One year ago today: June 4, 2024, eBay code is bad.
Five years ago today: June 4, 2020, June 4 is potatoes day.
Nine years ago today: June 4, 2016, 62 feet, by sextant.
Random years ago today: June 4, 2009, I learn some cobbling.
Tonkawa, Oklahoma. I never heard of it either, until I made a slight change in my real estate search parameters. Watching for houses that dropped more than 12% of their value, and something in Tonkawa was first on the list. What got my interest was the number of places that showed because we’ve only seen this [kind of drop] once before—in early 2007. When I had no money. But, the next bust has to start somewhere. And you can buy a house on Main Street in Tonkawa for under $50,000. The ad failed to mention Tonkawa is on an Indian Reservation.
Meet Harold, the Thrift store cat who does not like anybody. Don’t even think of patting Harold. He will tolerate me, I think because he knows I’ll leave him alone. Today, Harold’s energy level matched mine. You could total us up to zero, all batteries dead. I stopped at the Thrift for paper labels and forgot them behind as I founda beautiful solid brass and wood toilet paper holder. And I lack the energy to go back and get them.
How about MicroSoft, conned by the oldest trick in the book, the “thinking talking computer” parlor trick. This time, a billion dollars wasted on A.I. that turned out to be 700 engineers typing fast over in India. Ha! Serves them right. MicroSoft’s first-to-market strategy has been flogging substandard software on us for decades. Throw the shit out there, stop support, no legacy, then use the head start to quash quality startups. Spend the next three years patching up glitches but call it “support” and “updates”.
It’s migration again, we have a flock of small brown birds. To dark still to see more than shadows but we got at least a hundred. More news about NPR, who is defending their “right” to be anti-Trump. Weird. There is surge of radio articles that the FBI estimates there are a minimum of 8,000 Islamic terrorists in America, let in by the Biden-Harris people under that freaky Myorkas.
A few others are slowly beginning to share my suspicions over why the left is not openly preparing for the midterms. Those are normally a nothing election but this time around, the Democrats could get a real haircut. All I’m saying is the socialist have a plan, and it does not seem to involve appealing to voters. This week they voted for prison sex changes, men in women’s bathrooms, and more gun laws.
Nighttime tobogganing.
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This afternoon I bear you a mixture of bad news and mediocre news. This is the fourth time I’ve visited the Treasure Barn and I can tell they are barely clinging on. It’s a good concept and great when it flies, but there likely have to be 30 or 40 shoppers present at any given moment to operate a premises that size. I’ve never seen more than 2 or 3. And so it has been, as my contact was not there but I chatted with the staff. May was a dead month, I add this is the sixth year that the snowbirds have not returned. And from what I read, Canada has troubles of its own.
This photo shows me working on a display stand that tilts the box backward. Here, I’m seeing if this can be done with the end-pieces of the pickets, as I’ve notice the dog-ear cuts are exactly 45°. I could cut my own but prefer a shortcut if I can find something here. It’s not making the cut, I’m not that lazy, it is the need to recalibrate the saw after returning it to 90°. So I’m writing off May to a $180 loss, plus or minus. It’s all expenses that can be capitalized but I’d sooner show at least some cash flow. What say we throw on some coffee? This thinking part is where most people do not realize the money is made or lost.
Sale (boxes that is) have been disappointing. To me, it just means the pricing, presentation, or placement is wrong. While doing all this thinking, I built four more boxes including two from the new white fir lumber. That, by the way, is a no-go. The lumber is stained with a light tan oxide or some sort, which makes the end cuts unattractive, It’s still a great box, but is unpleasantly too heavy.
I spent some more time on that intro to “Wagon Wheel”. The secret, I think, is to fake the fiddle notes, which I have the hidden advantage of using the piano keyboard to place better passing notes. It translates to an amusing patter on the bass that most would not play, so of course I’ll give it a whirl. That’s how I roll. Personally, I like the fiddle riffs that have a long scale run up to each “melody” section because they can be played off time, an excellent arranging technique if you can find other musicians who it does not throw off.
Trump is finally cutting off taxpayer aid to these mega-hedge funds posing as universities. Why am I subsidizing Harvard who has a $50 billion dollar endowment piggy bank? With that kind of money, the school should be free. The medical treatments have nudged me back to a regular schedule in that I don’t have to get up and move around every five hours. So I slated some extra reading including star navigation. Up to now, I have only looked at the Sun. The Moon and planets have similar methods, but the stars are different. They do not move relative to each other, so the approach is different. Instead of measuring their position, you find the position of a fixed point (called Aires) and look up the offset in yet another table.
ADDENDUM
Watching John Wayne in “Flying Tiger” off and on, there was a scene relating to a comment I made last day. Wayne asks for a station wagon, and in the next scene a small truck pulls up. Few people would recognize that was, at the time, a station wagon. Long before I was around and station wagons were cars, what you see in the movie is actually the real McCoy. The originals were covered trucks that served train stations (hence the name). They could get both passengers and lots of luggage to the final destinations. Remember before 1950, most people traveled by train only and took a lot of baggage along.
My earliest recollections of travel are not a car, but trains and airplanes. I believe both my parents had military passes or discounts, so a car was not needed until we moved to a city. Unlike to day, trains and planes were nice ways to travel and people wore their Sunday best. Oddly, I did not know this until later in life when I looked back at the situation and compared.
What did I learn today? A reason. We were taught in school that when programming, it was efficient to declare if a variable was a byte, word, double-word, or quad word, each having twice as many bits. Also that a byte could have a maximum signed value of 127. But we were never told why. Now I know. The leftmost big is interpreted as a sign, positive(0) or negative(1). If the number has fewer digits than the declared size, the computer pads leading zeros until you get to the sign bit. This process is inefficient enough to slow down math operations.
