the latest from j. vernon mcgee, with the hell processed out of it. it’s a vern serm about hair, which he, somehow, works out to being equivalent to demon worship.
don’t worry, i processed the hell out of it, so it’s perfectly safe for ordinary people.
it needs a rhythmn track.
Symbolic Coach Lines
Christian Trees
Economy Whining (or “Economy Whinging” for a more “european” look)
Quipping for Christ
Teachers With Tentacles
Lowest Quality Price Tools
Best Jumbo TV Happiness
Gummy Whores
Overgrown With Underbrush
Hair Salon and Ankle Clinic
Lowest Price on Pubic Hair
Ceremonial Bread Fights
Fart Stand
Rain City Racists
Jutled Boxes
Your Safety is for The Lates
Worship Your Dick
An Imaginary Housing Community
We Make Hydraulic Noises
Bruch, Beeler & Giday, Attorneys at Law
Sage’s Gulag
Jalapeñes
Stortch
Smarmy Pants
Self Hostage
Flimflam Phloem
Acceptable Bones
War To Salvation Church
Can I Ask A State Trailer Park?
i INTENDED to use goo dot gl’s analytics to determine how many people had hit the link, and where they were located. apparently that was only a SMALL FRACTION of the information i could receive from the QR code.
what i didn’t know is that they shut down their URL-forwarder at goo dot gl in 2018 and i only JUST found out about it.
fortunately the QR code, and the URL-forwarder continue to work, but…
goddam it, gewgel… when you stop using something important, you should make it somewhat more obvious. 😒
now, admittedly, i INTENDED to use the goo dot gl analytics, but i only logged in to see what was happening for the first time, today, so i really was NOT paying attention, but still… you would think that a company as big as the big G could be a little more public about things like this.
this time it started out as a charging port. it was intermittent for a while, i had to plug it in a certain way, with the plug held just so, or it wouldn’t work. then i upgraded the OS to 15.x and it ceased charging all together. of course i noticed right away, since i almost always keep it plugged in to power, unless i’m actually using it for something.
i had to wait a week (with my tablet unable to charge) while they waited for a part to come in. i was supposed to pick it up today.
i heard the technician who actually fixed it, say, about 3rd gen 12.9″ ipad pros, he’d seen one with a broken charging port “last week”. he also said the job was sensitive, because switching the charge port means disassembling the screen, which is “sensitive”… which meant that they might have to replace the screen as well…
i don’t think i was intended to hear that part, because the technician was talking to his boss, but… well…
he was right.
they broke the screen. 😒
i was supposed to pick it up at 2:00, and when i walked in, the guy said that there had been an “issue” with the screen, and that i was getting a new screen, which — he said — would be delivered “tomorrow”…
the last time they replaced the screen (last year? two years ago?) their replacement “tomorrow” took around a week. and, because of the fact that they broke it, while in the process of fixing something else, they get the privelege of keeping my tablet until the screen comes in (whenever that ends up being). 😒
and, of course, i have a telemedicine appointment tomorrow… 😒 i think i can do it on my phone, but i have never done it before, so it’ll be challenging, at the very least. 😒
starts under lights on 210502, official first bowl smoked on 211114.
in memory of ManWoman, born 2 feb., 1938, died 13 nov., 2012. father/mother/brother/sister to everyone, but particularly those who have swastika tattoos.
࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉࿗࿘࿕࿖卍卐࿌😉
The issue is not whether Hitler’s Swastika is different from ours.
The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler’s.
that’s A³R²G³H² for those of you keeping track…
i have discovered YET ANOTHER thing that fell victim to the crack of 2021, and that was the user manual for our fireplace!
particularly, this exact diagram (found, and re-downloaded by MOE, who is the undisputed google-master of this house) which is found on page 28 of said manual: 
and the “automatic startup air control” is something i have never experienced in a woodstove before… it’s got a mechanical timer, and it gradually closes vents at the bottom of the fire, so that it has plenty of air to start with, but not so much air after 30 minutes or so…
and WITHOUT the information in this diagram, i have a very difficult time remembering the correct position for these things, which makes it REALLY frustrating, when i have to start a fire, as i did this evening. 🤬🤬🤬
fortunately, i have MOE to rescue me when technology fails. i now have this manual re-downloaded and stored away in an obvious place on my new cloud server. 😉
my guess is that this sort of thing is going to become, more-or-less, a standard occurance chéz salamandir, so it’s a good thing i’m starting to keep track of it now… i think… 😕
when i was in high school, i took latin, but that’s not the story.
the story is that, when i found out they were going to offer a latin class, i IMMEDIATELY wanted to sign up for it… but my parents said no, that latin was a “dead” language, that nobody spoke any longer, or used for anything (😏), that i would never use it, and it would just waste my time.
i was a junior in high school, and i REALLY wanted to learn latin. i pestered my parents for a few weeks about it, but they stood fast…
so i went to my high school guidance counsellor, and told her. she immediately agreed with me, and gave me a bunch of “hints” that i could use to try to convince my parents, but none of them worked. my parents were the stubborn, pig-headed people that i have come to know them to be since then, and they were adamant that it would be a collosal waste of my time to learn latin.
i went back to my high school guidance counsellor and told her that the hints didn’t work, and that i still REALLY wanted to learn latin… so she CALLED them.
she talked with my mother (who was the louder of the two) for about half an hour, and, somehow, convinced her that my studying latin would NOT be a waste of my time. i was overjoyed.
today, 40 years later, latin is something that i use on a DAILY basis, to help me understand, and better utilise the language i speak… to help other people understand confusing things (of which there are many)… to learn about places, and things, in a way that english, by itself, doesn’t even have a clue about… to have a better grip on romance languages that ARE used in the modern world — i also studied french in high school, and it gave me a better understanding of the french language, as well as giving me a sneak peek at spanish, italian, and portuguese… at this point, it would take me about 3 days of immersion to get functional in any romance language, and probably not more than a week before i was understanding most of what was said to me…
WRITING, on the other hand, would very likely take quite a bit longer, particularly in italian or portuguese, because they spell things strangely, have silly, inconsistent silent letters, “non-standard” pronunciation for other letters, and are, generally, more laid back, which makes learning to write more difficult 😉
and that’s ALL because i studied latin. 😉
and i use approximately ZILCH of the other subjects i studied in high school, with the exception of music, which i also use, on a daily basis… actually, that’s not entirely correct: high school taught me skills, like how to study, how to use the scientific method, logic and reason to figure things out, the proper use of tools like a wood lathe, proportional dividers, engineering scales, and a linotype, all of whose skills can be transferred to the “modern” world in a variety of ways…
in other “forward into the past” news, i finally got around to editing the Wraith Ugly/Bob Larson tapes. i’ve been flogging them on bob larson’s twitter feed, which is somewhat amusing. 😈
The issue is not whether Hitler’s Swastika is different from ours.
The issue is that it is our Swastika, not Hitler’s.
