One year ago today: April 13, 2023, payday @ the mines.
Five years ago today: April 13, 2019, Shazam!
Nine years ago today: April 13, 2015, diverse & equally spaced.
Random years ago today: April 13, 2008, a quiet Sunday.
Good morning, Scotland, where their Paki government has outlawed owning a chicken without a government license. Reverse colonization. I’ was up early testing tubes, and yep, the need testing of the first four chose, two tested bad. It would seem the order of the test is also important, another skill that you memorize. The bad tubes have been set aside to be checked at the shop to allow for beginner’s dumb mistakes. It is a laborious process but I won’t need much more practice. I’ve already picked out the parts where you read the needle and those where you watch how the needle moves. Those small stems on the top of some tubes I’m beginning to suspect are there only for testing.
I do know more than the normal number of people with unusual names, so imaging my surprise to read one of my old flames is mentioned as the mother of some gal who was rounded up in some kind of big police motel raid in Canada last week. What the? I can tell you right off the daughter is far to old and overweight to be directly involved in almost anything. Give me time to check this one out, unless you know many women named Romalia.
Amazon now uses 750,000 robots yet remains the world’s second-largest employer (after Wal*Mart). We found the missing microphones by unloaded everything in the van, see photo. Same old story. The case was placed on the back seat along with all the other gear. Somehow, it rolled off the seat into a trash basket. That trash is paper only and I felt the extra weight as I went through every square inch of the van. I knew there was a gap beside the seat, but it seemed too small for anything like a microphone to fit through.
Andy Young, former senior software engineer at MicroSoft, has recently agreed that after XP, all their operating systems have downgraded performance. This is still shy of admitting they are full of spyware and remote triggers activated by so-called upgades. They know developing one good such program would put them out of business. You know those $9,000 made-in-Iran drones reviewed here last day? They work, in that the Brits are using $35 million-dollar jets to shoot them down.
Growing cashews.
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Dedicate this afternoon to another music arrangement session. Don’t confuse this with guitar practice. It was time for another review which always reminds the few musicians who do it that a plan is also always a set of restrictions. Our song list is geared to a three hour set, but the capability is four hours. This consists of 32 solid tunes and 10 floaters. We barely make it at 32 total, including a few rather shakey numbers. There are tunes like Lambert’s “Moma’s Broken Heart” and Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Boy” that are highly structured compared to average and are very challenging to arrange right for a duo.
Next, I tried to find a picture of a Rolex wall clock. Yes, they make them, starting at around $20,000. No luck, because I wanted one that was not for sale. Why? Because links to objects for sale don’t last long enough to be included in this blog. Hell, regular links fail often enough.
Trivia for today: the minimum toll for a freighter to sail through the Suez Canal is $400,000. Relax, if your yacht is shorter than 60 feet, it’s only $185.
ADDENDUM
Ah yes, the old “cup of coffee” argument. Can you really make coffee at home as cheaply as the coffee shop downtown? The answer is probably not. The coffee shop is probably far more cost efficient. If you include all costs, including sunk costs, setup costs, fixed and variable costs, that cup of coffee you make at home probably costs as much as ten times what you think. Only rich people who have never had to start from scratch think you can make a cup of coffee for 5 cents.
One easy way to learn true costing is to imagine yourself on a desert island, and you want to start a factory that can produce buttons for one cent each. You must pay for everything needed to be brought in from the outside. Chances are it could not be done for a million dollars. Where are you going to get the electricity to run the machine. If you’ve picked out we are talking again about infrastructure, kudos. Infrastructure is why all the money in the entire world can’t fix Africa.
