One year ago today: October 11, 2022, 9,100 units.
Five years ago today: October 11, 2018, thinking about transistors.
Nine years ago today: October 11, 2014, I’d buy that.
Random years ago today: October 11, 2007, some new sparkle.
This was a band management morning, the sun arrived at 7:22AM. Lambert’s “Momma’s Broken Heart”, it’s on the list I guess. Reviewing the video, it’s one of those tunes we both instantly liked and knew (sort of). I set up the bass this morning and went through it note for note. Two chords (Em & B7) and a lot of presentation. Ideal for our style, plus another of those tunes nobody would expect us to play. Next Sunday is slated for pairing tunes up, that is the technique of finished one song and cutting right into the next one without a pause for applause. Of course, you make sure that second tunes starts in some manner that allows for just such an audience response.
I’m tinkering with the idea of having him sing the entire second set, or at least half a set at a time. Our sets are normally nine or ten songs. Let him do five in a row as a showcase. Whaddaya think, work with me here? Wilford must have forgot, so I got two projects complete. I took two hours to completely clear the south wall of the red shed and put up a work counter. Major work and earned me this afternoon off. Then, I got the computer set up on that counter (shown here) and systematically attacked the no sound problem. The good news is I found it, but no thanks to the millennials, because that’s how I had to go about it.
Will is a gamer, so I thought, whatever configuration he used was designed by a millennial, so let me go through the entire routine thinking like a millennial. It’s kind of tough to lower one’s IQ 15 points, but I used to work for a corporation. Rule #1 in thinking like a millennial is to assume everyone else is as stupid as you are. And if they are smarter, accuse them of “over-thinking” the situation. So we go through the motions, “device is working properly”, “RealTek enabled”, “no HDMI device found”, “driver is up to date”, aha! Did you get it? Nope? Then you are smarter than a millennial. We know there isn’t any HDMI device, so why is this message appearing? Because that’s how a moron would tell you the system is looking for something that isn’t there.
Ah, but we never asked him to go looking for it—he assumed you were a gamer. I stepped though all the menus until I found the one that said disable the device, even it if isn’t there. What a pity, sixty years after the computer is invented, these people still screw things up at this level. Drivers won’t delete if the device is enabled, they only grey out. Now I could open the driver menu and they were not grey. I then proceeded to delete every 64-bit driver in that endless list. By the time I got to the last one, I had forgotten leaving my VLC player set at full blast. I hope nobody in the vicinity was sleeping in. We have sound.
World’s largest makeup kit.
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Howie brought the old weed whacker back, he’s replace the carburetor. Amazing. He explained the repair kit was $14, but the whole new carb was $16—and would not let me pay even for the gas. That folks, is a great neighbor. It’s running fine, but two of the three major working parts are from spares in his shed. The spinner and the carb, Shown here is the old gas bottle, the previous owner had broken this, and there has to be a seal to start up with the choke open. The pull-cord is still broken, that’s headache to repair anyway, so use the drill starter. I’m warning the kudzu around here, you days are numbered. Here’s a shot of the new carb and the repaired fuel lines.
The Prez e-mailed, he’s better at picking tunes but not quite there picking material suitable for duos. He likes Lambert’s “White Liar”, but who is going to sing it. This is what, 2023 and the FTC is considering a law that make businesses like ticket sellers and hotels be honest about hidden fees. Florida hoteliers will be furious. Today I saw the word “microbarom” for the second time in my life. I read it in an encyclopedia once before over 50 years ago. They are low frequency sounds produced by ocean waves. There is now some evidence seabirds can hear them. Careful examination of all the brilliant white Greek statues shows they were once painted.
I tried to find a photo of the last F-4 Phantom jet built, to no avail. There is one in a Japanese museum making the claim, but the jet is still flying (65 years after the first one) in South Korea and Turkey. It’s success cannot be explained by any single factor, but it had some historic innovations for the time. Like that second pilot in an era where most interceptors were single pilot. Because the seat was raised, the other guy could see out the front of the plane and there are instances of the co-pilot spotting enemy aircraft 22 miles away. In the era of copied-German-designed homing missiles, that was game over.
It was a Navy fighter, so it had good forward vision and was reputedly very easy to land, which made it popular with the British, who still had a monstrous navy at the time. The Phanton was replacing the Sabre which was pretty much copied of 1940s Luftwaffe design boards. The US had supersonic fighters, but they required a shallow dive, the Phantom did it in level flight, so it arrived very quickly indeed. Test pilots said opening the throttles felt like getting kicked from behine. Still, it was huge for a fighter and in Viet Nam, the enemy had Russian SAM missiles, also built on German technology.
I’m finishing the spy-murder audiobook. By now, we know every person’s life history, every soldier from Madrid to Berlin that the dead lady slept with, and nothing about murder clues until disk 7 of 9. Then Macy finds the knife in the cellar, the first place you or I would have looked. Israel, why does it have such a funny shape? Turns out the Arabs historically left the land along the seashore uninhabited as a defensive measure against invasion by Crusaders. The Arabs were concentrated around the hills further inland. Thus, the Jews found it cheap and easy to buy the coastal areas and the country is long and narrow.
Why so many Arabs? Well, initially, there were not that many. They lived in tribes and there was no such nation as Palestine. The Jews began to develop the coast and made the same error as many other countries—they imported labor from other nations, in this case Syria and Jordan mostly. So it is only since WWI that any sizeable Arab population existed in most of Israel, and most of the originals sold what they thought was useless swamp-desert to the Jews and long since moved away.
Next, I stumble across a site that asks women why they would want to have Elon Musk’s baby. I fell out of my chair laughing only to find out it was an Onion spoof. It was such a hoot, here are the best answers:
“Court-ordered child support is the only way his employees get paid.”ADDENDUM
“So I can say I aborted Elon Musk’s kids.”
“I want a kid who looks like a Cybertruck.”
“What I specifically said was ‘I want to take Elon Musk’s children away from him.’”
“I’ve always wanted a child with luscious black hair plugs.”
“Bet I could get a free Tesla out of it.”
“It’s sort of my dream to collect a baby from every billionaire.”
“I LOVE Mr. Elon Musk, he is so SEXY and AMAZING! Check out my website”
“I want my kids to have claim to the Martian throne after the colony is established.”
“You have to have someone’s babies. It’s the law.”
“I’m 77 years old. It’s now or never.” (Dolly Parton)
“He bought the sperm bank and now it’s all they’re allowed to carry.”
An afternoon off, except I used some of it to build another computer shelf and set the new unit up, the sound is different and had to be equalized. Wilford never did show. I watched a clip from the movie “Patton”, where they show a scene supposed to be Kasserine. The Germans are shown driving up a valley with no scouts or reconnaissance, and nicely bunched together. I wonder if anyone will ever make a realistic documentary of Rommel. The Germans tanks were meant to take out pillboxes and such. They viewed destroying enemy tanks as the job of the artillery. In fact, one of their best tactics was to retreat so the British would chase them.
You see, they know the British tanks could move fast than the infantry. This meant the Matildas, the best tank they British had, would get well ahead of infantry support. The British had to change their entire army tactics to address the problem.