Friendly Swastika dot Art
the pond, last month…
the pond, this month…
it’s still not as full as i have seen it, but it’s getting there. a month of near constant rain doesn’t hurt, but it’s still not as full as it was before this summer. 😒
a couple weeks ago, i suddenly couldn’t login to my blog. it didn’t give me any of the standard “you can’t login” messages, instead it gave me half a page of code that was only partially legible (to me), and no clue what happend or how to fix it. 😱
after a good deal of futzing around, and a few back-and-forths with the host provider, i figured out that it was because i had a 2FA plugin, set to auto-update, and WordFence, also set to auto-update. when WordFence added a 2FA feature which was activated by default (generally, a good thing), and auto-updated itself, it “auto-updated” itself right into the middle of a conflict with the 2FA plugin that was already there, and active. 😱
at the time, i figured that it would be easier to delete the 2FA plugin and use the feature provided by WordFence… so i deleted the 2FA plugin, and set up the 2FA feature provided by WordFence.
except that, unlike the 2FA plugin that was now deleted, WordFence’s 2FA feature only gives you the ability to set up an authenticator ONCE, and, after that, it “assumes” that you have an authenticator set up, so it doesn’t give you the ability to set up another one.
which i discovered today, when i tried to login using my phone, rather than the tablet on which i have set up the new 2FA set up. the result was that i entered the 6-digit code given to me by google authenticator, only to have it rejected… twice… and then i was banned from logging in TO MY OWN GODDAMN BLOG! 🤬
THIS is why the web designer DIDN’T set plugins to auto-update on Hybrid Elephant! 👍
after i used one of my emergency login codes, i set the plugins to NOT auto-update, re-installed the 2FA plugin that allows you to set up more than one iteration of the authenticator, and deleted, and re-installed the blog on the authenticator on BOTH my tablet and my phone…
whew… i think that’s everything… 😕
back to nothing happening again…
my harvest is curing, but the trimmings aren’t drying as fast as i would like them to. i’m pretty sure that if i took the screen off of my office window (which i am not currently using anyway), i could speed up the drying process. maybe i’ll do that today.
i went to a concert with moe and her friend lora, a couple days ago. i was chosen at the last minute to substitute for lora’s husband, who said that a concert might jeopardise his recent sobriety (and he was an AWFUL drunk, so i totally agree), and, also, because, that way, i could drive and lora and moe could talk. 😉 it was the first time i have done ANYTHING that “public” in almost two years, and it felt really weird. it felt weird going to the tacoma-dome, and being in the (relatively light) crowd of people getting into the venue… i wore a N95 mask AND my cloth mask, and kept my hands in my pockets as much as possible. it felt weird sitting in the row of seats with a totally strange (masked) woman so close that she was touching my arm, for the two and a half hours of the concert. a majority of the people were wearing masks, but there was also food and drink available, and a significant number of people thought it was “okay” to wear their masks incorrectly (under their nose), which made me feel like they could have easily taken it off and not felt guilty about it. it felt weird, and creepy, and, when i got home, i felt like i had been swimming in other peoples’ cooties. i took a long, hot shower after the show.
the concert was jackson browne and james taylor, with both of whom i am, more or less, unfamiliar. with jackson browne, there were a few songs that, once he started singing, i went “yeah, i know that song” (although there was one that moe said “if you were alive in the ’70s, you know this song”, but i didn’t), and even a couple that i knew most of the lyrics to, but, honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that i was hearing them at a show that featured jackson browne and james taylor, i wouldn’t have been able to tell you that it was a jackson browne song… hell, i was under the impression, prior to the concert, that jackson was a black man, because that’s the way i always imagined him. that’s how ignorant i was. 😕 james taylor was only a little better, in that i knew that he was white, and i knew a few james taylor songs — all of which they played, of course 😒 — but with both of them, i never had time to listen to their songs because they were INTENSELY popular, so much a part of popular culture, and, particularly, because, james taylor was married to carly simon, and was addicted to heroin…
i never had a thing for carly simon, but i figured that if he were that famous on his own, and he was married to carly simon, then i’m guessing there was something more than “love” involved in the process. 😒
besides which, at the time, i was a lot more interested in the music of morton subotnik, arnold schönberg, and karlheinz stockhausen, who were — and are — A LOT more interesting… 😉
but the musicianship was outstanding — james taylor was backed up by steve gadd on drums, and bruce fowler on horns, both of whom played with frank zappa — the music was good, the lyrics were as “woke” as i remembered them to be in the ’70s, and more “woke” and more “blunt” for the newer songs, james taylor is no longer married to carly simon, or addicted to heroin…
but i would still have much preferred to see a concert of music by morton subotnik, arnold schönberg, or karlheinz stockhausen. 😉
they started up my unicycle class again. it meets for the first time on sunday, which is also halloween. i have to figure out a costume in which i can also ride a unicycle… also, now i have a much higher possibility of learning how to turn left before the end of the year.
i ordered two “performance masks” on the 5th of october, and they still haven’t been shipped out… but it’s just as well, because it has been raining a lot, particularly over the past few days. the pond has water in it, again, but it’s still drastically low.
i harvested on tuesday: 4 hours of bending, stooping, squatting, and sitting on top of a propane canister (with a piece of plywood over the ring, so i didn’t get ring-butt)… by bedtime, tuesday night, my lower back was painful enough that i couldn’t bend over. i took a muscle relaxant before bed.
yesterday, i woke up and immediately took two tylenol, and made it through the day without too much difficulty or pain… but the most strenuous thing i did all day was blow the leaves off of the back yard — a pointless excersise… there’s already three times more leaves than there were before i started, yesterday. i spent most of the day sitting, standing, or walking on level ground, and it was okay, so i decided to go for a walk. i went for a 2.5 mile walk, and was okay, as long as i was walking on the level, but any uphill or downhill produced spasms so intense that i wondered whether or not it was a good idea going for a walk. at the same time, i went to sleep last night without any medication, so i figured that it was going to go away.
i was wrong.
today, i realised i have my circus class. i felt okay when i got up, and was able to move around, get dressed and suchlike, without pain, so i figured it was a temporary thing, but by the time i was about halfway to class, i realised that circus class today would probably NOT include trampoline, tumble track, unicycle, or tissue, which pretty much leaves juggling, tight wire, and stretching. we started with some warm-ups, and that went okay, then moved to juggling, and that went okay, and i excelled on tight wire, because i discovered that my back DOESN’T hurt if i stand up straight, and engage my core, which is EXACTLY what you need to do on the tight wire… i walked forwards AND backwards on the wire, using nothing but a balance pole in one hand! 😎 but then we moved to stretching, and… no. my body DOES NOT want to stretch. 😒
i came home, ate lunch, filled and shipped out an incense order, and went for another two mile walk… it was better, but there were still major twinges when i went up or down hill.
my next door neighbour just showed up with a batch of warm chocolate chip cookies that are “medicated”… 😉 he listened to an abbreviated version of my circus class experience today, and recommended i try two cookies.
i still can not believe that it’s legal. 🤤
starts under lights on 210502, harvested 211019, almost two pounds (estimate based on raw weight of the harvested plants), 171 days, 122 of which were outdoors…
… making this my first successful, mostly-outdoor grow. 😉
harvest tomorrow. 😉👍👍
nothing has been happening.
nothing has been happening politically, nothing has been happening socially, nothing has been happening musically, nothing has been happening in regards to the COVID virus… i now have A LOT of “free” time: every other week i have a one-hour appointment with kate, and every week i have my one-hour circus class, but that’s it. 😩
i’ve been spending a lot of time hiking on taylor mountain.
