Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Fun, Fun, Fun (’til My Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away… )

Well, maybe not that kind of fun, but not bad, nonetheless.

The re-roofing of twc central (RW) is progressing. Minor setback. Make a short story long(er):

Installing metal panels over the existing asphalt shingles: use 1″x4″ purlins over the shingles, screwed into the deck and joists below, metal panels installed on the purlins.

OK, no biggie, except… 1x4s at local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard, or even at Lowes: WTF?!? That much?!? Nuh-uh, baby. Further away than local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard store but closer than Lowes “fell off the back of a truck lumber yard”: reasonable, but… The store was way low on 1x4s but had a pot load of 10′ 2x4s for $2 each. Rip ’em down the middle? Nominal 1x4s. Close enough. Bought a passel of ’em; brought ’em home and began ripping ’em up.

Table saw died. *sigh* OK, replaced table saw (much faster than repairing the old one, although I have that in my hip pocket for a later mini-project: repair and sell) and began ripping again. Smooth move. I’m still under the cost of 1x4s at Lowes (let alone the “cat’s back-riding” local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard) and have replaced a slowly-decaying power tool.

Still to go: installing the safety anchors (which I will be leaving on the roof permanently), the purlins and then the steel. Working on the first two on that list today, until the heat drives me off the roof.

The most fun thing in all this, so far, is that I’ve not done anything quite this physically demanding for the better part of two decades, and while I have the typical muscle aches–and my constant “Olde Pharte’s joint aches, etc.–to contend with, so far the pain’s all of the good kind: I can actually feel the good I’m doing myself. Like it.

Most UNfun thing so far: the buckets of sweat. Oh, it’s not all that bad in some ways, but having a puddle literally pour out of my sunglasses onto some work I’m doing is annoying, although at least that clears the puddle of sweat out of my field of vision. *heh* Playing in the attic (to replace a gas vent that needed replacing before the roofing went on) was interesting–like being in a low-ceilinged, stuffy sauna. Temps outside were 106F and in the attic? On fire, man. Going back into the unconditioned, ambient temp, garage from the attic? Felt like air conditioning. Chilly, dude.

As is Tradition for men in my family for carpentry or mechanicking work (going back as far as my paternal great-grandfather, at least), I have already offered a Blood Sacrifice to the Handyman Spirit. Yeh, yeh: I neglected to put my gloves on before moving the steel panels from where they were off-loaded to a better place for beginning to feed them up to the roof. Blood Sacrifice… What does not kill me hurts like the dickens for a while (and then fades into the background of a world of hurt *heh*), then heals… or not (so far all my past “Handyman Spirit Blood Sacrifice” wounds have healed, for various values of “heal” :-)).

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Which Side Are You On?

The Zero–0dumbo, The Great Obamassiah, he who has accomplished nothing but the personal destruction of his rivals on the way to being handed unearned plum after unearned plum, has finally, openly and relentlessly admitted his rabid antipathy to those who work hard and smart, who risk what they have to gain more and make real contributions to their community–jobs, an expanded tax base, goods and services people actually want–and his desire to rob the Makers to give to the Takers (leeches, mooches, layabouts and thieves).

Now, I’m not much of a Maker, but I do try to offer a positive worth to my community. My actual creative/inventive contributions have been small*, but I don’t leech off my neighbors and others who work hard to further their own legitimate interests, and I try diligently to fully pay my taxes, even though most of it is spent on things that have NO constitutional justification whatsoever (no matter how many threadbare lies politicians use as fig leaves). Given the aggressive, unchecked–actively encouraged by the “feddle gummint”!–growth of dubious “disability” claims and food stamp use over the past couple of years, I’m sure I could also get my own illegitimate piece of someone else’s pie, but I don’t hate myself, my family and my neighbors enough to do something like that.

Heck, I don’t even hate rich Dhimmicraps enough to sponge off their dime.

How about you?

Seen at Unexamined Premises:

Indeed.

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See Inigo Montoya

A “professional tech writer” (yeh, she gets paid for this kind of thing) vomited this one:

“Microsoft is continuing to eke out the Windows 8 news.”

That usage is so far “off list” that one would need a fully functioning Hubble telescope to gain a view of its meaning from that sentence. Even in the closest proper use of the phrase “eke out,” that is “to make (a meager supply) last, esp by frugal use,” the sentence misses the mark. One “ekes out” a meager supply to avert complete lack. There’s certainly a wealth of news M$ could release, now, but they choose not to, thus “eking out” a meager supply–the closest one could come to making that sentence work–simply does not apply here.

*sigh*

Literacy is more than just being able to laboriously convert those strange squiggles on a page into words or string some of them together in some sort of nearly sensible order. Understanding the words, having a store of well-written texts one has read and understood, is the next step to literacy. Things like this in text written by someone who makes her living with the written word are both disappointing and disturbing.

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Is This Dumba$$ Serious?!?

The Zero, addressing successful businesses (seeking to establish that they need to be taxed even more) has said, in part,

“Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”

WTF?!? Business owners aren’t taxed out the wazoo (America’s business taxes are the highest among industrialized nations) first with taxes on their businesses and then on their personal income (“Top 20% pay 94% of income taxes. Bottom 40%? Nada, zilch, zippo”) to pay not only for infrastructure but for “a multitude of New Offices… swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”?

