One year ago today: September 7, 2023, coffee, muffins, Ascension.
Five years ago today: September 7, 2019, memory as a function.
Nine years ago today: September 7, 2015, the Radio Shack career.
Random years ago today: September 7, 2012, a day in Colorado.
Fun, closing the books always catches errors or unknown transactions. This is why I keep a separate log. I slept through Friday night so I’m up early. You know me, I don’t spend money I don’t have, so I’m always surprised when small bills add up. I don’t have the time to monitor them individually. The totals crop up at year end. Did you know I spent $446 on pet food this year? Ouch! And during a rough patch, I stepped in and paid some vet bills. On myself, I’ve spend $0, on pets, $1,956. The largest element was that paw surgery for $775, but the totals are still numbers I just don’t spend, even on myself.
As for effect at kitchen level, we now sometimes run low or run out of some basics, like at the moment grits and gluten-free flour. But part of this is that things now don’t get replaced same day, they wait until the next planned shopping trip, which usually coincides with some other chore. Like a computer repair. In all, we are not doing badly but I will, with adequate notice, freeze the joint account until Xmas. I cannot imagine how other people are bearing up, but I do clearly see how so many of them needed this wake-up call to realize the effect of their tolerance and complacency.
Time to polish up the Ibanez, it shows it’s age. Where is my fancy capo, I own several guitar cases and today we commence the hunt. At sun up, we’ll try the old fake install, that’s where you just put a hard drive from one Dell into another until you find one that works. Before that, let me enter another 25 tubes. Never let a morning by without getting something done, but the way I feel, today would be a candidate. The laziest Saturday in a while. I even had time to browse some dating-club stats to notice nothing has changed. Maybe all women over 25 still single aren’t crazy, but the ones on dating apps are. The most common idiocy is they think they can do every guy in town and then take is slow with the nice guy who has a job. Pure insanity.
Wait, there’s more. A common retort is that men can sleep around and still be marriageable. Well, folks, the problem is not with the men, but the marriage. Bottom line is an unspanned gap gets created, being that if a woman sleeps around, she quickly runs out of good ones and begins doing the bad ones. I doubt many men consider a woman off if she had slept with (in my day) Clint Eastwood. Which, in turn is due to a simple fact. If a man sleeps with twenty women (not pros), this is a terrific accomplishment, requiring money, method, talk, and time. Not so for women—but I suggest they could improve their odds by putting some real work into it instead of the zero-effort lot they’ve chosen. And I don’t mean by putting on the right make-up, sister, I’m already listening to that lame CD.
Part of the task now is to determine if the unboxed tubes are worth sorting. The first batch of 98 tubes says yes. This is no simple matter of picking up the box and keying in the code. Often the tube imprint is faint or eroded away. Such tubes must be examined under magnification, a laborious errand. This batch rang up at $118 wholesale, or about $350 retail. They are back in the loose box, unfilled, this first box at cost is $620, or abour $1,800 retail if they could be sold at that. I need some method of “boxing” these loose tubes or they can’t be sold very well at all.
The ARES Global Mission Timer.
(about $3,000)
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Being tired is becoming natural and I know it will never improve. Which day, which sentence will be my last? Good question, first asked some twenty-one years ago. Deciding that was too gloomy to think about, so I flew at the two Dell computers and achieved the usual good news and bad news. Bad news is they both have a single CD reader. I was spoofed because the vacant slots still contained the mounting screws. Shown here is something few people will have seen this decade. Pay attention, you may never see it again. This is a clean new Windows XP install on a 386 computer.
The system is still missing these drivers, this was the big era for engineer-goofs. The screen says “no driver found” instead of the drivers name and where to get it. And certainly before any of them thought of putting the drivers into the device. It made each Windows install unique for utterly no good reason. America designed the computer the same as the automobile, that you need one in working order to get another one.
By then I had close to thirteen years experience and nobody my own age to talk to. This is well-documented. People my age know nothing about computers they can share, people half my age the same but for the opposite reasons. Both groups now use computers but with only the most marginal concept of what they are doing. That’s why they are so difficult to get to teach you anything. They don’t know themselves, they merely memorized what they are doing.
ODDs (Optical Disk Drive) in SATA do not exist in my stock, I will have to find a source or buy them new, if that is still possible. We are not out of the weeds yet, as after Win XP is installed, you must still add every conceivable driver that the whack-offs at MicroSoft ever brain-farted since day one. I said some good news? Yes, one of the computers still had the mini-WiFi plug in one of the USB ports. That’s worth about $30 if it’s a Netgear. Later, around 8:30PM, my air conditioner is kaput. I’ll get through the night with the fans, but time to replace the bedroom unit after only maybe four or five years. Half what you got from the Boomer units.
How about that food dye that temporarily turns skin transparent? Uber wins, proving it is a collection agent, not an employer. The Georgia Institute of Technology has finally agreed to quit training Chinese military engineers. I’ll make this quick, JZ called to see about the phone bill and she is still there. That means I cannot return to Miami for any planned medical procedures. Can’t crash at Agt. M’s, by just a few months he’s nearly got Irish Triplets. (Three babies in under three years.)
I stayed an hour over at the library, hoping to find more info on the voltage divider. Nothing, just dozens of diagrams how to hook one up, a no-brainer. Even my best physical application book devotes maybe on page of print, more on how sensor inputs are a form of divider. I’m on my own again. I see they are marketing a home seismometer for $899. It interconnects with other units and forms a large network of monitoring stations. If that is all it could do, I’d consider joining. A mild breeze off the Gulf contributed to a quiet afternoon, I plan on reading and so should you. My plan for the rest of today is largely about breakfast tomorrow morning.