i shipped out two incense orders, today. i’m averaging between two and six orders a month, and, before i got cracked a few months ago, i actually had over a thousand dollars in my bank account… but then i got cracked, and spent it all on replacement hardware and a pile of recovered, possibly useful data.
i have expanded ZIP files for about a tenth of my fonts collection, from the recovered data. mostly TTF files, and just a small fraction of the fonts i used to have. fortunately, my recollection is that my entire >10,000 font library is backed up on CD, somewhere… i’m sifting through the rest of the recovered data slowly, and more or less randomly: it’s totally discouraging to look at this huge pile of recovered data, which took me a couple decades to accumulate, but which is now many, many schrödinger’s cats with random file names, EVERY ONE OF WHICH has to be opened to determine whether or not it’s corrupt, and if it’s not, what general pile it goes in, which all have to be sorted again, later on, and then, probably, sorted at least once more before they’re back in more-or-less the place where they’re supposed to be. 😒
so, it’s something to do, but, literally, i would rather be doing ANYTHING else… 🤬
i ordered some “performance masks” from J.W.Pepper a few weeks ago. they were back-ordered (without my knowledge), and, when i talked to a customer service drone on monday last week, i was assured that they would be shipping out later that week, but i still haven’t seen or heard anything. they’re called “performance” masks, because they look like you’re wearing a mask, but, in reality, the mask has a hole in the front, that your mouthpiece goes through, which makes it practically useless as an actual mask… but the new rule at the market is that the only buskers allowed MUST BE masked, so it’s either wear a “performance” mask, or don’t busk. 😒 but i can’t busk at all, until the “performance” masks are delivered, and, as far as i can tell, at this point, they’re still on back order, and who knows when they’re going to arrive. 😞
today, after 3 days of rain, the pond FINALLY has water in it… not 10 feet of water, or even 10 inches of water, but it’s a start… and it’s going to have to rain A LOT MORE before we’ll be back to the “normal” 10 feet of water. 😒
but “climate change” and the coronavirus are chinese frauds, and we need to prevent the teaching of Critical Race Theory to junior high school kids in public schools. 😒
seriously, i’ve been removing flyers for patriotfront dot us, and flyers for somebody who is running for school board SPECIFICALLY on the platform of “mask CHOICE, not mandate” and “no CRT in schools”, from the bulletin board at the local convenience store… 😠 i’ve been replacing them with my “ultimatum to world leaders”, with a link to ABillionPeople.org, but it’s been being taken down almost as soon as i put it up, so i’ve been trying to get “creative”…
but it’s really disturbing to me that there are actual nazis living in my community. 😠 if he gets elected (which i hope doesn’t happen, but around here, who knows), i wonder how much actual school board experience he has, because the pandemic is not going to last forever, and once he discovers that public primary schools AREN’T teaching “critical race theory” he’s not going to have much of a platform left… but, by then, he’ll have discovered that the school board buys school books for the district, and i’m pretty sure he’ll have something to say about that. 😒
i just sold 10 boxes of Aparajita — an incense which, as far as i’ve been able to tell, is available NOWHERE ELSE in north america, and possibly the western hemisphere — to the Govinda Gallery in washington DC… which is the place that Astrid Kirchherr and Donovan exhibit their work…
squeeeEEEEEEEEE!!‼‼ 😊👍👍👍
fecesbook was down for around 6 hours, today… down, like, completely down, DNS not working, routes not functioning, nslookup and whois not working, domain for sale…
it’s back up, at this point, but, allegedly, fuckerberg lost 7 billion dollars as a result of the outage, and is now only the fifth richest person on the planet. still no word on exactly what caused it. 😉
two days ago (thursday) i got my COVID19 booster, and my flu shot.
i was also going to get my shingles shot (shongles shit?), but medicare doesn’t cover it (🤬👎⁇), it’s actually two shots, and they cost around $200 A PIECE!
so i didn’t get that, despite the fact that i had chicken pox, and moe has ALREADY HAD shingles, in spite of the fact that she’s not in the targeted age group. 😒🤬
yesterday, i felt like hammered shit, and slept most of the day. i suppose it was probably a combination of the two vaccines, along with the fact that i didn’t have any side effects from the two previous COVID19 vaccines…
today, i’m recovering, but i still feel like i’ve been run over by a steam roller.
HOWEVER…
there are STILL people who refuse the vaccine, for one horseshit reason or another. there are STILL people who say that it’s got a 98% survival rate (leaving out the fact that there are many major, long-term health problems that follow most survivals)…
THEY are the ones who are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the 700,000 COVID19 deaths that have happened since january, 2020…
AND THEY STILL REFUSE THE VACCINE!! 🤬🤬🤬
soon, there will be a 9/11-style mass-death every week from COVID, and these people — all of whom try to keep 9/11 in the forefront of our minds, whether or not we want it there — will STILL be refusing the vaccine.
…
okay, i’m going to say this because it’s not on twit-turd or feces-book, and nobody is going to ban my account for advocating someone else’s death… 😒
i think it would be best for everyone if the government simply KILLED these people, so the rest of us can get back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, some time in the next decade. 😒
a few moments ago, shortly after 7:00 pm this evening, i was alerted by the sounds of footsteps on our front porch, to the presence of people about to knock on our front door.
i still haven’t gotten over how intensely quiet it is out here. even with my music playing in my office, i was able to hear footsteps on our front porch, and was able to get there BEFORE they knocked on the door.
so i confronted two very young (probably no older than 21 or so) females, in masks, a taller, blonde one in the back, and a shorter, asian looking one (although she spoke with an american accent, so i would guess that she’s not first generation immigrant), JUST as they were about to knock. the shorter one introduced themselves as “missionaries from the church of jesus christ”… and she didn’t have the chance to say “of latter day saints”, because, by that point, i was ALREADY indicating that i was very definitely NOT interested in talking to missionaries. we said our mutual goodbyes and, JUST as i was closing the door, it started to rain…
HARD… 🤣
it rained for 10 minutes or so, REALLY HARD… long enough that, i’m fairly sure, they got TOTALLY soaked… they didn’t appear to have a car in the vicinity, and i have seen them riding bicycles on back country roads, before, so i’m guessing that they had a long, wet walk, in the dark, back to whatever mode of transportation they had… and i KNOW that our next door neighbours on both sides likely had a very similar response to mine… and we’re at the end of a dead-end road, with a what-is-usually-a-pond on the other side of the street… ROTFLMAO!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
i suppose i should have been a little concerned for their safety, since they were young women, alone, lightly dressed, on foot, in the dark, in the rain, in a remote area known to be inhabited by… less than savoury characters… and bears… 😉
but i wasn’t. 😈
one distinct DISadvantage to having a new, working cloud drive, is that there have been two different occasions within the past two days, where i thought of something, and went to look for the source files, thinking that i knew exactly where they were located, only to discover that they were on the OLD cloud drive… 😒
god DAMN whatever anonymous skript-kiddie that caused this! 🤬👎‼
now that i’ve got a functional cloud drive, i am going through and replacing what i can of my lost music collection, including music that i produced myself.
