September 27, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 27, 2023, what happened ot Apeel?
Five years ago today: September 27, 2019, my see-through floor.
Nine years ago today: September 27, 2015, if you listen . . .
Random years ago today: September 27, 2007, slimeball sales tactics.

           Polaris Dawn. That’s the private space mission that includes an EVA, often called Space Walk. It has little interest to me except on one detail. Otherwise, it is all tested technology from the past. The capsule has no air-lock, so the people inside must be suited up before anybody steps outside. It finally happened two weeks ago, but I just saw the video this morning. If this is all outdated activity, what’s the important detail? Easy, it is doing it for one-tenth the cost of a NASA operation.

           Something funny is going on with the English voting system, like they’ve been taking lessons from the Bidenistas. He is latest several polls consistently show him barely squeaking by on issues for which he is historically very popular. Few political viewpoints have a 50/50 split and I’m automatically leery when I hear of such situations. The A.I. translations of historic speeches are heralded as masterpieces of accuracy—except for Hitler’s speeches which are, the State media informs us, are “being used by the far-right to sell radicalization to a whole new generation of young people.”
           This photo of cables and copper hanging on the side of the silo is the most dynamic thing that happened to day.

           The longshoremen are going on strike, demanding wages equal to dockworkers. This struck me as odd until I learned the union wage was under $16 per hour. The real issue is they cannot afford any quality of life on that after Bidenflation. There are over 40,000 then along the east coast, so that will paralyze the food supply. The use of cropland to grow subsidized corn has left America unable to provide its own foodstuffs. I should buy an extra case of food just to be on the safe side. What’s my emergency food budget, let me check. $280. That’s not enough.
           My rodent trap has a limitation. It will catch two out a batch. Thereafter, no matter what location or bait, the rest learn to ignore it. You’ll get another couple with spring traps, then same thing. Sure, it’s instinct but it brings on another problem with squirrels. At least one in each generation learns first to defeat the bird guards, and later that I can hit them at long range, which in this case is from the corner of the house to the cardinal feeder, around 40 feet. One thing they cannot defeat is if I hit them from an open window. The snag there is you won’t last long in Florida with your windows open. There is only one economical solution beyond that.

Picture of the day.
Cat poop cookies.
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           Home all day, what a treat. My plan is to buy two large batches of staples, such as rice and macaroni. Enough for a month means 36 of each, we know this from the budget. Any source will do as the Internet has made prices not worth shopping around for. Look up Mac & Cheese. The difference between Costco, Save-A-Lot, and the Dollar Tree (where else would you buy such a product) is less than 15¢ a box. Save money and buy it by the carton at Wal*Mart, save the planet some other day.
           Not wasting any time, I went through the two hour process of getting speech-to-text set up on this computer, a Win 8. By that version, I’m told, they had perfected the application. They lied. Nor is the thing easy to use or set up. It was over two hour before I could get it to recognize a single word. Each component tested okay but it would sit then blinking a cursor on a blank word document. On-line was the usual post-1900s runaround. Dozens of tutorials none of which match your actual situation. Most waste you time by not getting to the point for the first five minutes, a millennial specialty, I call them the “Hi Guyz” garbage.

           I know part of the problem is that I do know how it is supposed to work, where most so-called power users plug something in and hope for the best, or have the shop set it up. When somebody is terrified to let anyone else touch their computer, that’s the goof I’m talking about. I resorted to our old shop standby. Step through every menu and try every option until you make headway. I found out the hard way that too many audio applications will not work with the default software in your computer. You need a separate hardware audio manager, which I sort of know a bit about.
           My preferred brand of this is Realtek, but only because it usually works when you install it. I’ve never had time to figure out how their brains operate. That was a big part of today’s delay. Their screen menus and instructions often overlap. Activating one feature often silently and invisibly disables some other seemingly unrelated setting. Turns out that is what I was up against. Enabling the microphone (which requires a third app, I use Audacity) turns off a very important process around here—playthrough. That’s where you listen to anything your system is recording in real time. I will tackle that tomorrow, right now I can listen to MP3s but not record them.

           It was after dark that I got the first words to appear. I’d started with Word, but it created a tiny text box of the dictation that could not be expanded. Each segment had to be manually accepted. It’s as quirky as Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS, which also means Domain Naming System and, if you were ever a dance instructor like I was, Did Not Show, for a skipped lesson.) To hell with that, I switched to good old ancient Notepad and it finally began following along in real time. That’s when we hit the same old barrier—the software is designed for drawling low-vocabulary mouth-breathing sub-humans.
           It produced some kind of error in every sentence. All time saved by dictation was lost going back to make corrections. I was at this juncture back in 1997 when I wasted two months with DNS. It still stumbles over most anything over three syllables. Today’s crop of imbeciles will always blame the user. There’s a problem with that in my instance. You see, I speak absolutely flawless, accentless, native English. If the software fucks up, it is not due to me. This concept is so totally alien to today’s graduates, who are incapable of admitting their world is imperfect.

           Yet it works almost flawlessly if you gear down to baby-talk, which to me is probably around third-year college level. Yes, you can spend the time needed to train the software, but it’s all about time, isn’t it. Thirty years later, I have less time that I did in back then. So why the sudden focuses on “the Queen’s English”? Easy answer: A.I. I’m hoping it is one system that branch can accomplish. I’m hoping to find software that specializes in regular English instead of every damn inbred potato phoneme and Asiatic prosodic down at DEI headquarters. Today was not that day.

ADDENDUM
           Later, I did the rounds. I know exactly which four or five clubs to drop in for one on a a Friday to have my finger on the pulse of Polk County. It was payday and the crowds were sparse, except for Kooters and downtown Bartow—but still most disappointing compared to normal. I’d normally stick around the last club on the way home, but decided a beer from my fridge was better entertainment.
           I was out there long enough t write a letter to Marion and plan my next move with the tubes. The multiple listings has not increased sales. My new plan involves cherry picking the lot and dumping the rest on the first buyer. At $2 per tube, that’s still $6,000. Sometimes I still wonder where I would be if I’d had such options in my youth. Enough infrastructure to survive until something big paid off. You’ve heard me call this the “incubation period”.
           Without that infrastructure of your own, you must pay for it some other way. That’s why a paycheck never lets you get ahead. The system makes it too damn expensive to survive by relying on others to provide that framework.

Last Laugh