You do realize that, just in order to make any profit at all in the face of the horrendous expenses imposed by almost endless paperwork and other “compliance” costs businesses are compelled by just the “feddle gummint” alone to incur that businesses must pass on the tax expenses (at the very least) the government imposes, AND that the supply chain hidden taxes are about 22% of every product and service you purchase? What Odumbo is really saying is that because he wants to expand the number of people dependent on government, he wants to TAX YOU MORE.

BTW, as it stands right now, there are only about 1.2 workers for every person either on welfare or in government “employment”. Yes, yes I know some government workers really do exist, workers performing essential tasks. My own back of the envelope guesstimate would place them at about 1/5 of the total of government employees, based on what I’ve observed over the past half century or so. The rest? Just a covert “welfare” program for useless drones or toxic, “Type 2 Bureaucraps”.

As for Odumbo, well, he either knows he’s lying or he’s an idiot. (The two, I realize aren’t really mutually exclusive, and, in fact, in Odumbo’s case, aren’t at all.)

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An “F” for Test Design

Lovely Daughter sent me the photo below (modified to obscure personal information of both student and teacher). If I had been grading the pictured test, the student would have been credited with 100% correct answers and the test designer with a big fat zero for amphibolous (equivocal) wording. Just sayin’.

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Consider the DMV (and Some People Think It’s a Good Idea to Have Government Manage Health Care?)

Sarah Hoyt posted yesterday about her experiences with “gummint bureaucrappy” (my neologism applied to her descriptive narrative on bureaucracy), and that prodded one of my two active brain cells to simulate something like life.

Her youngest son had to trek (with Mom, for reasons Hoyt skewers) to the DMV for his license.

“…which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two…”

Good Sharkey, Colonel God! That’s worse than I’ve experienced from any DMV in 40+ years’ experience driving! Most recently, it took me 15 minutes and I walked out with my new license. BUT, it did chap my gizzard that for the VERY FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, thistime, although I have a 40+ years’ easily-trackable record with four states’ DMVs (20 years in this state alone), THIS time I had to have my birth certificate to “prove” I am me. (WTF? How does my birth certificate prove that I am me, unless the whorls on my baby footprints were to be matched up with my adult footprints?) The funny thing? (No, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny gag-gag”.) My birth certificate was temporarily unavailable (long story), so I sent off for a duplicate (yes, a photostatic duplicate that was as exact a duplicate as can be produced, as comparison with my original later demonstrated). To obtain it I had to include a scanned copy of… my current driver’s license.

So, my (then) current driver’s license was all I needed to obtain a duplicate birth certificate… which was needed to renew that driver’s license.

Complete, absolute and total paper-shuffling B.S.

I draw from this sort of thing–and from Hoyt’s post, to which you can surely add your own examples–an extended lesson:

Governments cannot run without some form of bureaucracy, but since bureaucracies are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps that’s an argument for anarchy. *heh* The bureacrappic anarcho-tyranny that is now strangling our economy, castrating our liberty and aiding in stultifying society is certainly the most potent argument against surrendering health care to the “tender mercies” of yet more “gummint bureaucraps”.

Just sayin’

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I am So Behind the Times

Thank God!

Flipboard is apparently THE “killer app” in some demographics for iPad, iPhone and Android phones. Here’s what the app has to say for itself (OK, via developers’ plug):

Flipboard brings together world news and social news in a beautiful magazine.

Flipboard’s award-winning experience lets people see everything in one place. By bringing together the world’s stories and life’s great moments, you can stay up to date with the things that matter most. Flip through the news from your Twitter timeline as well as from outlets like the BBC, USA Today and The Verge. See everything from posts and photos shared by friends on Facebook and Instagram to videos from Stephen Colbert and pop culture nuggets from Rolling Stone. Find inspiration for your travel, style and life from places like National Geographic, Oprah and Cool Hunting.

It’s the one thing to simplify your daily life. Bring Flipboard on the train during your morning commute, catch up over coffee or on vacation, use it as a tool at work or simply to wind down your night.

Talk about damning itself in the eyes of anyone with more than two active brain cells. Absolutely nothing listed above is worth aggregating into an electronic magazine experience, unless one’s goal in life is to make oneself stupid(er). If auto-lobotomy is one’s goal, then the “benefits” of Flipboard are manifold. If one instead wants to preserve a few brain cells for actual thought, then it would seem that avoiding the things touted above would be a Very Good Thing. (OK, with highly filtered and limited use, Facebook and National Geographic could be less brain damaging than the other things listed, but FB is filled with crap and NG has been degraded to barely better than just another Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind propaganda organ. *sigh*)

Thanks, Flipboard, but I’ll pass. Aging brains need to be stimulated with information that’s not toxic cotton candy in order to preserve mental capacities as much as possible.

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I Really Need to Get Off My Lazy Butt…

…and check into configuring the Amazon Cloud Player differently, but I figure I can Get Around to That Real Soon Now (or maybe defer it until after the next Procrastinators Anonymous meeting… although I think that’s been postponed again. ;-)). Still, since it randomly selected one of my fav Beethoven symphonies (OK, they’re all favs, but this one is one of the “fav-er-er” ones *heh*), I guess it’s OK for now anyway.

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MSOffice Spellcheck: Terminally Stupid

Try as I might, I canNOT train MSOffice’s spellcheck in the differences between “affect” and “effect”. Dumbass subliterate M$ programmers seem to refuse to allow “effect” to be used as a verb. Of course, most people can’t discern between the two words, but one might think that fixing a spellchecker’s mistakes would be allowable for a user to effect.

(Yet another reason why I generally prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice, although I have come to prefer and migrate back to Outlook 2010 from the “open[er/ish]” Thunderbird mail client.)