Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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How Does One Miss Something That Is Not There?

I mean, seriously, how can you even acquire a target that doesn’t exist? Aim at a donut hole in a non-existent donut? At a zero with the rim kicked off? No, really.

*heh*

Oh, well, absinthe makes the heart race, or something like that…

In other news, while I like the service in general, Amazon really, really, really needs to take a look at its Cloud Drive limitations. I mean, download only ONE file at a time? Really? How very… 20th Century. For example, whenever I get another 100 or so mp3s stored there, it’d be handy to download ’em in one batch (for local archiving locally, transferring to a super small 8GB mp3 player–for use while doing yardwork, etc., where the Kindle Fire might *cough* not be the right device, etc.) rather than one. At. A. Time. Just sayin’, Amazon…

If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum–or even merely like to read the S. Plum books in order to mock the “life” of a fictional character whose “life” is more dysfunctional than your own *heh*–you might like the less dysfunctional female sleuth found in Dani Amore’s Death By Sarcasm. Some folks might be put off a tad by the constant, repetitious, almost metronomical (notice the scesis onomaton? *heh*) sarcasm–weak, middlin’ and somewhat fierce but constant, unending, continual. OTOH, I liked it. 🙂 Unfortunately for my tiny lil tightwad heart, it was good enough that I’ll soon crack open my coin purse to cough up a carrot ($0.99) for the author. I like to encourage good writing, and the author’s second book (Dead Wood) is also better than some (*cough* Evanovich *cough*) books I’ve paid much more for.

Fun stuff, Maynard. The second novel noted above doesn’t include never-ending lame jokes to accent an overarching ironic theme–perhaps a plus for some–but does have one small structural weakness in the plot. It wasn’t enough to cause anything but a minor pause in my devouring of the book. A $0.99 murder mystery of the caliber of either of these books is a crime… against support of good writing.

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Baby Steps…

A few additions and improvements to the new “Coffee Shrine” in the last week. The bamboo plate rack is installed and holds all the (unbroken *heh*) salad plates, which we normally treat as dinner plates, allowing the open storage of the dinner plates on the counter, using a different, horizontal storage, bamboo plate rack. The “fun” coffee cups are now hanging on the wall for quick access/use, and a bit more trim work is done, leaving just a few bits and pieces of trim, molding and some flooring work to finish things out. My Wonder Woman likes it, which is the single criterion that counts. 🙂

UPDATE: Painted “bowl” shelf and the part of the new (furniture-grade) plywood facing to the cabinet next to it last night. Primed some trim for painting and then application tonight. It’s coming. Still have the soffit above the sink/west wall cabinets to finish (plastering/painting), but it’s all coming along.

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“Noughts and Crosses”

Yeh, maybe Limeys ( ;-)) call it that, I dunno. Sounds British anyway. When I was a kid, we called the game, “Tic-Tac-Toe” and played it only when we were already bored to tears, so its complete predictability didn’t matter so much. Other folks apparently called it by other names, as this off-shoot discovered by Lovely Daughter demonstrates:

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I Don’t Do Book Reviews, But I Do Rant

Really. Well, I do discuss some books with my Wonder Woman and sometimes other family members from time to time, but actually reviewing the books I read would cut too much into reading time to do it. 😉 And, frankly, the voices in my head have spent so much time over the last seven years escaping from my control and putting words down on this blog that I sometimes begrudge the time they’ve stolen from my reading.

But, just read another book Dead Wood by Dani Amore, on the Fire (really nice reading experience, BTW), and one thing really hit me. From my own limited experience with people in the “recording industry” in combination with a better understanding of how music (no, the real stuff) is made and just music knowledge in general, the portrayal of the dirty underbelly of the “music industry” is spot on.

And it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s just as ugly as the crap it churns out and feeds to the ever lower, most common denominator of society, dragging sense and sensibilities ever lower in a never-ending spiral into the sewer of faux “art”.

In case you’d missed it before, I have about two ounces of respect and appreciation (combined) for recording “artists” nowdays, and I reserve that respect and admiration for the very (very, VERY) few who deserve it. Clue: you’ll not find ’em on anyone’s Top 40 list. In fact, most of the increasingly brain dead public wouldn’t even recognize what real musicians produce as music, or if they did would in any way, shape, fashion or form be able to appreciate it, let alone grasp the least bit of it, since it would take a soul not completely seared by lapping up the toxic sewage common in the offerings of the contemporary “music” industry.

rant /off

BTW, How sweet it is to have all my fav recordings of all my fav artists and their performances available to stream to the Kindle Fire while WiFi-ed to any network. Combined with either some very nice ear buds or (the other really excessively nice Xmas present) the Grado headphones, it’s only about three orders of magnitude less enjoyable to listen to them than doing so live. That’s a plus, really. Sweet, sweet, sweet. *ahhh*

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WalMart Should Be All Over This Idea

So, you’ve heard of “rapture pet services”? No? Well, essentially, it’s this scam where self-proclaimed atheists (or pagans, no real theological difference there to the targeted market) who go around to Christian churches or other groups that embrace a pre-tribulation dispensationalist eschatology that teaches that Christ’s return will be heralded by a sudden disappearance of Christians who are “taken” ahead of His return. These con men sell pet care for the pets these folks believe will be left behind.

