March 19, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 19, 2023, “letters of introduction”, no less.
Five years ago today: March 19, 2019, Five Guys, too expensive.
Nine years ago today: March 19, 2015, eentsy yellow flowers.
Random years ago today: March 19, 2016, Florida’s endless horizon.

           I’ve painted myself into a corner. All my XP install disks are not where I store them. A clean Windows install is not something I normally trust anyone with so I brought the desktop here. I haveno choice now but to systematically take this place apart until I find them. This is also the lazy man’s Spring cleaning as I always find other misplaced goodies. I’ve already found the 3D card, an older but super nice video card and driver. Not a bad start to a day when I slept in until noon. It’s down to about six places they could be but I’m not looking forward to diggintg then out. It’s Festus Tuesday but I’m going to pass unless I find some untapped energy.

           Here is a view of the setup procedure underway out in the shed. This might bring a tear to an old installer’s eye. I never thought I’d be returing to XP after over twenty years, yet it remains the best (and safest, cleanest, and most reliable) product that company ever produced. That’s a damaged Dell installation disk I was hoping would pick up but no dice. I’m takine extra care with this install as tihis may be the last. You know, if I could find a source for the drivers, that’s all that is stopping me from totally reverting to XP.
           Here’s an odd twist, did you know XP is actually quite safe once more? It was unplanned but how that works is “backward progress”. After Win 7, there was a big push to practically shame the world into going 64-bit. The people who are most likely to hack a computer are the leading edge of the consumer suckers out there, mostly the gamers. They all rushed to 64 bit like lemmings. But the only thing different at the user level about 64-bit is that it will run 64-bit. And that is incompatible with 32-bit so your old gear is shielded by a thick layer of consumer stupidity. I’ll wager the largest bloc of 64-bit users don’t even know what it is.

           By the time I got the things layed out for the oil change, I was too weary to continue. It’s another quiet night for me. Let me calculate the GP of the Sun, it is now 18:38:30. and the delination is 00° 09.0 which means the Sun is almost on the equator, the Equinox is day after tomorrow. On the hour, the Sun was 88° 07.0’ West, correct to 38 minutes and 30 seconds after the hour by 09° 39.5’, giving a location 97° 46.5’ Alas, I cannoot go further, as all on-line coordinates use decimal degrees, which is NOT the way navigation is done and other sites want keyboard symbols that must be inserted as special characters, one by one. Total retardation.

           Thanks to Google, the map section of the Internet is now one big shopping mall. My best guess, without filling out a credit application, giving out my e-mail, or signing up for a membership is the Sun is somewhere near the Galapagos Islands. Not one of the on-line maap formats was useful, as in a simple lookuup display of the calculated location. God, there’s a lot of morons out there who don’t even suspect what a nightmare they are building for themselves.

           One amusement to me is the number of places on-line that try to charge for almanac information. They don’t know it is free, but you know some people. I do want an almanac, but not for the information, rather because no on-line publication comes close to the ease of use of a good old-fasioned paperback, the version pictured here. I don’t even know if this is the best one, it is just the one I learned on and have always used. It seems plain dumb to go looking for a computer when the book version does a better job if it.
           Another laugh is the number of sites that are instantly blocked by my millennial-ware settings. Who even tries such crap on this subject amazes me. Maybe a word of caution is due. The on-line almanac world is full of complete assholes. For example, the US Navy version that pops up on most searches is dated 1981; There is no mention of this on the web pages, all 314 of them. Here, look for yourself. What sort of douchebag would post such potentially misleading navigational data? I don’t know if there is an answer.

Picture of the day.
Japanese luxury train.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Tired but not sleepy finds me checking mail feeds, which I’m behind on since this trip. I see the Supreme Court is wising up to a Trump victory by ruling Texas can deport illegals. Trump is suing the media again, but this time it was not dismissed by a liberal judge. General Flynn says he’d re-open the assassination files of Kennedy, King, and a dozen more. A Texas power company issued a warning its solar power could be interrupted by the eclipse.

           Almost 3/4 of the world salmon comes from fish farms, and the industry is being plagued by mass instant die-offs. They are blaming everything, the fact is the fish are cloned and lack evolved defenses. No matter how the left tries to block A.I. from producing “racist” results, the software will not comply. Time to question how they are defining “racist” maybe? As for the election tactics of the Democrats, the public is showing signs of weariness with endless stream of anti-Trump accusations. They’ve become routine and lost their edge, which is baffling to the Bidenista. Any one of the accusations would have toppled most of their enemies. And the Democrat bullies were most definitely unprepared for an opponent who fought back.

           By late afternoon, it turned cold, Tennessee cold. This just means we shift work inside and I know by now you are thirsting for news on the vacuum tubes. Looking over the hundreds of cheap tubes draws the conclusion they are not much worth selling. What would any red-blooded American do? Why, find a gimmick of course. I’ve discovered that same as discrete (solid state) components, the tubes have datasheets, and in the same ill-thought-out formats. Y’know what I mean, “Get Andy’s whiz-kid from shipping to make us up one of them-there millennial database thingees".
           I mean, the kid is level 99 Game of Thrones or something, what could go wrong? Put it this way, if you are getting your information from any stripe of “quorum” source, you are being properly mal-informed these days. We are departing from pure tube logic here, as my goal is not to locate working tubes, but to sell tubes that glow for a higher price than otherwise. Think Steampunk, you know I was once dumb enough to think they were building something useful.
           Whoever Frank is, he’s got a no-nonsense web page I’m using. You want the lower voltage tubes, we will be using only the heater pins, which tend toward numbers 7 and 8. The type of voltage, AC or DC does not matter, since it is a heating element. On the other hand, since the first number on the tube is the voltage, I’m glad I kept that box of old wall warts. The tube I randomly chose is a 6AF3 listed at $3. I cannot get it to glow, but this is my first stab at it. After a timed three minutes, it neither glows or ven gets warm. This raises the questions, what would a kid raised on hose-water do?
           But I do know nobody won the Powerball and that’s over my half-billion mark where I buy one ticket. So, let’s see, there are nine pins on the tube. Is that combinations or permutations? I switched tubes in case that was the fail only to get the same condition on a second dissimilar unit. The heater pins shown on the datasheet cause a dead short. I got nowhere with this.

Last Laugh