April 11, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 11, 2023, 1/8th speed.
Five years ago today: April 11, 2019, my favprote recycle.
Nine years ago today: April 11, 2015, Archie, my comic idol?
Random years ago today: April 11, 2005, a long entry.

           The long-winded Yesteryear of 2005 has an explanation. By April, 2005 I was at the very weakest stretch after my second check-in at the hospital. I could do little else but read and write, two skills that came in handy after all, Ken, Elliott, & Teresa. Another incentive to write so much was the many omens I’d never get another chance.
           The latest version of Scrabble, known as Scrabble Together, is aimed at stupid people. Mattel discovered 75% pf people aged 25 to 34 could not play the game without looking up words. Which is borderline retardation. The solution? Dumb down the game. Looks to me like they added twice as many vowels, but then, do public school grads know what a vowel is? The woke version allows people to pick the “level” of English and play as a team instead of competitively. The degree of ignorance in these follow-on generations is staggering.

           Last evening’s show did not go well. I found out later in that half-hour I left to go find my microphones, Bradford got up there and blasted the room with some super-loud lead riffs. As he would say, what good is a 200 watt amp if you can’t crank it to 11? That is not the way to endear yourself to the barmaid, especially after she just got nominated for best barmaid in town. We shall presume that has nothing to do with her also being the youngest by 15 years.
           When it is this windy at dawn, we are in for it. These windstorms are like mini-hurricanes, so batten the hatches. I’m baking ribs for breakfast. A sober assessment of the amount of work put into that jam last evening says time to admit the old gear is too heavy for the job. The PA head is itself twice the weight and power we’ll ever likely need. Remember the Hippie bought that Fender Passport? Well, he did it because it was cheap, but you know what I mean. Anyway in the music business, cheap is just as valid a reason as any.

           Silver inches past $28 and no reaction from the big banks. Ycharts display no significant changes in volume for days. How odd? What is going on? Could be they are waiting this one out. I’ve looked at some PA systems, there are a couple candidates. The nearest big store is right across town, an hour each way.

           I’m still missing my microphone case, I clearly remember zipping it shut here y’day morning and it is gone. That means it either fell behind something or I put in inside something else. The windstorm arrives, I’m reading more of the war book, which makes me suspect these authors include a false narrative on the Holocaust or else risk not getting published.
           Rumor has it the Paris Olympic swim may be canceled due to “fecal matter” floating in the river. A nation destroyed in one generation without a shot being fired in resistance. Why am I glad I never moved to Seattle in 1999? Here’s group of line dancers from Texax who were kicked out of a contest because their costumes “triggered” some libtards. One in five homes in San Francisco are now bein sold at a loss due to crime and taxes. What’s this? O.J. Simspon is dead? I never heard of him until my late teens when RofR's father mentioned he was a sports star, then nover again until he was arrested.
Picture of the day.
Caprock Canyon, in Texas.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
           JZ called to report a serious side-effect from a new water pill. I was unaware that could happen, I’ve been taking the same one as a control for some twenty years. It’s standard for many people who, like myself, have in the past had stress-related conditions. This almost naturally led to a forty-minute discussion if diet. My primary principle is everything in moderation, nothing to excess. It’s just that some people define excess by internal standards. While I do not drink milk, I go through a can of Carnation per week and a pound of butter every two weeks. JZ, who is lactose intolerant, thinks that is too much. What say you?
           And that was the biggest event this afternoon. I’m still deep in fatigue mode, so I got lots of research and reading. My investigation centered on the latest in voice dictation, the software they say will replace typing. My experience with Dragon Natural proved it was much too cumbersome for entering this journal. To be clear, it would enter what it thought you said, but then so much time was needed to go back and correct errors that there was no real gain. It also reacted differently when I was speaking or when I was reading aloud.

           Be careful here. There are at least a dozen products that fail to spell out their limitations in a field where many funtionalities overlap. For example, voice recognition is not the same as voice control, transcription, or voice notes. If you want to talk into a device that then types the text for you, the item you seek is called dictation software. You’ll want a standalone (off-line) version that operates in real time, that is, you can instantly watch it type the words right after they are spoken. Yes, I know, in a sane world, you should not have to go through these hoops to get what you want. Oh, and not one of the product pages mention a word about security.

           Is there a product that couples A.I. with voice recognition? The system used by my phone chat, I find amazing. Even when I use non-standard phrases, it invariably gets the spelling right. While chatting is not a fair test up against the vocabulary in my blog, from what I see that is one of the few realistic options left to ever have my side of the story published. If I find something, I’ll report back to you within the day, but any on-line apps are rejected for obvious reasons.
           Further automatic rejects include phone or tablet apps and anything that requires an Internet connection to function. Also, sheer distrust says no subscription-ware or MicroSoft products. This narrows the field cosiderably. One flag is the claims of the products often reveal that for them to say something, the feature must be missing or substandard in other products. Example, many products say they change speech to text, implying that others do not? How in hell does that work? Am I missing something here?

           Have you seen the picture of that ugly women teacher arrested for poinking a student. She’s hideous, but again, only men get long sentences for sex crimes. Here are the replies l liked best:

Arrest the student.
Git dat boy to an eye doc, fast.
Probably plied him all the fried chicken he could eat.
Was it a school for the blind?
Tell me it was Special Ed.
Scarred for life.

ADDENDUM
           I’m getting hounded for being “too fair” over my assessment of the jam last day. In reply, I will give an alternate explanation that is wrong, but demonstrates that I did consider both sides. Here’s the acerbic view of what happened.

           First off, the staff there is in a world of their own. To me, playing the music you want to hear instead of what the audience wants is a mistake if the first magnitude. Yes, I’ve made that mistake myself, but when I was twenty, not when I was forty. Also, the staff is not there consistently or often enough to spot any trends, so every decision they make has elements of short-sightedness.
           Fact. My group shows up early in order to play our weaker material when nobody is there. If you’d show up once in a while and check out reality, you’d know this. There was nobody there between 8:30PM and 10:00PM, I even started late and nobody noticed. Let’s put something straight, my band shows up there in the spirit of getting the session going. When you hire fat goofs from out of town to run your jam session, and they show up once every few weeks, that is why there is no consistent crowd. It isn’t the band causing the problems. We are an excellent pub duo and I have the videos to prove it. What we are not is a weekend show band stuck in the Eagles era.
           Nor do you people appreciate that it takes a lot to put on a show. You act as if packing equipment in and out the door is something you never asked us to do. How grateful can you get? This may one day be a rap-disco bar, but a lot of your customers will have to die before that ever happens. What happened tonight is the barmaid showed up for the first time in a month, listened to our practice set, then shut the show down just as the crowd I planned on began walking in the door. So the people, including any who may have wanted to hear live music, got the juke box.