One year ago today: March 29, 2023, what not to buy.
Five years ago today: March 29, 2019, finger bassists, you say.
Nine years ago today: March 29, 2015, typical 2015 daily expenses.
Random years ago today: March 29, 2013, “I hope this helps.”
This morning I hear a ruckus near the birdfeeder. Yep, Florida rat season, so I called and left JZ a message. He immediately went to check his storage and sure enough. I was up before dawn, I have six traps set. The rats in time will win, you know. Those few traps got me tired, so I made a pancake breakfast and went back to sleep past noon. Except for JZ calling about the damn rats. And I’m not looking at another spare rib for a week. What a feast that was.
So, fun it is. See this photo? There must be a name for this type of gag. I think I’ll make one. A fake little saloon facade thing for photos. Put it outside Sandi’s at the street festival and split nay donations with her. I have some footage of the pig races, but they were the same as last year. New, untrained pigs who stop and take a pee along the track. Whee! This Saloon frame is a classic, I believe I still have my first photo on this one on file somewhere. I am now 62 pounds heavier without ever having been a big eater and not a fan of processed food. They got me anyways.
How about the latest round of millennial paybacks. They were warned. Now their HP printers are shutting down whenever there is a problem with the credit card registered to buy ink cartridges. Even if you buy the cartridges someplace else, HP demands you have a valid card registered before the printer will work. Serves you people right. Censuswide reports more than half of all Americans use an ad-blocker. That climbs steadily with more experienced uses right up to 84% with programmers and security firms. It is 100% for people like me, and yes, privacy is the leading concern. (Censuswide is the firm that does polls for Ghostery.)
Here’s a picture of the signpost from y’day, I turned up the old road, what’s it called, Arbuckle? It winds around to emerge just south of Lake Wales, by which time the sun was setting. Five hours but again will I ever see these things again? On the other hand, one sweep of the clock could change everything.
It’s not true there was no cheap medical in America. It’s always available, but every society has a class that lives at the subsistence level for one reason or another—and in America welfare props them up to a degree the rest of the world can only dream of. Now, it is no different with medical, it’s yet another thing the welfare cases get for free. We’ve become like England, who’ve bred a complete fourth class of society, the permanent welfare dependent who know you won’t let them starve.
JZ says to cut the old agave plant right down to ground level and a whole batch of baby agaves will spring up. I don’t know if I have the heart. That brave cactus was one of the new things that ever grew right in this yard.
Small farm combine.
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See this photo? It is from a movie or GIF I’d make for you if I could find my Movie Maker software. For the life of me, I can’t find my tray of XP install disks. Meanwhile, here is a view of the cheapest thing you could to at the Fair—but you have to ask. Three duckies for ten bucks. If you insist, you can get one for four dollars. Invented as a novelty, what a sad state of affairs that there are now people making a living at it. Sigh, I moved alonge before she could ask for money over taking the pictures.
So it is with the Caltier crowdfunding site. It is coded in fragments by people who don’t know each other. Transferring money in should be a simple one-step process, but as we know, the original Internet ignored pretty well all security issues. Now, the transfer is a convoluted nine-step tap dance of unrelated screens, back-and-forths, and third party declarations that don’t work in the sense few comprehend what is going on. They click what works. You need only read back in the blog to learn the struggle I had with it.
What happens in this case is the series of steps have different confirmation procedures. On the identity screen, you click on “Okay”. The account number screen you have to find and click on “Next”. The third is the transfer link configured so once you key in the amount and hit enter, it closes, reopens, and moves to the next step by itself.. And so on, no consistency. I work it right because I know the manual routine behind the scenes. Well, latecomers to this game may not even be aware that connection exists.
Many of these steps link to processes which Caltier themselves had no say. And example is the KYC (know your customer) subroutine required by law. For months it got there and just stared back at you until you figured out the exit button did not appear until you scrolled back to the top of the form and clicked on a button that said “Individual”. You bet these things are destined to cause trouble, and this time, right after I got the Reb schooled on the latest methods, one of the screens changed, this is what I'm talking about. She had to miss a transfer while I was out of town. (All trasfers must be enacted on our own (XP) equiprment which only goes on-line for the transaction.)
ADDENDUM
Feeling cozy, I stayed for a few rounds and remembered that $2,500 retraining allowance I’ve never used. No, Ken, I can’t go cash it in, I have to take an approved course, file for a reimbursement, and wait six weeks for the check. It’s a reminder of my big eras in college. When I was 7 and broke and later iat 30 when I returned to graduate under completely opposite circumstances. It’s a sad tale of missed opportunity, in that when I started, I was ground floor with computers as business began to convert—but they would not hire without a degree. Ten years later, when I got the degree, everyone around me with the same degree had ten years experience. This is a well-know story. But yes, I did get the degree, two of them in fact.
After all these decades, here was a memory that stung and I could feel it still today after this trip. Some of you may not get this, but I’ll repeat the story. I was raised and left home with so few resources that I could not grasp how teens around me could say and do things like they did. How some kid could state with absolute confidence that he would graduate from law school and open an office in Dallas. Not just school, I know sixteen-year-old girls who announced they had decided to become famous singers. How did these kids know they had the resources, that they could pass all the tests, that they would not run out of anything before they got there?
Today, I know, but back then, that way of life was so distant from my reality that I did not accept it as possible. I survived, barely, semester by semester, never knowing each four months in advance if I’d make it that far. Would I have enough food? Would my clothes last? Living knowing if one single thing ever went wrong, I would be financially wiped out for years because I’d never get a job that could pay what I already owed. RofR used to remark how those people had the resources to be stupid and make mistakes, and in a sense he got that right.
That was my late teens, surrounded by people my own age who could commit untold resources to goals unimaginably far over any horizon I could even invent. And now they want me to feel sorry for who?