This seems like a perfect gig for WalMart. Souless corporation (no “rapture” there!) with plenty of pagan/atheist Chicom slaves to export Christians’ pet to for “care”. Bonus: can probably get the Chicoms to pay for the additions to their stew pots, if the event ever comes to pass.

Win-win-win. Pre-trib (most likely segment to be conned) groups will have a salve for their consciences, WallyWorld will continue its march to World Domination and a bunch of hungry Chinese kids will go to bed with full stomachs.

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Turned!

*heh*

Talking with Son & Heir about 4 months after his switch to a graveyard shift.

“I don’t think I can ever be a daywalker again.”

*sigh* And I hadn’t even seen the signs. I guess I’ll have to remove garlic from the recipes in meals he shares with us.

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Still Fire-ing Away

Just another Kindle Fire micro-mini update. So far: books, movies and music are the Big Deal, although I have found and installed several Android apps that are very cool, both in the Amazon app store and elsewhere.

Elsewhere? Yeh. Side loading Android apps is easy-peasy once two conditions are met: getting the things actually downloaded to the device and configuring the device to allow installation of apps obtained outside the Amazon app store. But more on that later.

The apps I’ve found so far that have tickled my fancy (in a good way–getcher mind outa the gutter! ;-)) are Opera Mobile (of course! *heh*), BubbleLevel (amazing! Using the Kindle Fire as a level. Cool!</em>) and TeamViewer. While I’ve installed other apps over the last few days, these three have seen the most use to date. Pinch & Zoom work much better in Opera Mobile–Zoom and watch the page center in on the text or graphic you pinched to zoom without needing to manually adjust as with the Silk Browser. Nice, and just one of many browsing experience enhancements.

BubbleLevel? I have found myself walking around as I watch a movie or read a book. I catch something out of the corner of my eye. “Oh, that picture’s not level.” Pop open BubbleLevel and… level the pic. *heh* Sure, I could eyeball it level (it’s a knack), but why, when “there’s an app for that”? *heh*

And TeamViewer. Fun controlling one of my other computers from the Fire. That’s all. It’s just fun. Yeh, yeh, I know I’ll find it to actually be useful at some point (TeamViewer should be on every computer on a home network, IMO, and having it on the computers of remote family is even more useful), if only for accessing files and running apps on my desktop while I’m elsewhere… Oh, yes. That will be useful.

Now, as to dislikes concerning the Kindle Fire itself.

Few, but the biggest dislike is that Amazon didn’t include a USB data cable! (!?!) OK, so Amazon’s virtually giving the device away already, but not including a data cable? That goes beyond an annoyance and enters the verge of “This ticks me off” territory. How much easier it would be to sideload Android apps by dragging and dropping them from my desktop/laptop onto the Fire as opposed to emailing them as attachments and then downloading the attachments? Lots. But no, that will have to wait on my separately-ordered data cable, since none of my other USB cables has exactly the same micro-USB termination. *sigh* And even though I can email mobi files obtained elsewhere to the Fire (an eBook format the Fire can read) and have the Fire sync them, it’s a cumbersome process… and I have at least 100 of the things (only the ones worth reading more than once) to sync in.

Data cable a must-have. Amazon not including one with the Fire is irritating.

Now, side loading on the Fire: easy-peasy, even considering the irritation of having to kludge-net with an email attachment download. Oh, what’s with the email attachment download instead of a direct (browser) download of an Android app? I dunno. Silk seems to really, really, REALLY not want to download apps, and even with Opera Mobile it proved to be easier to download the apps to be side loaded on another computer, email the APZ APK* files to myself as an attachment and then download them to the Fire from the email. Weird, but not at all difficult. From there, if one has already enabled installing apps from “unknown” (as in “unknown”=”unavailable in Amazon’s app store *sigh*) sources all it takes is invoking the APZ file and bob’s your uncle.

Another lil note: I find that I have read most of the (10) books I’ve read on the Fire so far in landscape mode. Since I generally read a line or so at a time rather than one or two (or a few) words at a time, the longer lines afforded by reading in landscape mode are a better fit for my reading style.

*APZ-APK: while I’d like to claim “APZ” as a typo, anyone with half a brain would see that as a lame excuse. It was a brain fart (or Early Oldtimers’ Disease, take your pick *heh*). AMZ files are an Amazon mp3 downloader file, so I may have conflated the two format extensions somehow.

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Christmas Continues…

Well, we’re off in a bit to Lovely Daughter’s for a “Boxing Day” Xmas celebration. (We’ll box things for charity in the coming “boxing week”. ;-)) I’ll leave this video I just saw for anyone who might drop by:

Back, now. Had a lovely time at Lovely Daughter’s. She and her Estimable Spouse are Good Company.

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Liking It

Ok, so typing on the Fire is still a bit of a PITA, but I’m able to manage short things like this. And while I got Silk working pretty well, Opera Mobile does seem more responsive, and it gives me more screen real estate for browsing. Nice.

UPDATE: Well, while I’m still getting used to the kybd, it’s juuuust workable. Opera Mobile is da bomb. Figured the tabs out. Lil different but workable. So very much slicker than the Silk browser. Now, that’s not so much a comment on the Silk browser which is about as good as, say, Chrome on the desktop. But for a mobile platform, Opera Mobile’s just been doing it longer than most and is just moire mature on the platform, I guess.