Five years ago today: July 19, 2020, hence, more danceable.
Nine years ago today: July 19, 2016, “presentational”.
Random years ago today: July 19, 2015, soggy shrub in Navajo.
For a true Fortune 500 update, look at the list of corporations leaving California. Ha, that governor who wrecked their economy is planning to run for President, proof positive that liberals have a vertical learning curve. I’m up early and now positively notice another change—I no longer have a keen sense of how long I’ve slept. Is this a symptom or side effect? I’ll ponder that over some grits and coffee. Real grits, with a tablespoon of pork drippings in the mix. Good morning. Here is my pick of the day, the World’s mostCondescending Man, even by my criteria.
A six-hour day, mind you an easy six hours. I moved the old van (the Hyundai), clearing out the interior and searching for a hole through the firewall to feed the starter wires. I’m not going to repair the ignition switch, rather mount the starter switch inside. I’ve done this many a time and the trick is to drill as little as possible. The lumber is ready to build a work counter and some utility shelving in the front bedroom. My exercise consisted of walking back and forth to the shed around 30 times.
I cannot find my mid-size router, the one for making panel slots. It is lost but it’s around here, so remind me to tell you where it turns up. We have another rat, a juvenile female, ready for deportation.
South African coast, once.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The laser etcher is on the work bench, shown here. I confirm, not one of all the big-talking hi-tech denizens of central Florida seems to have ever seen a portable laser, much less actually used one. I have 48 hour to become the expert—and these people wonder why you never share anything with them. Dammit, folks, sharing is a two-way street and we don’t need 50 million peasants saying otherwise. Wilford is forgiven, because he is already over 30, but the XYZ bunch have no excuses. In my day it was nothing new to have no skills, we called them drop-outs, but nowadays there is no, repeat no, excuse.
Argh! Instant problem. I have the design area up, but cannot stop the line from drawing. I pressed every key and button. Thinking I’ll just find a tutorial on-line, and what do I get. That stupid goof VariedLife that is so thick-headed stupid he cannot even stay on topic. Too stupid to design anything, he downloads a graphic, the one thing I do NOT do until the source is trusted. Allow me a moment to explain the line problem. Like most people, I first picked the line tool and drew a line. But if you try to draw a second line, it starts from where you left off. You cannot break this line and there are no instructions. Because the line is active, it disables all the other controls. Your one option is to exit, which MicroSoft detects and tries to make The Dreaded Bing your default browser—a mistake few people make twice.
I’ll get it, but what kind of sick bastard comes up with these things? It is now 2 hours and 50 minutes later, but I have the sucker printing something. No thanks to the instruction manual or anything on-line. Everything important was achieved by trial and error. The laser beam is yellow, just set the thing to 100% and slow it down, this is not mentioned in any of the literature. And yes, you get an aroma, but I used fence panels so it is kind of like cedar. This machine is not a speed demon, but then again, neither am I any more.
One surprise is knowledge of laser power in reality. This is the 5W model and you bet, at the highest power and slowest speed, it will slice wood. So, we add another capability. We will have to improve the IDE screen, maybe make a proper design and see if it can be imported. There, that is your adventure for the day, now go have a beer. It’s Saturday night.
The software has quirks. For example, it will park itself in a corner and there is no command to move it. You have to reset the stop position in software. It randomly stops by itself and closes your Internet connection. (This usually means it used an old DOS communications port, something I have not seen in years.) Once real annoyance is it can activate MicroSoft Bing or Edge, it’s all crap I don’t want on my equipment. I’ve test a few features and believe this will work fine for its intended purpose of branding my boxes. I suspect some of the oddities are built-in safety features.
That horrible Colbert person is history after it turns out his show was losing $40 million per year. That it was able to do so is, to me, a direct connection to USAID. Ha-ha, some Latino drove his car into a crowd in LA and somebody shot him. This is the correct way to deal with such people. Or that bridge in Kentucky where they slapped around and arrested the “protesters” for blocking traffic. In Kentucky you can protest on the sidewalks, not the middle of the road.
ADDENDUM
Rehearsal, a management viewpoint. Our lack of coordinated practice is evident. It has been two months and we find our guitar player is again comping. I mentioned it but won’t pursue as they always quickly spot their strumming does not match the bass line, and people quickly learn to hear my bass lines. In all, we ran through 24 tunes and here is some breakdown. Steve still lacks confidence with strumming but was quick to spot he can stop and start again to the bass lines, that’s a plus. What we are doing is still a shortcut to a band because we have “a sound”.
Comping is also a signal he’s been soloing, but in this case that is unlikely for many reasons. It is also a result of not playing the tune along with the original recording. This is not a problem when you hang around with yahoos like me, as I will throw you to the lions. No amount of good advice beats the lesson of screwing up on stage. Another item is his reliance on his tablet for lyrics and chords. That is probably a mistake, along the lines of using the overhead for your Karaoke lyrics. It plain looks dumb standing there reading the words.
And the more so when you have a stage darling like me who knows every slick move in the book. So, I let them catch up. We also had a mismatch in some of the keys. I moved fast to quash that issue—you can only change the key if you are the one singing it. Against my better judgment, we may play some slower tunes I’d normally reject. The worse argument is that “people like this tune”, as I guarantee you the first thing you lose on stage is any sense of what they like. I rely more on keeping a list of what other bands play too often. Besides, if guitar players knew what women liked, they’d be getting as much as I do and we know they do not.
Same as before, we need work only on the arrangements so we are both playing the same thing but not the same notes. That tablet misleads him often, as most of the tabs are written by other guitar players. Steve appears to not understand scale tones, that I am playing those notes that guitarist often interpret as chords. There is no G chord in “Spiders & Snakes”. Learning scale tones is a given for piano players, but not strummers.
Overall, we have fallen behind. The result of learning new material in isolation, it’s normal to find this sort of drift. The pictures taken, which you don’t get to see, drastically show the age difference between us. He gets top billing and knows it will be a long time before he finds another bassist like me and the smartest thing I could do is lose 40 pounds.
