December 26, 2022

Yesteryear
One year ago today: December 26, 2021, damage control drill.
Five years ago today: December 26, 2017, less than portable.
Nine years ago today: December 26, 2013, still $1,500.
Random years ago today: December 26, Y2003, free tea!

           Off to another frozen start, which caused memories. Let me comment on the two sides of that. Back home, we still had wood head 30 years after the town banned it. So, the kitchen was always eerie on cold mornings until somebody braved over there and threw some logs on the coals. Even an hour later, the center was hot but the corners were still like ice. The cabin here has no heater, so I was out there before dawn putting on a pot of chicken soup. With celery, carrots, and onion, plus garlic. Add a tray of corn muffins fortified with almond slivers.

           This filled the house with aromas like wow. Sounds homey? Sounds great? Well, you can have it. I would never live like that again by choice, it just proves you never had to endure it for very long. My kitchen this morning was same as outside at dawn, that’s 36°F. The timer here shows in another 28 minutes, I’ll leave the nice warm bedroom and head into the galley for some grub. Yes, the birds are fed. The woodpeckers usually don’t nest in man-made boxes. I dunno, I’m going to check on the one I put up near the laundry last year, just to get it out of the way. My word, food does smell better on a cold, cold morning; that much I’ll admit. Coffee’s on, as well.

           I scrolled through a series of videos on robots, a series of simple but well-controlled single-purpose types with early forms of A.I. control. It’s too early to go into detail. No doubt these are to replace workers after the pandemic revealed how useless most of them were inside the office. Those who live in the fantasy-land of work at home should be very worried. If your job involves working a cash register, handing patients their prescriptions, or most office work, now may be the time to consider going back to school. Like I had to when I was 28.
           That’s not a gripe, I thoroughly enjoyed school the second time around. If I could afford it, I’d stay in school the rest of my life. You learn a lot more once you know what is important and, at least a few years ago, you do meet a far higher caliber of women. The ones husband hunting on campus also know this is their last chance to have their flings. Being blonde, blue-eyed, and knowing how to keep your mouth shut seem to be the best lures. The only problem being you don’t always attract the best fish. Ha, to do that, you need to get on stage where you pick and choose.

           This photo shows a Café X robotic coffee vendor. I’ve been looking at this for a while waiting for the price to drop. It’s a take-off on TeaBOT, a Toronto (I think) outfit that pushes automatic tea brews, but at $10 a cup, I stay away. Robots should lower prices if you ask me. By the way, I did see eggs at $10.14 a dozen at Wal*Mart. I thought the initial report was a typo. Back to Café X, the product price is not available, although you can put a $5,500 deposit on a unit. Be wary of market statistics like this machine produces “three times the revenue” per square foot. You must have TypeForm on your computer to visit their website—but I’m not near stupid enough to allow TypeForm on the premises, so wait until I go to the library.

           You can view specs at robotplace but be aware the installation requires full logistics. That includes refridgerator lines, drain, a nitrogen generator, and a container for 90 pounds of ice. They don’t make a unit that sells just ordinary, everyday, good old American hot coffee. Good grief, old boy, that’s called a vending machine. I’m enjoying my second cup of steaming chicken soup just in time for a siesta. Three more degrees and it will be warm enough to work outside. Here’s a parrot caught my eye at the store, but $800 is too steep for me.

           Last for now, the latest guitar player (Mike?) sent an e-mail. Ha, he’s already had time wasted by the local flakes who answer every ad. I’m glad he’s got that experience out of the way. He’s a landscaper, so at least we know that won’t clash with the gigs, but until he finds something, he’s doing deliveries. This could reinforce the amount he wants to spend on my list, an important consideration but tempered by the fact he admits he can’t sing every song.            Read my memoirs for a run-down why there is a right and wrong way to learn new material. The wrong way is to wait until everybody in the band can play it right at rehearsal. Do that and six months from now some slowpoke will still dragging you down. Throw the tune out there asap and the guy will figure out he’d best quit using valuable rehearsal time to do his practicing. The last band I was in never did their homework and hence the song list never changed. And confident bass players know you can just tell the audience you are learning the tune. They love it.

Picture of the day.
Beeswax embossing machine.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           One oddball concept for replacement by robots is female fashion models. The industry could afford to pay millions for the perfect female robot. Forever young, forever slim, never goes feminist or animal activist on you. Ideal poses on demand, no escalating makeup costs, no searching the world for the right attitude and zero replacement costs. As the joke goes, the one men want to see is outlawed in most places. I make a prediction that the ratio of people who are addicted to social media is exactly the same as I’ve said are boring in real life. Self-zero-ness is the largest factor of why so many deadbeats pay so much attention to what winners do. How’s that for a coined word?