i have four St. Fred albums on bandcamp, and the only one of those four that were lost on the old cloud drive has not been replaced locally, and that album is The Church of The Pleistocene, which, naturally, means that it has been a few months since i heard it last…
i downloaded it today, and listened to it… and it has held up pretty damn well, considering that it was released in 2018… and i REALLY liked this track, number 14, called “Lamentations”…
in the same way, there are also nine albums of music by And More on bandcamp, which i haven’t heard for even longer (why listen to music i made 30 years ago? i just have it because i made it 30 years ago) and that, too, has stood the test of time admirably. the track is called Pfisteria:
i still laugh when i listen to this… 🤣
(that’s how i know it’s finished music, if it makes me laugh… 😉)
i’ve been playing around with “yellofier electrified” on my tablet, for the past few days, and i came up with this vaguely spooky “music box” tune which i really liked:
then, because i didn’t have anything better to do, i exported it from electrified, and imported it into audacity, where i doubled the track, and then set one stereo pair to play back 10% slower than the other stereo pair…
and the result was an EVEN BETTER version 👍
on 190114 i reached the first plateau, and i’ve been hanging around there ever since.
but, recently, the batteries that completed the first plateau have been acting like they’re on their last legs, not holding a charge, or charging inconsistently, so i decided to get new ones.
unfortunately, the batteries that they made in 2019 are no longer being manufactured, and i really don’t like buying stuff online, where you can’t examine it closely before deciding it won’t work…
which is exactly what happened with an outfit called “slick vapes” (they have a web site, but i won’t link to it, because they’re assholes). i looked through their selection of dab pen batteries and bought 3 “Evolve” batteries… which turned out to be exactly the same as the batteries i rejected prior to reaching the first plateau (they were “pen sized”, wouldn’t hold more than a few hours charge, when they would hold a charge at all, charged inconsistently, etc., etc., etc. 😒). then, i discovered a new type of “coilless” atomiser that looked like it would fit, but i wasn’t sure, because… online… 😒 so i ordered them, and they got back to me and accused me of using a stolen credit card… 😒 and when i got that straightened out, they said they had shipped the product, but the tracking number they sent me said that USPS was still waiting for the package two weeks after they said it was shipped. 😒 and when they FINALLY arrived, wouldn’t you know, they don’t fit any of the vape mods i have. 🤬
two cannabis starts under lights on 210502. 18 weeks later, 126 days, and now they are taller than me… 
back in the dark ages, when i was working at STLabs, before we moved to factoria (i.e. STLabs… so, what? maybe 1995? 1996? somewhere in there), i was testing Internet Explorer version 3.0, which meant, basically, that i was testing micro$not’s browser engine, which is called MSHTML.dll. at the time, a very good friend of mine from college, saint fred (now, sadly, passed on) was mucking about with the innards of micro$not’s operating system, and discovered a problem which had existed for several years prior to this, which micro$not had “made disappear” by changing the technology’s name from OLE — which was, itself, a “renamed” technology, originally called Visual Basic for Applications, or “VB-A” — to “ActiveX”, and, in the process of making it “disappear”, actually made it more prevalent and insidious, by making it work seamlessly with even more micro$not technology.
and, saint fred being who he was, took advantage of this by writing the “Exploder Control”, which could be embedded in a web page, or a microsoft document, and would, when “activated”, perform a clean shutdown of the computer on which it was being viewed… whether you wanted to shut down your computer, or not.
you hit this web page, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 😏
or…
you open this microsoft word document, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 🤣
i watched it happen as it first came out, before anybody realised what it was. it was hillarious! i gave the URI for the exploder control to my boss, and then went back to my workstation and listened, as she suddenly whined “it shut down my computer!” 🤣🤣🤣
and, of course, micro$not’s response to this was to threaten saint fred with lawsuits for doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing, and when that didn’t work (because fred made sure that the exploder did everything strictly “by the book”, including getting micro$not’s signature on the control), they made the exploder control something that was detected by their anti-virus software (even though it was very clearly NOT a virus, and, actually, did everything totally “by the book”, something to which micro$not never admitted), and, once they figured out that they had caused all of this, they pulled their signature on the control, so that it raised even more red flags before actually activating it…
and, basically, did everything EXCEPT fix the problem, which, after a few months of frantic ass-covering by micro$not’s marketing department, while the tech industry had a good laugh, got swept under the rug, anyway, by more current micro$not fiascos.
but the technology remained, and every version of windows has support for activex, every version of MSHTML.dll has support for activex (which is one of the reasons micro$not got rid of MSHTML.dll a couple years ago, and current versions of Internet Exploder… um… what’s their browser called again? EDGE, that’s it… uses google’s “chrome” browser engine, instead. the browser wars are over! micro$not LOST!) and you can, literally, do ANYTHING with activex, that you could do from the normal user interface of windows, and there is, literally, NOTHING stopping you from doing this — or other, more nefarious things — given A LITTLE knowledge of the technology.
which is why, when i saw this headline: Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft the FIRST THING i thought was “Exploder Control strikes again!”
this is one of the VERY BIG reasons i do not use micro$not on my computers. i don’t even have my microsoft 5-button mouse any longer!
i wonder if they’ll ever learn. 🙄
i remember learning, some time ago (like, possibly, as many as 20 years ago), that the movie staring Gina Lollobrigida, which features the song “‘A Frangesa” (the name of which i have been unable to determine), was a “modern remake” of “L’Arlesienne”, by Georges Bizet and Alphonse Daudet…
or, possibly, that the movie starring Gina Lollobrigida was based on the real-life story of the person about whom Alphonse Daudet wrote his romanticised play…
but i can find no solid evidence for or against this theory, on internet.
i wonder if i imagined the whole thing… 😕
i can say that, if i had known about the movie with Gina Lollobrigida when i first learned the song “‘A Frangesa” (which was when i was in 8th grade, or thereabouts), i would have had a much more positive opinion about the song than i had at the time. 😉 as it was, it was a harder-than-normal concert band piece which i could play, but very many of my fellow student musicians were unable to play (because it’s “faster” than most of them could play reliably), and, because of that, it sounded VERY MUCH like an elementary school band trying very hard to play something that is too difficult for them EVERY! SINGLE! TIME!
ETA 210907: the movie appears to be called “La donna più bella del mondo” (the most beautiful woman in the world), but was english-ified into “Beautiful but Dangerous“… but i still haven’t been able to find out whether or not it was a remake of L’Arlesienne. internet would be a much better place if you could ask questions in human language and not be inundated with meaningless information that is only intended to sidetrack you from what you really want to know… and it’s full of computers! ick! 😒
a couple weeks ago, i decided i was going to take a “proper” mushroom trip, and, towards that end, i prepared two 00-sized capsules with the oldest of my mushroom stash. by last week, i had decided that i didn’t want to take the whole thing, all at once, so i took the larger one…
and didn’t feel anything… 😞
which was really dissapointing, but i figured the mushrooms were old enough that they’d lost all their potency. despite the fact that i didn’t “feel” anything, i definitely noticed the “characteristic” anti-depressant effects of the psilocybin, and so, this week, i decided to take the other, smaller capsule.
that was at 12:30 this afternoon…
this time, i DEFINITELY feel something…
despite the fact that the capsule was approximately 25% SMALLER than the one i took last week, i’ve definitely had a marvelously melty afternoon, after going for a ≈5 mile walk in the woods, i came home and spent the afternoon doodling and listening to music over headphones…
it’s now approximately 6:00…
something i haven’t done in a very long time… stupid brain injury… 😒
once again, gas is $4 a gallon.