Being tired is becoming natural and I know it will never improve. Which day, which sentence will be my last? Good question, first asked some twenty-one years ago. Deciding that was too gloomy to think about, I flew at the two Dell computers and achieved the usual good news and bad news. Band news is they both have a single CD reader. I was spoofed because the vacant slot sill had the mounting screws. Shown here is something few people will have seen this decade. Pay attention, you may never see it again. This is a clean new Windows XP install on a 386 computer.
If you recognize this screen, you are a pro. It’s the recommended slow format of the newly installed hard drive. It is working off the boot disk at this point. The neighbor’s son, over 40 and a computer use for over half of that has never seen an install before, bewildered that it could be done anywhere but the factory or shop bench. He watched for about ten minutes, unable to fathom any of the process. Why it’s bloggable is because he represents the stage of computer savvy about the time I myself was 30. By then I had ten years experience and nobody my own age to talk to. This is well-documented. People half my age are total experts about nothing except disguising that very fact.
Much later, check if I went downtown. It’s late and I see I’ve reached another trade-off. I played the guitar an hour. Old Eagles do not flow naturally to me. So, do I continue to torture my finger tips or do I flub some of the chords on stage? I’d say flip a coin but if Trump doesn’t win in November, nobody a year from now will have one. Say, do you know who I got an e-mail from? Tonio, the tow truck driver from Valdosta. He grew up in the area and saw my post about the Royal Café. From across the miles, I hope you’re doing fine, we had quite the adventure.
Tonight was a dud and it fits my observation of the changes associated with (but not blaming) the new staff. Other than myself, none of the old crowd showed up except out of habit for Karaoke. After waiting too long for their turn, they left right afterward. I waited an hour and ten minutes and finally had to leave, my days of holding until midnight are long over. I know the technique of maximizing sales by making the singers wait and it does not work in the long run. The place was mainly full of unfamiliar people and that is what’s killing the place. There were only two couples I knew and they sang once and exited, probably wondering why Bill isn’t there any more.
There were no regulars present, they’ve all been chased away by the rap and metal. As predicted, even that novelty is wearing thin and the decline is well underway. It’s also a later night crowd, more boisterous, giving the room a less friendly atmosphere. The balance has been upset but the change is too complicated to blame any one source. It’s a younger crowd, but not by any means a young crowd, and that is not a winning formula in a small town. They can’t even count on me more than every other week now that my duo is playing sometimes, notably at the type of clubs that their lost clientele now go.
I have some new country CDs that I will use to test apparatus. One of them is hits by Garth Brooks. Now, I know we play one or two of his songs, but that is the exception because that is one droll, boring vocalist. It’s like listening to gospel when you are in the mood for rock and roll. Um, even the font on the CD jacket is so bad I thought “Face to Face” read “Taco to Taco”. Other than what we play I’ve never heard a tune by that dude that made the grade.
ADDENDUM
The final chapters of the book on Rommel and Tobruk become more readable if, like in real life, you learn to ignore each bastard’s name and focus on what he actually did. Then, you can pick out the story of the single panzer that made it all the way from the beginning in Tunisia to the end in Egypt. Unlike the British, whose tanks were so bad they often abandoned them with minor damage, the German repair crews worked seeming miracles recovering and repairing their gear. The British had the same capability many times over, but meh, just wait for the next shipment of Shermans.
Do be alert, the book purports to be an impartial account of the soldiers involved, but it is loaded with snippets of wartime anti-German quips. The Brit military shows itself over and over an arthritic innovation-stifling bureaucracy. The Limey footsoldiers recount time and again how they were sent piecemeal into battle by orders from London, knowing full well it was Churchill needing any kind of victory to prop up his coalition government. This can be summed up by the tales of German gunners, like the one who saw a hundred tanks approaching with no infantry support.
The propaganda war never ceased. The British all knew the winning formula for tank warfare was mutual support, but each service had its own jealous priorities. The same thing happened near Singapore, where the RAF would not fly escort and the Royal Navy thus lost two of its newest ships to torpedo bombers. Montgomery was hardly the first instance of the British shaping up by continually canning any commander who lost even a single fight until those that remained obeyed blindly as weight of numbers slowly decided the issue in the background. By the time Monty showed up a Captain Bligh could have won the war from his rowboat.
[Author’s note: that comparison to the ships lost near Singapore is a classic of British non-cooperation. The ships set sail with no fighter escort for a number of dumb reasons. By now the vulnerability of ships to aircraft was all over the news, but the airplane guy didn’t want to lose his precious new airplanes flying convoy duty and apparently Churchill, underestimating the Japanese, figured the mere presence of two European battleships would be enough to intimidate the enemy. The ships lasted one day.
To be fair, the original battle squadron had been dispatched with a carrier, but it ran aground off some island in the Caribbean. The Navy planes had different commanders than the Air Force planes and the British military is nothing if not bureaucratic.]
It remains a common falsehood is that the Germans attacked in overwhelming force.when, fact is, they were always a tiny group compared to the massive convoy-fed British Eighth Army with years encamped in the Nile delta. It was the frequency with which the British found panzers in the desert and u-boats in the ocean that led me to completely disbelieve the crazy notion that the Germans never suspected their codes were broken. If there ever were any Germans that stupid, they are alive today and working in the immigration office.
The true number show that the outcome was never in doubt. In a comparable period before El Alamein, the German corps received 2,546 tons of ammunition while the British units got 20,000 tons. With tanks, discounting the Italian tankettes, it was 200 German against 1,200 British. Much is made of the British deception methods, such as parking tanks under canvas that made them look like trucks, the fake pipeline, and driving vehicles with special tires to leave marks like tank treads. I say if the British did have that many disguised trucks, the Germans would certainly have bombed them. My conclusion was the Germans knew damn well what was going on and lacked the means to do much about it.
