One year ago today: February 10, 2024, a busy, happy day.
Five years ago today: February 10, 2020, a generic day.
Nine years ago today: February 10, 2016, the attack on Shkreli.
Random years ago today: February 10, 2008, everything in 3/8ths.
Y’know, I’m still tired from the van work, so I took the morning off. And instead of building that starter switch, I hot wired the solenoid and drove to the south end to mail letters and such. Bryne the Luther met up with a bunch of buddies who convinced him to go bar hopping through western Louisinana, where they knew all the back roads. The problem is, those roads have not been graded since Biden shipped all the money overseas. The next day his back was so sore he landed in the hospital. This convinced me I need today off. Here’s a stapler I took apart, except for the spring, zero recyclable parts. Here’s a stapler I took apart, except for the spring, zero recyclable parts.
I drove to the south end for some lumber and some snack items, that’s my morning. I’m on disk 5 of “Giver of Stars” and it has become a human interest story, centered on the back hills of Kentucky. That was the most backward part of the country at the time. One has to admire the way they take care of their own while remembering these are also the people who harbor 100-year feuds with no telling how many have died. Alice is how a year along her job with the pack-horse library and is having trouble at home. The hubby has not consummated the marriage and spurned her advances. The father-in-law is overbearing.
She has taken to some of the more needy families, often stopping to read to the ones who can’t. Alice’s mother-in-law was gone by the time of the marriage, leaving a house of sequestered old lady artifacts. Embroidered cushions, porcelain dolls, and old photographs. She finally liberated two of the dolls and gave them to some girls in a cabin in the woods. (The father would not accept them unless giving something in return, so there is now a stuffed deer head on the library wall.)
Alice’s co-worker is going the mine foreman, but is banned from the property by the owner, Alice’s father-in-law. Marjorie is a free spirit, kind of the Erhardt type if Amelia had access to guns and whips instead of airplanes. I can attest to one truth in the book, the lack of sex education. This was normally done by keeping the topic a secret until it was too late. The library has a little blue book that they circulate with the women kind of hush-hush. The wording and descriptions are accurate. My assessment is because I was able to interpret the encyclopedias and figure out how not to “get in trouble”.
You can read my long-ago pages for how I got the reputation of being the boy they could “do it with” and not get pregnant and that I would not blab about it. It was these early teen years that began my dislike for older women and their ways. And at the expense of being called a liar by weak men, I made it with every girl I ever dated except two, including every pretty one in my high school, and all through college. I was first with most of them, which explains why, when my younger brothers finally clued in (years later), they hated my guts. Good.
Ubatuba Island.
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By the time I got home and put things away, I plunked down under the A/C. Yep, from a week ago under the heater to under the cooler. I got th eaccoundes updated and Caltier finally paid out January with the lousiest small percentage yet. I got $12.25. There were smaller amounts but that was back when there was less than $2,500 in the account. Mind you, allow for this as a period of adjustment to a leaner, meaner America. By the looks of things the free ride for the whole world is over and Trump is on his way to becoming a living legend.
Valentine’s Day is the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in 1944. This is an often circulated picture of the city, but it is incorrect. Those are American tanks rolling through Cologne. The Dresden controversy will unlikely ever be solved, as the British war propananda is still spreading lies about the war 80 years later.
Wanting more info on one-transistor amplifiers, I ran across some references to a “carry-ahead adder” which purports to speed up computer addition by reducing the time needed to decide if there is a carry-bit. If math isn’t your favorite, this is when a computer register adds to “1” bits together. The answer is “0” with a carry, just like decimal adding past 9. I did not know this delay was an issue. The clearest example was called a Kogge-Stone adder and it was so complex I could not follow the first sentences. It also claims to save power and have a smaller footprint.
That’s when I decided on a nap and dreamed up a small project. Want to hear it? Good, because I rarely remember dreams any more. It’s a wooden box with a lid. You put a quarter in the box and close it. The open it. If you are lucky, it gives you two quarters back. If you are not, it keeps your quarter. How does it work? The wood on the box is old pallet wood full of nail holes. You, the owner, know the trick is to pick up the box to open the lid, covering one of the holes with your thumb.
What’s this Apple is ordered to give the EU access to encrypted cloud data? I warned about that on day one. What manner of moron puts data on somebody else’s computer. What a software company can encrypt, they can decode. I’m sill waiting for the first software that puts the encryption in the hands of the user, not the seller. Another on-line rip off? Thermaltake is a brand of external drive reader. If you need to replace the power supply, you will find a ton of them on-line with a shared feature. Each poster has taken the effort to erase or obscure the output voltage. I don’t know what their problem is because they are all 12V, but they sure have gone through a lot of trouble.
My siesta was cut short but some feral cats in the back that would not quit fighting, The silo has a small radio that plays all the time. I could not find the cats but the sound was from the silo. I flung the door open to scare them. No cats. It was NPR radio airing a Hindu music festival. Businesses will use Trump’s cessation of the one-cent coin to round prices up.
ADDENDUM
Nothing yet on the rumored Musk SuperBowl commercials, but a huge backlash about the half-time shows. This has been brewing for years, but until Trump quashed political correctness, few people spoke up. The people want an American show, not an African show. There was a call for a country music half-time show. Here is a rare but typical quote, this one from a Gab poster.
”Did you mean western as in "country & western"? Because, I haven't heard any country music on country music radio in years. Bro-country is pop music that is so embarrassing simple and pathetic it makes K-pop look like classical. Bro-country is how AI is confident the subjection all of humanity won't be that difficult. Bro-country has as much testosterone as Taylor Swift sipping diet sprite through a paper straw that was handed to her by Lady Gaga . Bro-country went Bud light at least 10 years before Dylan Mulvaney gave them social herpes.” ~DertyT