on july 18th, i got a new car: a 2019 hyundai ioniq hybrid.
it gets ≈65MPG… (it actually gets between 60 and 70MPG, depending on how i drive)
i LIKE spending $25 for gas, looking at the “full tank” indicator, and seeing that i’ve got almost 800 miles before i have to fill up again. 👍😎
although, i must admit, as a person who almost religiously got gas when the indicator said the tank was half empty, i still haven’t quite gotten used to the fact that, when the indicator says the tank in the new car is half empty, i’ve still got more miles to go before i have to fill up than any of my previous cars had when they were entirely full. 😉🤣
also, i REALLY like being able to drive down the street and not make any noise… i like stopping at a stop light and not making any noise. i like going 75 on the freeway and not making any noise… and looking down at the indicator to discover that i’m going 75 on the freeway, not making any noise, and RECHARGING MY BATTERY ALL AT THE SAME TIME! 👍👍👍😎
i have dreamed of owning a hybrid for at least 40 years… check that off my bucket list. 😉
now, to get some artwork on this blank canvas. 😈
this afternoon, i was doing some yard work, and i found this in the gravel between the house and the trailer… 
it’s small enough that i’m 100% certain that, if i didn’t already know what it was, i wouldn’t have even noticed it, but…
AS IT HAPPENS… i know EXACTLY what it is, which is a 1909-2009 Alaska Yukon Pacific 100th Anniversary pin, which was given to performers at the celebration, and (i believe) were also for sale to the people who came to the celebration. i know this because, in 2009, the ballard sedentary sousa band peformed at the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition 100th Anniversary… although, for some (now) unknown reason, i was unable to make that gig, so i had liz get me a pin, becuase i have always been interested in the alaska yukon pacific exhibition, and i was really dissapointed that i couldn’t be there… and i THOUGHT that pin was on my red fedora, because that’s the last place i saw it, and it was only last week that i wore that hat…
could i have lost my AYP pin? 😨
so i ran upstairs to check, and… no, my AYP pin is right where it’s supposed to be:
so, that raises a new question… was the former owner of my house at the AYP 100th anniversary, and did he/she/they buy a pin? or were they performers? i consider the latter to be EXTREMELY unlikely…
i’ve come to a decision.
there are over 150,000 separate files, which takes up 4.5GB, in the .jpg directory alone, of the recovered data.
it took my computer half an hour of doing nothing but loading the directory, before it was completely loaded. every time i opened a file, it took 10 minutes to reload the directory.
i would have to open every one of them to determine if it’s corrupt or not, and if not (about ⅔ of the time), i would then have to determine what it is, and where to put it.
if it takes me (conservatively) 30 seconds per document to make those determinations, i will be doing this for the next 4,500,000 seconds, or more than 7 months of doing NOTHING but opening files to determine whether or not they’re corrupt… no eating, sleeping, shitting, busking or anything else, just slogging away in front of the computer.
factoring in those other things, i’m looking at a couple years, minimum. 😒
i may have been willing to do it at one time… who am i kidding, i’ve NEVER been willing to do that, for that long, for as little payment as i would get. 😒
it’s sad, but there it is: the last 6 years of my life, in pictures, and they’re all going down the toilet, along with a significant portion of my business, my music and artwork, and monique’s photos from the past 6 years.
now, do i keep the data on my new cloud drive, or do i delete it. i’ve also got it on the 1TB external drive that the data recovery folks sent me, so it wouldn’t be entirely deleted… but… 😭
this is one of the times the computer has won the battle. 😒
ETA: interesting, but extremely BIZARRE development is that, upon further investigation, there is a “.jpg” directory, and a “photos” directory, in the recovered data. the documents that are in the .jpg directory are about ⅔ usable files, but their names are gibberish, and there are more than 150,000 of them, all in one directory. however, for some strange reason, the files that are in the “photos” directory are in subdirectories that indicate the manufacturer of the camera, scanner or printer (of which there are about 50), and further subdirectories that indicate the make and model of the camera, scanner or printer (there are A LOT of them), and the files themselves, for the most part, contain the date they were taken in the filename… and, let me tell you, i have A LOT easier time figuring out what a photo is if it is named something like IMG_20061129_133315 (49EA1400).jpg than i do if it is named 80AB2B00.jpg… A LOT!
this is an update. what i’ve been doing:
busking. this has been a long time coming. it’s really good to get out and play music for people, and, so far, we’ve been averaging between $15 and $25 apiece for an hour or so of busking. now, instead of howlin’ hobbit and his ukulele, it’s thaddeus and his banjitar — an interesting hybrid, that looks like a banjo, but has six strings and is tuned like a guitar. as i’ve always said, the money is an extra, added bonus, for me, and it’s still true, even after a year and a half… but it’s always nice, and we’ve actually already got one “paying” gig as a result: the pike place market is putting on a “sunset supper”, and is hiring market buskers at $100 apiece for an hour of busking while rich people eat food… that is, most likely, NOT offered to the buskers, but they’re paying $100 apiece, so it’s sort of okay… the BSSB has started rehearsals again, too, which is another bonus. 😉
ripping CDs back into my music collection. i have only gotten the barest of starts sorting the recovery data, in spite of the fact that, in the small print, the data recovery people say that their “free” recovery media (a 1TB hard disk, in my case) only has a warranty of five DAYS — which, to me, says “if you don’t get your data off our recovery media post haste, we’re not going to guarantee that you’ll have ANYTHING, regardless of how much you may have paid us.” nevertheless, at this point, i’ve got all of the data that really made a difference (the panchamukhi ganesha from my car, the spreadsheet containing the data for the Incense of the Month Club, and the spreadsheet of blocked-for-spamming IP addresses), and, basically, if i had anything else i need, i don’t remember it, and probably won’t until i need that data again, which will mean that i’m probably going to have to keep going back to the recovery data on occasion, for the rest of my life… however, if i already have freshly ripped .flac files, then, when i finally get around to slogging through the 1TB MESS of recovered data, it will be slightly less of a concern if the archives i got are incomplete or corrupt. this is an ongoing project that is probably going to take several weeks to finish, and while it’s going on, i may not post here, as much.
hiding from the smoke and heat. it hasn’t been as bad as it was a couple years ago, but it’s definitely smoke season. i look out my office window and see orange skys and translucent air, and the AQI is 63, which is firmly in the “yellow” range. busking, yesterday, was an extra bonus, because it was around 10°F cooler at the market than it was at home… it’s 20° cooler than it was in june(!!), but it’s still in the high-90°s, which is extremely rare around here, in my experience. the government climate change investigatory committee just released the first part of their study, a few days ago, and it says what climat change activists have been saying for 30+ years, now, which is, basically, climate change is real, it’s happening, and it was definitely caused by humans… and then, two days later, 7 democrats switched positions, and voted with ALL the republicans, to pass a law making it illegal for the government to EVER ban fracking. 🤬 so, i guess that means that, ultimately, climate change will kill us all, but the rich people are going to die last. 🤬🤬 i have never wanted to, but it’s my impression that, soon, i will have to apologise to ezra for bringing him into a world where he may never reach his full potential, because of the thoughtlessness and carelessness of my immediate ancestors.
