One year ago today: February 17, 2024, am I rambling?
Five years ago today: February 17, 2020, more rambling.
Nine years ago today: February 17, 2016, the $35,000 range.
Random years ago today: February 17, 2004, that’s me.
Today’s addendum contains info on why I’m looking at old posts. If you see any photos, it’s because I injected them later and may have no relevance to today. And old around here is kind of unique to the Internet as I may be talking about items written in 1979—I’m looking for short passages of technical material. These old writings certainly show the effect that Internet publication had on my style. It’s part of what makes this blog unique. For those who may note the “Home” link at the page bottom, the explanation is that when Google first took over, there was no home link, then it appeared but sent you to their home, not yours. For those users who just never get enough advertising, there is Google.
The DC housing market is still reeling from the “Trump Bump”. Many buyers on the public payroll who bought in the past four years thought they could continue the work-at-home scam indefinitely. They purchased in areas that have massive commute times if they must return to the office in person. Over here, another tube sale puts us over the top into some serious cash, it just took a long time. Now might be a good time to separate those high-end tubes. Over time, some of the boxes have gotten juggled, but still 90% accurate. It’s an inventory thing.
The mysterious hissing noise in the kitchen is found out. When you walk past the refrigerator, it is from the ancient floorboards along the east wall. The kitchen is the only spot in this old cabin that still has the old flooring. Now grab a rake, we are going up the ladder to clear the leaves out of the roof valleys before it gets too warm.
A.I. is spawning a surge in the sex doll business. You are not alone if you think these dolls resemble street hookers, strippers, and leftovers. Ha-ha, how goes the old joke, the ones really in demand cost $15,000 and are illegal in 46 States. Then again, considering the caliber of females out there still available in this once-great nation, let’s not be laughing too soon.
Former Libyan European Hospital.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Shopping was the active part of today, we saw that coming. Plan on a couple days down time, that’s physical only. I have decided to built some quick cheap tube boxes to store the valuable tubes and it should not be long after I dump the others. I got a notice in the mail that the State of Florida is now paying my Medicare. Good, I deserve if for all the tax money I’ve paid but the scary part is if they were not compelled, it would be, under Obamacare, $299.55 per week. Yep, per week.
I have nothing new for you today, I was asleep for most of it. I’m watching another desert island movie in stages and our audiobook lady, “Alice”, has been invited back to England by her parents. She’s to be tucked away in some sleepy village where she’ll find a man not too fussy about her background, and spend her days doing English things.
My review of Assembler Language is moving along, but each version is unique to the chip. I use the terms machine language and Assembler in a blurry fashion, but I mean the code one writes that gets assembled, as opposed to higher languages that get compiles. My renewed interest is due to my recently learned features of how registers worked. I did link a bunch of registers together back in 2015, but did not know the details.
What’s changed since I first say this language 44 years ago. MicroSoft is the quick answer. As usual, they took fairly standard commands and renamed them, calling it “new”. I recall the courses clearly because we had been taught to use as few commands as possible, each one as close to a machine operation as possible. It was good training, for back then, because computers cost more than labor. I can still think in terms of how these registers worked together to operate as a computer and want to delve a bit deeper.
Back in my day, one command was one operation. That’s changed a bit. Each computer function, we learned, created a stack of memory addresses that contained instructions or data. You moved a pointer to the stack you wanted to use, which you defined by giving it a start and stop location. I’ve forgotten all of this, but I remember the starting point for all programs was the third byte from the highest or last memory location on your computer, usually FFFFD in hex.
Seeking knowledge of the registers, I’ve had to watch a lot of versions of the code, and it has changed. Things that were verboten are now used, some commands do multiple tasks, and these days you let the computer decide what memory locations to use. That’s dicey, I’ve often seen crashes and clashes that I know must be MicroSoft overwriting its own memory locations. Overall, I admit have forgotten 90% of what I knew on Assembler primarily over disuse.
Another half-hour’s reading taught me this has changed. Even the texts that refer to the original coding now include descriptions of commands and processes I do not follow. My final assignment was to construct a printout of the first 50 Fibonacci numbers. What was a function call to me is now a single command. Do I really want to relearn they way they do this now?
ADDENDUM
Time to embark on a new adventure. Add it to the list of items in this life that everybody is an expert on these days, but who were not a lick of help so I got to it on my own. The text-to-voice apps I’ve tried in past are wonky. Much too low-grade for the vocabulary of this blog. They were like listening to the Garmin lady pronouncing abbreviated street names. Lately I’ve been wondering what difference the more evolved artificial intelligence since a year ago makes. It did not take long to impress me. The first lesson learned is sloppy writers get sloppy results.
To challenge the system, I uploaded a sample of technical writing, much like you’ve read here on topics like robotics, music theory, and navigation. Nothing heavy, but a mode of writing not tolerant of mispronunciation or syntax errors. Again, I was impressed. This is where we stop. I am not likely to proceed unless there is money involved—and again I find no straight answers. But I can go over the statistics. For instance, I’m aware of the time required to produce the text and what is involved presenting it.
Some years back, I walked away from publishing product reviews on-line. People who simply read the packaging would clobber real user input by out-posting everyone else five-to-one. My excellent and highly-rated reviews never rose above 150th place. I’d have to look back but I think the most I made was less than a dollar per post. Other people would simply flood the market. You can see where I’m heading with this. I need something that cannot be swamped by the minions and can quickly reach a critical mass.
At that point, I have two advantages. One is that I already write the content. I could churn out more daily podcasts than squadrons of writers. It’s copy & paste for me, and it is material that cannot be duplicated. I could be the one who dominates a category. If anyone tried to copycat, they would quickly run out of material. The other consideration is I do not have to make a living at it. My minimum income to justify the effort has always been pegged at $5 per day.
I’ve listened to other “home-made” podcasts. They are lame, particularly the unrehearsed live recordings, um . . . er . . . y’now. I’ve contacted the Reb about this to see if we still have a channel with the audio-book outfit, the crazy brothers who got lucky. You see, I also listened to a few top-notch podcasters who claim to be making thousands per month. I could give most of them a run for the money—they plainly are not good writers, and those who read scripts fall short of the mark. You might want to look at some of this material to see where I’m getting my input on this topic.
Having said that, there is an aspect of writing that I learned forty years ago that a lot of today’s authors could stand to heed. It is the unavoidable reality that no matter how good you think an idea is, it is not a good idea unless you can write it down. Work with me a bit on this one, as the initial posts would be excerpts from this blog. It would not take much to post a first batch of 300 or 500 articles. This is not a commitment, peeps, and what I could really use right now is real time voice A.I. that lets me sing like Steve Perry.
