October 29, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 29, 2023, a generic day.
Five years ago today: October 29, 2019, trip pictures.
Nine years ago today: October 29, 2015, gas cans, coffee, music.
Random years ago today: October 29, 2018, unfamiliar trip planning.

           Down for maintenance today, just a random day off. Let’s see, calendar says mention food and I missed going to the used paint store last week. If I get a layer of cherry stain on the wood before Festus, I’ll be happy today. Blog rules I record the biggest events of the day, even if that is a ten-hour siesta. I know, I’ll walk outside and take you some random photos. And we have a baby mouse in the live trap, who is now pursuing a new career at the Confederate cemetery. Keep alert, there is rarely just one baby mouse. Here’s a stirring picture. My gentle paint mixer. Doesn’t splash. And some of the ancient paint I salvage requires lots of mixing.

           I’m reading “Cryptonomicon”. It’s been on my shelf a while, but it is deep reading and best enjoyed if one if familiar with the art of electronic deception. The plot is set in World War Two in the early days of spoofing, or electronic warfare. Should you read this, you will know as I do two important matters that apply to today’s digital surveillance. A) every form of dirty electronic pool alive today was born in England before 1943. B) there is and cannot be any truth to the widespread stories that German intelligence had no idea the Enigma code machine had been cracked.

           The book is very educational and really goes into detail of how this facet of warfare takes place. If you like to discover the generally unknown methods that are still employed today, this is your book. For example, while many know that each telegraph operator has a “fist”, few people know that people of Asian descent are able to copy the pattern with little training. This is why I would not rely on that method of recognizing the sender. However, wartime England had a shortage of trustworthy Asiatics. Even today, you are not supposed to know that America has a small trained core of these people ready just in case.

           Plus the author is up on the tactics and gives good insight into the layers of deception. He still places faith in deception measures that would not fool me for a wink, and I’m not even in the trade. Example, a sudden flurry of messages is taken to mean something has happened, where I would suspect it is a ploy to swamp my code-breaking system or slip in bogus transmission. It is also idiocy to think the Germans did not salt their transmissions with morsels, as I call them, the most famous being the Midway “AF” ploy. Plus, there are just too many reports of German U-boats in the middle of the ocean suddenly finding airplanes and destroyers bearing down on them and blaming it on “radar”.

           This is one of my prized shop possessions. And old school paint can opener which doubles as a bottle opener. It’s the best ever for stubborn old paint cans, so that is likely why the quit making them. No, you can’t borrow it, even for a second. Get your own.
           Japan has passed a law against break-dancing in their subways. North Carolina rednecks built a road to a stranded community is week that the government said would take six months. Some comedian at a Trump rally went off on Puerto Ricans, saying the island was a floating trash heap. There is outrage, but nobody is saying he’s wrong. Upon checking in for Festus Tuesday, the neighbor is in the hospital. He mentioned a sore stomach last week and that is never a good sign. I’ll keep an eye on things, he has family to feed the cats.

Picture of the day.
Eastern Idaho.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Some 50 million people are said to have voted early, with Trump in a commanding lead. However, the corruption has started. As usual, the so-called battleground precincts are demanding three days to count the votes—after they know how many ballots are cast for Trump. Where are all the poll watchers we were told would be present? I follow the antics, not the politics, but are they not required by law to have equal numbers of each party on staff? If so, why are there never any Republicans around when the funny stuff is going on?

           News later in the day, the neighbor is being kept in the hospital, no visitors. I would rate this an exceedingly serious. I can monitor his doors, the barn, and his driveway from my workshed, there is little else I could do to help out.

           One of the more satisfying steps is applying stain, shown here is the cherry color. All the edges and corners are done, so this is just the smooth easy part that imparts the illusion that I know what I’m doing. The whole procedure never quite becomes routine, there are always mistake to be made. And what you learned five boxes ago is a snap to forget if you have not applied it since. This is the most fussed over box yet, But I’m tired and would rather take my time. Tired equals mistakes equals doing things over again. Like this cut at the wrong angle.