hiding from the virus. the delta variant is 1000 times more contagious than the original strain, and they’re saying that recipients of the pfizer vaccine, at least, will have to get a “booster” shot, but they’re not saying when it will be available, or how long we have to wait before getting one. in the mean time, schools have been making masks optional, and reopening, and then closing down again, when 40% of the students get COVID, while the right wing, q-anon devotee, anti-mask, anti-vax, trump morons are dying by the thousands, and STILL ranting their nonsense about it affecting pregnancies, or tracking microchips in the vaccine. there’s an image i saw on twitter that is, basically, a huge banner, strung between two cars, that says they’ll never get the vaccine, and that you’ll have to kill them… the ironic part is that, most likely, we won’t have to kill them, because the virus will do that for us, and we won’t have to do anything. hospitals are failing in missouri, texas, and florida, where the governors are particularly anti-mask and anti-vax, despite the surge in cases, and a vast majority of the fatalities have been people who refused the vaccine. at this rate, we’re going to be dealing with this pandemic for A LOT longer than the 1918 “spanish flu” pandemic, primarily because of STUPID people who won’t get the vaccine or wear masks, on account of their “freedom”. 🤬
apart from the fact that it looks… i don’t know… cool? creepy?
and it actually tastes okay, as well. it doesn’t taste like antifreeze, at any rate…
yah ma pak, yah ma pak
soh by ting ya mi yah mah pak
yah ma pak, yah ma pak
soh by ting yang mi ya mah pak
ah yo ma mella hen mai, yah ho hane prupah tah drei
uhkonda pakatzong tzai raipa tah treibal ke
waggah boom
sah ting mabe me mamei, yah chun tehma batsal trai
bahchoi dupoinga dai mai, pah teh tege dur chatse
sorting through the mess of recovered data is heartbreaking.
i’m finding all sorts of stuff that, once i actually see (or hear) a bit of it, i know exactly what it is, and i’m starting to get things organised enough that, some of the time, i even have a place to put it, once i’ve discovered what it is…
but, then… everything doesn’t come crashing down, but…
i haveHAD a CDR album called “We Bore 2“, which was one of my favourites. it was produced in 2003 by Toast & Jam Records, which has, since, gone out of business, and their web site is now a japanese porn site… it was a “various artists” compilation of electronic, experimental, glitch music, and it was AWESOME!
i found a .RAR archive with the .mp3s for “We Bore 2”, and i was, like, “COOL!”… i expanded the archive, and put it in the place it had been taken from in my collection, and went on to the next archive.
today, for the first time, i actually LISTENED to “We Bore 2″…
yeah, all the tracks are there, but track 1 is NOT what was there the last time i listened to “We Bore 2″… and track 2 is also the same way, to a lesser extent… and track 3 is pretty messed up… and track four is mostly there, except for a patch in the middle which is totally missing… and track 5… and track 7… and track 8… and track 9… 😭
pretty much all of the tracks have something wrong with them…
and i can’t get another copy of the CD, because i originally downloaded it as a .rar file…
and, i’m pretty sure (given the huge quantity of .rar and .zip files that got recovered) that more than a few of them are going to have exactly the same problem. 😭
ETA: all is not lost… well, for “We Bore 2” anyway… it turns out i actually have the original CDR for this album… but i’m fairly sure that is NOT going to be the case with a majority of the .rar and .zip archives i have…
NOBODY will listen to this music — prove me wrong.
i found sumbunal of my music collection, on a huge stack of CDs and DVDs (possibly two, i haven’t checked thoroughly, yet) which i had stashed in the garage, in a cabinet in front of which i have stacked 4 huge cartons of incense… so, naturally, it was the absolute LAST place i thought to look. this appears to be my music backups from 2002, or thereabouts, until 2016 or 17 — when i “moved everything to the cloud” — which means that the part of my collection that isn’t backed up, is, very likely, music that i have on CD (which i can re-rip, if necessary) or music that was in a .zip or .rar archive… and, strangely enough, not many of the .mp3s that are on the recovery disk actually made it, but there’s probably 90% to 95% of the .zip and .rar archives that appear to have made it through… meaning that, when i opened the archive with ark, it opened and didn’t tell me that the archive was corrupt most of the time… 😕 i don’t completely understand how that happened, but i’ll take it.
and, to be honest, there are more than a few albums where i was able to download all but one track from the backup disk (for whatever reasons), so i’m really glad that i actually have as many CDs as i do, because that makes it a lot easier to go back and re-rip one track from an album.
it’s been more than a month since i played music through my stereo speakers. i spent ALL DAY today, listening to music and uploading gigabytes of music to the new NAS. 👍😉
and, TOMORROW, i’m going BUSKING!!! 👍😎👍
why is the opposite of “progress” not “congress” rather than “regress”?
i got in contact with the vehicle-wrap artist that did the actual artwork for the previous car, and he, also, sent me an .eps file containing the original artwork, so i’m sure i have backed it up, now… although i haven’t backed it up to the cloud drive, yet, because i can still only access it through a web browser on my linux box, and not at all on my mac laptop… and i am worried that they’re not going to be able to make it work on my mac laptop, because i did the steps to auto-mount a network drive, at startup, and it took my password and chewed on it for 30 seconds or so, and then rejected it… i THINK it’s because the cloud drive wants me to login to /cgi-bin/ but the ancient mac will only let me login to the base server URI. and on the linux box, it allows me to specify the login directory, and accepts my password, but never gets beyond that, to actually logging me in — it just repeats its request for a username and password, over, and over, and over, and over… 😕 hopefully, when the guy comes over this evening to give me the keys, he will be able to conclusively address these issues.
ETA: he addressed those issues like a boss, and had BOTH the ancient mac and my linux box wrapped around the NAS’s little finger in about 10 minutes… the old mac, apparently, doesn’t like the domain name, and REALLY doesn’t like the fact that my username has an @ symbol in it, but it eats up the intranet IP address like it’s going out of style, and, because of the fact that it’s ONLY addressing the NAS from the intranet, i just gave it the administrator username instead of my username… and the linux box was, basically, the same, once we figured out how to do it… and connecting monique’s computer was easiest of all: just gave it the intranet IP address and everything was kosher. 😎
there’s A LOT of music in .zip or .rar archives in my recovered data, so, once i get to the point of actually expanding those archives, i will have a significant part of my music collection back… for that matter, i’m pretty sure i “backed up” my music collection to CD, around 10 years ago or so, which means that, once i find where i’ve put it, there’s a good chance that my music collection will be back to 75% to 80% of what it was prior to the crack.
the western digital support personnel that i talked to on 210724, who said that someone would be calling me “monday or tuesday” lied, because it is now wednesday, and i HAVE NOT received a call from them… which only strengthens my suspicion that they are NOT going to try to contact me until after 210731, which is their deadline for making a claim through their data recovery program. 😒
the process of categorising partially corrupt files is both time-consuming, and ultimately frustrating, because, once i have rough-categorised the files, i have to go back through, re-open every file again to determine what it is, re-name the file, and then categorise it AGAIN… and A LOT of the file names started with the date that they were last looked at, which, frequently, is a complete mystery from inside the document, so even when i have them renamed, and categorised, i still can’t complete a time-line for stuff that was modified more than once… which will, very likely, cause major headaches in the future, particularly with documens created for other peoples’ printing. 😒
seriously, whatever anonymous skript-kiddie did this to me — who has never even met them before — just for “lulz” — better hope that i don’t run into them late at night in a dark alley, because, if that ever happens, the result will NOT be positive for anyone. 🤬
on a lighter note, i got my physical copies of questionable content, the electronic copies of which were lost… i’m slowly getting everything put back together.
