This bad software began to emerge around 1995 because that’s when coders arrived and began to replace real programmers. Coders do not need to know the fundamentals of what they are working on, they need only focus on making the screen appear to be doing the job, witness the cruddy performance of GPS. The result of this is you get people who, usually without realizing it, adapting how they do things to the limitations of whatever software they use. And that is like learning how to drive only one make and model of car. One may become an expert driver, but overall, remain pretty useless.
They live in a world that uses imperfect software to emulate imperfect processes, but think themselves the leading edge of a new and wonderful computerized era. Ha! I learned this mainly from working at the computer shop we closed in, what was it, 2000-something? Power users coming with 14,000 emails saved since day one for no good reason. Legal secretaries who had no idea what the file suffixes meant or any vague idea of how a word processor actually did its job. This is also why I don’t use track balls or track pads. They are too slow and too inaccurate to get precision work done, if you want to race me you will lose badly. The problem arises when you insist on showing me how you do it and I don’t have the time to wait around.
These are also the crowd that think they have a business in the gig economy, but that is not the same as getting any real work done. Why? Because it creates nothing, every gig I’ve seen in this context involves working the cracks that have appeared in the larger systems. Bitcoin mining and such, the type of “business” that will instantly be wiped out by the first round of Artificial Intelligence. Another telltale sign is ages old, such people have no desk, no printer, no convenient place to work. Don’t tell me you work an eight-hour day when you have to walk up a flight of stairs every time you need to charge your laptop batteries.
ADDENDUM
I’ve started a trend. Once I got the big ladder up to trim that tree, word got around and two more neighbors have borrowed the ladder. Even the lazy guy who hasn’t fixed his gable vent in ten years was up on his roof this morning. I’ll take the credit even if nobody gives it to me. We have Chooks trained to do a run by himself and have found the limit that tires him. I like a completely tired dog, they are so much more obedient. I was up early loading the van, it is now late afternoon and I’m still here.
Remember that robot weeding machine review here last year? It’s back with twice the capacity, using lasers to chop down 200,000 weeds per hour. No price tag has been published yet. It says here NASA is hoping to design aircraft that diminish sonic boom.