           Here is your picture of the afternoon, from Reddit. What’s it doing here, my anti-shitware won’t allow Reddit. Well, the word Bisht came up, it’s a type of Arabian cloak, but only because one sold for a million dollars. Somehow, this young lady’s surname is Bisht. It seems Reddit has a section called “thighzone”, and I’m a slim upper thigh man. This gal barely qualifies, note the puff already starting near the tops. Normally that would not make the blog, but that’s when I began reading the adjectives.
           Thighs were rated as: chocolaty, hypnotizing, slow motion, swimmable, vroom, non-jiggly, yumphie, caramel, dazzalating, but overall, it was the category that got me: droolworthy. She’s okay. I clicked on other links but one thing I’m learning to really peeve is sites that have English graphics but Urdu narration. You can’t tell what the hell is going on.

           By 1:30PM it is 45°F but with the Florida humidity, it’s still bitterly cold. What’s a project I’ve been putting off? I know, removing the Win 7 counterfeit message. I didn’t say I had a bad copy, only that the message appears on a computer that I happen to know does not belong to MicroSoft. In their infinite wisdom, let them devise some other way to harass the user. An hour later, failure. I can get right into the setting panel (plug-n-play) as system admin but “automatic” setting is greyed-out and I cannot activate it. We’ll get this yet.

           Next, I went on to Caltier to check on the transaction status. It is still not done after a week or more. They must have read my note about the “Enron-like delay”, as they’ve changed the status message to read the transaction takes “3 – 5 days” with the comment “we’ll let you know”. I think I will test the system by making another while one is still pending. Moments later, no can do. Mind you, I see their point and it certainly cuts down on staffing at their end. My advise is set up your own set of books as their on-line reports are a terrible design. They are both upside down and do not show transactions, only the total, and for some reason, the number of transactions. That’s millennial-think. Fifty bucks and fifty-thousand bucks, that’s two transactions, no difference.
           There are still spurious error messages that appear, and the one place where you can view your total investment is on a page that displays enough personal info that you’d best close it before you go for coffee and make sure you are away from shoulder-surfers. One more quirk is that you must provide an e-mail to open the account, so shortly thereafter you change to a different e-mail as a security measure. Caltier does not offer this option as your log-on can’t change. Are these people rookies? Later, they have activated a screen that does show the transactions. They are still upside down, like bank statements.

ADDENDUM
           Ever heard of Captagon? Same here, it is a cheap amphetamine gaining traction in the Middle East. I’ve heard it called the “overtime pill” for allowing users to stay awake and work for three days. So the drug is not for pleasure as much as staying awake long enough to pay the bills. That should give you some idea of the distribution of oil wealth over there. Users often sleep 24 hours to recover from a session. The reason it is banned? It’s addictive. Nobody seems to much complain about the effects.

           My camera model just went on sale for a third the price I paid. Just something I noticed today, but my Sony still works fine. This is far from a great camera, but it’s nearly 100% of the photos taken here for many years now. Five years to be closer, I bought this for my birthday in 2017 while driving a sidecar through Tennessee “on the edge of winter”.

           It seems my mini-lesson on meridians last day grabbed many hits. So, let me tackle another problem that confunds newcomers. The sextant reading. You can’t read the Sun’s height off the scale, the actual height is the “complement” and my task is to describe it so it makes sense. Okay, wherever you are, that creates your own imaginary. Remember that. The horizon is at 0 degrees and the spot above your head is way up there at 90 degrees. You look through the sextant and bring the Sun down to the horizon. Suppose the sextant reads 35 degrees, why isn’t that the height of the Sun? Why do you have to subtract it from 90 degrees?
           Ah, because that is the angle you collapsed to 0, when you brought it down. The 35 degrees isn’t there any more. What’s left (90 – 35) is 55 degrees and that is your correct angle of the Sun from the horizon. Make sense? It does but only for understanding, and that was my goal. Actually, that’s the angle of the sun above the one spot on the ground it is directly above at that moment. When you are in the US of A, that spot is way south of you over the horizon.

           [Author’s note: true, this is a fake explanation to help beginners get the concept. The actual reason is because the longitude does not begin at the South Pole, it is zero at the Equator. So the North Pole is 90° on a map, not the 180° you experience from horizon to horizon. See, my way is easier to understand.
           This is a major shortcoming of navigational terminology. A degree can represent both and angle and a distance. It can take a while to keep them separate in the old noggin.]


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