but i still have to rewrite the IOTM blurb about patchouli for next month, because it’s coming up really soon, and it’s the only IOTM blurb that i didn’t get back… which is a real shame, because the old one was really amusing, and i don’t know if i can remember all of what i said.
lord buckley would love this…
but, unfortunately, lord buckley was part of the data that either wasn’t recovered, is corrupted, or i haven’t found it yet because i’m dealing with sixty gazillion files that are named something like 0SVP8382U794.mp3 or 3O1458DNLWO.jpg, because all of their meta-data has been deleted. 😒
anyway, the new NAS is up and running, although not completely configured yet. i have an “app” on my phone and tablet that gives me access to the cloud drive, and i can access it through a web browser on my antique mac and my linux box.
ETA: and accessing it through a web browser is an entirely new experience for me, because, despite the fact that it’s in a web browser, the “pages” are things like the file center, which allows me to “drag-and-drop” files from my local computer, to upload them. basically it acts like a window, even though it’s technically a web page. will wonders never cease?
although i’m fairly sure linux has a more direct way of accessing the cloud drive, the guy who came by to set it up wasn’t a linux geek, and, apparently, has never met a linux geek in the general public. he was astounded when i told him that i had been running linux for 20 years… 😉
but the new NAS is WAY cooler than the old cloud drive, primarily because it is, apparently, possible to edit files while they are still in the cloud, rather than having to download them, edit them locally, and then over-write the old file on the cloud. if what i have already experienced with audio files is true, the likelyhood of my losing any MORE music is practically eliminated. also, it appears to be possible to install executable code on the NAS, and run it locally, which would make things EXTRA SUPER COOL, but i’m not 100% sure of it, yet. 😉
ETA: the NAS has, apparently, either configured itself, or something has been installed remotely that allows it to communicate with my linux system via a number of different protocols, including SMB, MTP (whatever that is — Media Transfer Protocol… who knew?), HTTPS, and bluetooth… which is really odd, because my computer doesn’t even have a bluetooth reciever, so i kinda wonder where the “Bluetooth” icon in the remote network directory came from… unfortunately, i have been unable to connect with anything other than HTTPS, even though the SMB instance takes my password and doesn’t say it’s wrong, it just won’t log me in… which is something to take up with the configurators tomorrow.
the “twisted pair” who are whipping my computers into shape doing my configuration are going to be finished up tomorrow, at which point i hope to have the more direct method of connecting on at least the linux box (if they aren’t able to figure out the antique mac, i understand). i’ve already got a lot of stuff sorted out of the recovered data, including a whole bunch of music, embeded in .zip archives, which appears to be uncorrupted, so, initially, it appears that i may not have lost everything. oh, i also discovered a bunch of CDs that have the date 4/20/13 on them, that appear to be raw .wav files of my first three cassettes, originally produced in the 1980s. if they are as pristine as they appear, then i MIGHT NOT have lost all my old music.
AND western digital FINALLY got back to me — i originally reported the loss on 210624, and, since then, i have sent the drive to texas, waited two weeks, and had the people in texas deliver the drive back to me, which arrived ONE WEEK BEFORE the western digital team (which “values your data”) got around to contacting me… 😒 they said they couldn’t help me unless i uploaded the system logs, but when i plugged in the drive, it wouldn’t even mount on mac, which means that they couldn’t even talk me through the process of recovering the system logs, at which point the issue was “escalated”, and they are, alledgedly, going to call me back monday or tuesday. at this point, i would estimate that it’s NOT particularly likely that western digital is going to call me back before 210731, which is when their web site says i have to have contacted them regarding a data loss from CVE-2018-18472… because after 210731, they don’t have to do anything about it. 😒
i saw a bare bear (a black one) today, at 47.4336528, -121.9412438 at approximately 1700 hours.
sorry, there are no pictures, i was too busy getting the fuck out of there.
here are some wildlife pictures that aren’t twice my size with four inch claws, even if it was going the opposite direction.
also, some paraidolia, for you religiomus folks. 😉
i’ve got a lot on my mind… my new car, my old car, monique’s old car, my cloud drive, the data, which still needs A LOT of categorising and sorting. there’s so much of it, and about a third to one half of it is corrupt, but i can’t tell without attempting to read it…
next to my tablet is a cup which contains pens, pencils, permanent markers, a divider, a compass, a bong reamer, several dental tools, a couple of hemostats… miscelaneous things that i need on a regular basis. i was looking for the original gear shift knob for my old car, which involved emptying out a bag of miscelaneous leftovers from when we moved (last year), which i never got around to sorting out. it had a number of things that i had been looking for, like my extra vape battery, an extra container for concentrates, my (ORIGINAL!) fidget-cube, and some extra pens and pencils, which i proceded to put in the cup next to my tablet… but it was full.
so, i decided to get a larger can, from my workshop, into which to transfer the pens, pencils, and miscelaneous tools, which took a while, because i had to find the can that i was looking for. when i’d found the can, i went back into my office, and transferred the stuff into it, in the bottom of the cup, i found this…
i got this… i don’t know how many years ago… i think it was before my injury… i got it a clear quartz ganesha, and this citrine one, at the same time, but i lost the citrine one almost immediately — like, within the first two weeks — and i have never seen it since.
so, according to the latest theory, a script kiddie found out about, and took advantage of CVE-2018-18472, but the bug doesn’t just allow anyone with the IP address to login as admin…
the bug allows anyone with the IP address to login as admin AND DO A FACTORY RESET!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
what this means is that the files weren’t just deleted, they were OVERWRITTEN… a factory reset reformats the drive and re-installs the operating system.
which means that the files that are gone, are gone for good. there’s no getting them back, at this point… 🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢
not only have i resurrected the ganesha graphic, but i actually bought a design template for a vehicle wrap on a 2019 hyundai ioniq! 👍
now, maybe, i can do the whole vehicle wrap that i have been dreaming about. 😉
AND i pick up my new car today… even before we’ve decided what to do with the old one…
this deciding we’re going to do this big thing at some amorphous time “later”, and then having that “later” be “later today” is really confusing to me. 😕
yup… we’re now the owners of four cars: the 1998 ford F150 pickup truck, the 2009 hyundai elantra touring, the 2014 hyundai santa fe, and the 2019 hyundai ioniq.
the current fantasy, such as it is, is that we have traded the santa fe for the ioniq, but the santa fe is, currently, in pieces at autoworks of issaquah, who should have it put back together monday or tuesday. we’ve still got to retrieve the dog crates from the back of the santa fe, but, at this point, as soon as we receive the title from the bank (monday or tuesday), we’re handing it over to the hyundai dealership in puyallup. then, we’re going to private-sell the elantra touring (i don’t want to sell it with the artwork, but if we have to, then so be it), and, at some point in the next couple of weeks, we’re driving to salem to pick up monique’s new santa fe — it has to be a santa fe, because that’s what the dog crates (remember them) fit into…
so, alledgedly, we will, once again, be a three car household… but…
this is getting really confusing. 😕
vector renditions, i.e. infinitely expandable and contractable, keeping the same line quality.
