One year ago today: August 1, 2023, I get a smart phone.
Five years ago today: August 1, 2019, plumbing & Boss Hogg.
Nine years ago today: August 1, 2015, on attacking strongpoints.
Random years ago today: August 1, 2004, Big Dipper mythology.
Over a dozen views on my band ad, which specifies I am not taking auditions at this time. All from places like Sarasota, well beyond driving distance. This means the area is gearing up for tourist season and the wannabes are searching for a ready-made band, happens every year. That’s how I found my guitar player, but don’t say nothing. The other even that causes an upsurge in viewings is a rise in unemployment. I’m digging though my supply of hard drives this morning, scrounging for an 80 Gig SATA and coming up with nothing. That’s why I had time fix a grand breakfast of my favorite French toast. Good morning, World.
I did kind of warn you about LinkedIn. Described by laid-off tech workers as a “cesspool”, it set off my alarms the first time I looked at it. And no, I did not open an account. This once-good idea has degenerated into a quagmire of shit-postings, fake job ads, come-ons, and a permanent record of each user’s failures. The first thing a hiring department does on LinkedIn is look for where the candidate applied before and the reason he was not hired. I learned about phony job offers, calling them “resume collectors” back in 1999 when I moved to Florida.
Decades ago I complained about fake employment agencies and I was a lonely voice. Now the droves of so-called tech workers job-hunting in California are echoing that, but much too late. The bogus job industry has taken root and now they are stuck with them. Serves then right. I’ll remind you of the episode that got my goat. I responded to an ad for an accountant in Ft. Lauderdale. I don’t know if this was before the days this blog went on-line, but it bears repeating. Having run into resume collectors before, I asked the lady if the job physically existed and if she worked for that company. She lied on both counts. When I took off work early and drove the 30 miles though the city, she wanted me to “fill out their questionnaire”, a sure sign of a rip-off.
No ma’am, I am here for a job interview. I have my resume with all the information I care to part with. A quick argument ensued which revealed there was no job. It’s for a factory that may or may not open in a few years, she went on, but they “like to keep 200 resumes on hand”. She had also specifically denied on the phone that she worked for a hiring agency. Now comes the famous incident—I reached over and grabbed my resume out of her grip and she fought back. Aha, she was being paid by the resume.
She called security but by then I had stuffed the resume back in my pack. That, lady, is my property. I later complained to the county that these people were running a fake agency, since there were no jobs. I was informed that was 100% legal in the State of Florida. And now LinkedIn has taken the scam nationwide. Would you hire somebody if you knew they had been rejected 25 times in the previous two months?
Times have changed for the worse over there. It seems punching keys on a computer built & programmed by somebody else does not a tech worker make. If they were real techs, they’d be in demand and all their skills would be transferable.
Do you know anybody in Oklahoma City? Me neither, which is why I don’t answer the call. Trump, if you want that extra 10 million votes, you know all you have to do. Years ago, I kept misplacing my adaptors for camera microdisks. I had to buy the double disks that had the SD and the adaptor. I was informed that they were never sold in this form. Yeah, well today I found the misplaced units and now I have six of them. It was a walk down memory lane, but also photos that showed how much I’ve aged since 2017. About 15 years, that’s how much. No, you don’t get a picture. If you want pictures, the posts since July 25 have been updated, go look at those.
Houston food truck.
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Here’s an item many of you have not likely seen before. Possibly you have viewed one of these 104” TVs, priced at around $12,000. That’s what is different about this one, it was free. Agt. M, shown here in secure mode, found this perfectly working unit thrown out in a driveway near the church. Now on the wall in his house (he moved out of the apartment last month), it is some kind of fancy display. There is a complete computer system build into the back of the unit and it is touch-screen.
Back home, I crawled under the old saw table to rig up the last two shelves for the tubes and got into more dirt and ants. Is this my destiny? By rights, I should by now be a billionaire and telling my foreman to look after such things. I have not done a tenth of the things I would like to in this life, all through lack of money (not a total lack, as I did fine with what I had). A secondary effect of no money is if you invest, you won’t see a payoff until you are too old to really have the fun you wanted, and as I found out at the corporation, you are often too tired by the weekend to do much anyway. The things I wanted to do that got past me were not lack of incentive, but were too expensive. Yes, I would have liked to tour Australia by motorbike as planned in 1995.
Other shelved ideas were a trip to the pyramids, and my oft-blunted trip to the Smithsonian. In this life, I’ve commented how ambition, unless it is blind ambition, is not enough. I never did get a break, certainly not the life-enhancing kind. I know about the be glad for what you got philosophy, because I am glad. And I would be even gladder if there was some reward for behaving and keeping my nose clean for 50 years. I don’t really have anything much different that the yahoo who never really tried or the lazy bones who never worked.
Agt. M has a trailer for sale, I’m broke but I’ll take a look. He says somebody put a lot of work into it. There’s a toolbox and sides and a tarp cover. I’ll take a look when I’m in town, he says it’s worth a couple thousand bucks. As it is, I don’t have anything tow bar, but I will be getting one installed. I’m too old to ever be stranded again.
ADDENDUM
I’ve been drawing nautical matters, using my waterlogged Universal Plotting Sheets. It’s more fun than it seems and a bit of an art. There are a dozen versions of doing anything, I’m picking what I think is most useful. Lots of unwritten rules, such as writing any direction notations only inside the compass circle, and choosing the next highest parallel or meridian if the data merits rounding up. This activity also stands out when you do it in public. That’s much like saying I live in a world of ill-accomplished do-nothings, but I won’t say it like that.
My old CDs, remind me to say 24 of them. I’ve just watched a video how to wire them up to produce a poor man’s solar panel I must now build one to see if the thing is a fake. Using only surplus materials except something I’ve wanted to learn for a while—how to coat things with clear epoxy or whatever the guy used. Stick around for details.
