One year ago today: July 22, 2023, fruit poisoning.
Five years ago today: July 22, 2019, I changed the channel.
Nine years ago today: July 22, 2015, the Heikendorf Panther.
Random years ago today: July 22, 2016, corpokleptocratic.
A day of accomplishment and frustration. Overall, just a day, so here’s the details. I woke up to find two sales, one of which was higher than my asking price. I know it is an auction, but I also know there is no easy way to display what’s going on. There is no consistency between eBay screens, even the simplest feature of always putting the back button in a single screen location screwed up. Hitting the back arrow often takes you right out of the app.
Another boggle is their so-called mail system. There is a difference between your mail and your unread mail. They are two different displays, and thanks to that I lost a $94 sale today. You only think you are looking at all your orders. It was for a tube I listed that normally sells for $300 and is the most expensive sale I’ve missed so far. Until I memorize how eBay had screwed the pooch, there will probably be more.
Theory, I have one concerning how eBay got that way. I’ve sometimes called it MicroSoft Drift. It’s a result of dumbing down your application to create more sales. The operator, instead of getting more skillful, thus becomes every more distanced from knowing the correct way to do things. Just push the button and the software takes care of you. Until it doesn’t. Soon, you have your entire usership dumbed down like those Army videos of a chimpanzee pushing colored buttons to get a banana chip. Now eBay prints the label for you—but it is an eighteen-step process. (Self-test: I did not say eighteen mouse-clicks, I said eighteen steps.)
I streamlined some of the work in the shed, finally just hanging up eight grocery bags and forgetting about tube sizes. Just get them separated. The Reb called, there is nobody up there to talk politics with, so it was a record hour on the phone for me. I have not read a book on governmental procedures much above the local and state level, I’m not the one to ask. But the Reb is amazing in that while she has not either, if you explain something, she accurately spots the implications. Try that with the some husband-hunting divorcee who shows up at the watering-hole this weekend.
For example, Biden stepped down as the candidate, he did not step down as President. Some people are demanding proof of life, nobody has seen him in days. We hear he has endorsed Kamela (not a typo, the ‘e’ is intentional), which has horrid implications to most people. That means instead of stealing the election for Joe, they steal it for her. Then the sequence described y’day installs Hillary as the henchmen shout they are listening to the constituents by canning Kamela.
This morning added $425 worth of tubes to the eBay list, but it is taking far too long. At this pace, it will be months before I reach the critical mass needed to justify daily attention to the sales. The Reb says Dragon Naturally Speaking should suffice for the simple phrases needed for tubes, we are talking a vocabulary of just the alphabet and numbers. I have a copy of the Pro 8 version, but I do not care for the way it must be activated. Most of the “required” fields are none of their business and I don’t want them hav
ing that data on file in any case. But I thought I’d use up a free activation and see how far I get.
Not far. A large part of that is this computer. The DNS package says 2004, so it may not even be installing on this Win 11 computer. What’s more, I don’t have a working microphone that plugs into a computer jack. I have my old Optimus desk microphone, but it produces a muddy sound. It’s getting a signal, I can see the bars, but it will not play through to the speakers, which also are working fine. Another example of shitty millennial fail-safe. There should be a big fat button that you can hit to make sure it always plays by default.
Russell County, Virginia.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The software won’t install. I’ll call Stew tomorrow and see if he’s got that 386 computer. Entering the data by voice is four times faster and I need to pursue that. Today’s install kept looping back to saying it needed to install more files, but kept backing them out and reverting to a logon screen. I’ll pass for now, maybe watch a tutorial, there has to be something better than this crap in the past twenty years—but you watch, they will have mucked that up as well.
What a hodgepodge of search results. There are at least 30 products out there that result from text-to-speech where most of them can do no such thing. Voice command is already a gimp feature, I don’t want a text reader or a translation. Transcription software is not in real time. I think the correct term for what I want is “dictation software”. I want it to enter text where my cursor is when I speak, with the ability to recognize punctuation commands. You think that would be easy, since the granddaddy of that is something like 30 years old already.
Next, an article says that Win 1 has a speech to text built in. I found something in the Ease of Access folder, I think it is called just “Speech”. Give me time to test that which might involve me having to buy a new for-the-purpose microphone. Everything I’ve got is too heavy duty. My hesitancy with this app is two-fold. One, I only want it to work sometimes, not take over my system. Two, the configuration may not be reversible. Notice how I’m not leery of the software, but of the motives in those who created it.
ADDENDUM
What’s all this incoming? I’ll start with the e-mails. Is Biden dead? Let me check the feeds. Oooh, something is going on out there. If these are rumors, they are consistent ones. Gab wants proof of life, the mainstream media is suspiciously silent, and the talk is they are swearing in the Hoe for President, which the American public is not going to stand for. Here’s a report saying Biden died two hours ago from a massive heart attack. Well, he was jabbed and boosted, so myocarditis would be the diagnoses, but everyone knows he was offed when the assassination failed. If he is dead, that is a bit too convenient for the Democrats. It solves more problems than it creates.
Something is afoot. There goes my phone. I gotta take this. Catch up with me later. But if there is no word from Biden in the next couple hours, that is past the point of no return. Nobody has seen him in over 5 days. Even if he shows, he can’t explain that away.
