July 6, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: July 6, 2023, Disney, the loser.
Five years ago today: July 6, 2019, 85% same usage.
Nine years ago today: July 6, 2015, learning the auction ropes.
Random years ago today: July 6, 2012, in a key I can’t sing.

           I gave the doggies their separate walks again. The Reb is in Franklin so we slept in until 10:00AM. Breakfast was fried turkey mixed with their crunches. Then out in the back to enjoy the sunlight. This also means I missed the cool morning to clean up the yard after the fence job. What I got done was a few hours mileage on this Mac computer, a skill I had let slide. One feature I instantly like and don’t like is how, with Apple, there is usually only one way to do something. No Crtl-C copy shortcut. (I found it later, but the meaning stays posted.) My mixed feelings are due to a factor most people have never considered. I’ve mentioned it in this blog, so here it is again.

           One of the greatest time-wasters on a computer is whenever you have to switch your hand from the keyboard to the mouse or back the other way. When you type blog entries involving millions of words, this makes a significant impact on your time. (That’s why I criticized eBay for requiring so many different operations to post anything.) While I generally do not like keyboard shortcuts, mainly because they often zap your work into cyber-nothingspace, but you [at least] could leave your hands on the keyboard most of the time, a huge savings for typists.

           I got the printer working with this Mac, but I do not know how. I went through every menu I could find and did the old enable/disable test on each one. Nothing, but around an hour later, I see a yellow light came on the front of the printer and the message “offline” had changed to “idle”. A test print was successful. Good, because there was zero progress in the back yard today. These iMacs have their own set of quirks (and headaches), the most annoying is pictures from the Internet will not display. And of course, not one of the help lines mentions this.
           This is a reminder to myself, since I don’t know what just happened here. I got into a DOS-like screen, reset a bunch of 0s to 1s and back again. Around 40 minutes later, I saw the yellow light. I printed one letter but could not duplicate it from the downstairs computer. Now I cannot find that DOS screen again. So typical of operating systems these days.

           To wind down, I have that old pro-Asian book, “The World is Flat” in the van. I disagree with the premise but it contains a good amount of statistics and proposals it’s wise to be aware of. Most of the ideas are not new, but the author (T.L. Friedman) goes into them at length. An example is a universal transferable pension plan for workers. I stayed with my old company years longer than I should have to qualify for the pension I have today. It’s unquestionable that my career would have taken a different path if I could have moved around, but in those days, the prevalent fallacy was “employment for life” while my personal motto was “employability for life”, a phrase Friedman could have lifted from this blog.
           It was well known long into my working life you move up or you move out, but ten years was the minimum employment (I was there 14 years because I missed the buy-out package by a few months in my 10th year. As for the bulk of “The World is Flat”, it is based on countless millions of foreign labourers taking the more mundane aspects of western jobs. I’ve always maintained that too many people here are being paid more than they are worth on this count, but it took the Internet to drive that concept home. True, I lost my last “job for life” to outsourcing, but unlike my co-workers, I was completely prepared to move along to the next.

Picture of the day.
Another eastern religion.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           The library for two hours, then I went for a donut and coffee, blogworthy because that set me back $5. The same Dunkin I was at New Year’s Eve 2018 when it was $1.89. Needing some down time, I had this mornings book with me. It goes on about how the power of the West is being shifted East because of the number of lost jobs and the number of engineers and MBAs coming out of places like India. Read my lips, if those cultures were ever going to contribute or invent something globally useful for mankind, it would have happened long ago. The fact is, they can take the drone jobs, but cut the bullshit they will ever win by any means other than brute force or overwhelming bulk.
           Read your history, in the past we have prevailed over their religions, politics, military, manufacturing, social, and financial best, and we will do exactly that when they beg to take us on intellectually. There is no element of racism in that statement, but I will be a racist any time it suits me, since the term has lost 99% of its meaning through over-use.

           Next, I got a message from the Kaiser, he is way out in Oklahoma. I chose to write letters, and later drop in at Karaoke. Taking care to send the Reb photos of the pets splayed out sleeping all over the furniture, along with the houseguests, because I know she frets about the especially the doggies. Stopping at the Nail to find it empty (I did not know it was a franchise), I headed back to the familiar turf, Shooters. It was an evening of terrible singers. Why to these female Broadway singers who can’t hold a note show up at country music venues and grate their fingernail voices on the blackboards? I stayed late, writing, which remains an excellent way to meet women, but also a lot of flakes. It is so obvious so many of them have never seen anyone writing in public for so long it dumbfounds them.
           There should be a picture here of the interior at Shooters, now with six pool tables (down from twenty). This is from the bar side, way at the east end. looking down the length of the room to the west. You can barely make out the stage against the back wall. It’s full size and they have had nine-piece orchestras up there. Mostly it is the same Karaoke guy, the one always asks when the Reb will be back. Possibly when they repaid the interior to get rid of the old cigarette aroma?

           Tell you what. You’ve been nice so here is another view of the bar, with the stools removed. It’s long enough for twenty people. Follow your eye along to the far end of the bar, it wraps around back there to the wall just before it appears to end at those gaming machines. It forms a small nook and that is know as my office when I get there.

Last Laugh