           The saw must have got bumped and these were not 45° cuts. I’ve not really learned to do any other angle. It’s a good thing I’ve determined they can be used as the “roofs” for wall boxes. That’s what you see here, piecing them together for a wall clock. This was supposed to be a long narrow box for my current sensor. Maybe there’s another picture today showing the deer camera being loaded with an SD card. This evening I hope to get some of the marauding raccoons and there is a possibility our possum might show. If this link works, here’s a blurb for China’s space station. It’s a copy of ours with one glaring difference. Their’s is downright luxurious.

           The Brit dude who was creating A.I. kiddie porn got 18 years in prison. Like Shkreli, that will teach him not to pay a cut to the establishment. He was a goof, living in his parents house and charging $80 to take in pictures from pedos who know children in real life and change them into graphic images. While what he did was wrong, I’d stop short of saying it makes him guilty of any actual sex crimes. Plus, jailing him just creates a new underground industry. As far as any direct harm, 18 years is excessive, considering the photos were more like realistic cartoons and it is not illegal to produce them.
           Have you heard of “technological self-determination”? Probably not, it s part of the DRM (Digital Rights Management) law of 1998. The law that makes it illegal to produce anything that bypasses or cracks DMR has the gimps up in arms. DRM works by tacking code extensions and now a very tiny minority of society is about to increase your prices again. This blog distinguishes between disabled people and gimps. Gimps push their “rights” on you, one of the most annoying is the MicroSoft gimp features, where a typo can irreversibly turn your work into crap. That is, you can’t disable the junk that is there for the disabled. If they get their way, they will force the rest of the world to again pay extra so they can get more comfortable—and screw you if you don’t like it.

ADDENDUM
           Let’s talk investment. This is now four months that Caltier has paused without a decent explanation. They continue to operated and offer other investments, but not the two I have my money in. While they continue to pay well enough, that investment was supposed to grow by additional monthly amounts from my budget. It’s fair to say even if they come back, the momentum has been lost. I can’t plan ahead when I can’t put regular funds into the system—which I know is the ONLY system that works all the time. (And the hardest for most people to stick with.)
           Next is Lofty.ai. My conclusion is they consider themselves too “space-aged” to answer mundane questions like what some of their jargon means. I’ve gotten only so far into their log-in process before, then it stops. You go on the chat line and get a robot that talks in circles. I don’t think they are serious enough to warrant my business. I don’t need buzzwords when I’m trying to set up an account.
           Now, thinking it forward, part of my incentive was to learn cyber-currency. I don’t need Lofty to do that. I know BitCoin is the granddaddy of these currencies. That’s a dicey bit to understand in itself, but from the outside it is similar to currency trading, which I know how to do. My understanding is there is a fixed supply of BitCoins, something like 21 million. It’s established enough that if the prices fall, it will get propped up by people buying in. Thus, my changed plans now drop Lofty and look at Bitcoin.

           There is another “reverse” calculation I do for investing in volatile things. Similar to the way I worked backwards from my retirement goals, I learned that one reason rich people make money is they never have to panic-sell. They do not require the funds for day-to-day operations. I regard investment money as just as spent as if you used it to go to the movies. So I look at BitCoin ups and downs and it never stays steady. For someone who can wait out the bad times, that is always an opportunity.
           My worst investment of this type sense is silver. A year after I bought, it dropped to half what I paid and now, 13 years later, is just back to level. But I lost nothing but time because I did not sell. I will therefore do what I always wind up doing—going it alone. Because even when you meet people who supposedly know the ropes, they are rarely capable of logically and systematically describing what they do. “First you set up a wallet.” “What?” “Well, actually, I don’t know, my cousin set it up for me.”
           Nor is it easy to find good tutorials. They all try to sell you something or blast you with jargon. “Send me $19.95 and I’ll teach you how Internet scams work.” My plan is to watch the first five videos that claim to teach the rules and see if something can be amalgamated from all the bull donkey. It’s frustrating because much as these people want to blur the vocabulary, there is really nothing new about investing. Only the lingo changes. One of the sites I chose defined “tokenomics” as “the study and analysis of the economic aspects of a cryptocurrency or blockchain project, with a particular focus on the design and distribution of its native digital tokens.” Did you get any of that? A virtually meaningless definitions, but typical of the era.

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