today, i confirmed that they are the original, and my modified versions of the graphic, which is excellent, because, otherwise, i wouldn’t have artwork for my NEW car…
whee? 😕
oh, definitely whee… the new car is a hybrid that gets almost 50MPG, and is only slightly smaller than the current car, although it’s white, and not black…
such is life.
good news: i got back (most of, as far as i’ve been able to tell, so far) my IOTM club records, including, most importantly the records of who paid when, and what they have received.
bad news: i’ve checked the largest adobe illustrator documents i can find, and they’re all corrupt, which means, very likely, that the artwork for my car is no longer, and when i get a new car (which might be a lot sooner than i expected), i will have to come up with new artwork for it.
i still have A LOT of files to evaluate… like more than a week, of solid 8-hour days, doing NOTHING but evaluating files… possibly as much as a month of 8-hour days. 😒
and that’s NOT listening to music and watching videos… that’s opening files, to make sure that they’re not totally corrupt, and listening to no more than 5 or 10 seconds of the music or video, to make sure that they’re not TOTALLY corrupt, and then rough-classifying the file based on the contents i’ve seen… and then going to the next file in the list.
which, of course, is leaving me with files where all but the last 5 or 10 seconds of music or video is corrupt, but the rest of it is fine, which is almost more frustratingly irritating than if the entire file was corrupt. 🤬🤬
also, more bad news: there were NO .ogg, .flac, .aif or .aup files recovered AT ALL, which means that NONE of the music that i have recorded since 1983 made it. 😢
i MAY still have the cassettes on to which they were originally mixed down, but they haven’t been played for at least 20 years, and i don’t hold out much hope. ken may have some of my stuff, because he is a music hoarder, and i have played music with him since 1985 or thereabouts, but he lives in bellingham. and i can download .flac files from bandcamp for all of the CDs i have made, except for the one that was made right after my brain injury, which isn’t all there on bandcamp… 😒
but, at this point, it doesn’t look particularly encouraging, and i strongly suspect that i’m going to have to re-rip ALL of the physical media i own, which is another couple of months of solid 8-hour days, at least. 😒
and that doesn’t even begin to address the HUGE quantities of music of which i have purchased and downloaded ONLY electronic copies, like the 40+ albums from ergo phizmiz which i have been collecting for AT LEAST 20 years.
it feels good to have created a way out of this mess, but it’s heartbreaking to think of how much quality work i have done that has been lost. 😢
ETA: i don’t know whether this is as good news as it could be, but i got a zip file full of business logos from my web designer, and there are a couple of high res graphics that are, basically, what i used on my car… and i actually found a couple of .eps files (which, i believe, are vector, and native to illustrator) of the graphic on my car… i haven’t checked, yet, because it’s late, and i really should be in bed, but, well… 😒 AND i am, officially, buying a new car (a hybrid, hyundai ioniq), which means that i’ve got to move my graphic, anyway.
the answer costs $600, not $800. 👍
the answer is two 4TB disks in a RAID1 array, not 2TB disks, in a RAID1 array. 👍👍
i know that the cause of all this was the (potential) loss of all my data, but, at this point, i like where it’s all going A LOT more than i did two weeks ago… for that matter, i like where it’s all going a lot more than i did a month ago, before this all started happening. 😉
the answer is a 4TB NAS, two bays of 2TB each, in a RAID1 array.
this serves a dual purpose: the NAS is my “cloud drive”, and the RAID1 array is my backup.
i can “backup” the backup, to “the cloud” or to an external 2TB device (like a flash drive) on a regular basis if i want, at that point, for extra security.
the answer costs around $800, for them to come in, set it up, get all my devices talking to it, from the antique mac to the bleeding edge kubuntu box, and hand me the keys.
i can afford the answer, without having to get “household funds” involved.
why?
because someone send me almost $1,200 for one of my huge boxes of incense, that’s why. 👍
‼
in other news, i paid them $600 and they’re mailing me back the remains of the old NAS, and a disk full of either data, or not-data. 😒 whee.
proverbs 22.6 says “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
when i was a child, from the time i was born, i was trained to believe that i was insignificant, at best, a screw-up most of the time, and a horrible, disgusting screw-up who had no right to live on special occasions.
my earliest memories are of my parents being livid with me… because i had slammed my hand in a car door, because i had “found” a nest of fire-ants, because i cut my finger with a sharp knife at a fancy restaurant… all before i was 5 years old.
my parents never physically harmed me, and to someone looking in from outside, i would have seemed to be a normal, happy child, but they used their words like clubs and straps, often and without mercy.
i don’t remember ever getting a hug from either one of my parents. 😢
my parents, and my younger brother and sisters called me “crummy child”. initially, i think, my parents thought that they were “out of hearing” when they called me that, but as soon as my first younger sister could talk (when i was about 7 years old), she called me “crummy child”, and the other sister and brother just “picked up on it” over the years, as they learned to talk. my father thought “crummy child” was a term of endearment. 😒
my younger siblings are now 55, 53, and 51 years old. i haven’t spoken to any of them in 35 years.
and yet, 61 years into it, i can’t shake this feeling that i am a horrible, disgusting screw-up who has no right to live, and should be called “crummy child” by people who are younger than i am. 😒
thanks, mom and dad. 🤬🖕
if you didn’t already, now you know why i haven’t talked to you for more than 5 minutes in the past 40 years. 😒
i want to make a bootable kubuntu 20.04 USB flash drive, but i don’t know how (never done it before) to install from a USB flash drive… and “installing from a CD” is no longer an option.
and, apparently, cheapbytes.com is no longer in business… 😒
so, i go to https://averagelinuxuser.com/make-a-bootable-usb-drive-in-linux/ which contains step-by-step instructions for how to do it.
after spending half an hour figuring out which is the USB flash drive i want to put it on to (/dev/sdc — which i found out by removing all the other USB disk from my system, and typing “sudo fdisk -l”), i try to wipe /dev/sdc and reformat it (because it is formatted for mac), but when i type
sudo wipefs --all /dev/sdc
it says
wipefs: error: /dev/sdc: probing initialisation failed: Device or resource busy
so, i try
umount /dev/sdc
but it throws the same error…
i DO NOT UNDERSTAND!! the device is NOT “busy”, you dumb machine!! 🤬 but then i realise that the machine isn’t the dumb one here, and if it’s giving me an incomprehensible error, it must be because it has been given incomprehensible commands… by me… 🤬
so, i type:
sudo dd bs=4M if=/home/salamandir/Documents/Install/kubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc status=progress && sync
and, eventually, it gives me
2643034112 bytes (2.6 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 163 s, 16.2 MB/s
630+1 records in
630+1 records out
2643034112 bytes (2.6 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 163.442 s, 16.2 MB/s
but after that, it hangs up. when i press "enter", after a LONG delay, it gives me
^C
and, after that... nothing.
i don't have the patience to learn all this again... i just want it to work... 😒
after another HOUR of futzing about, i figured it out... but it's REALLY frustrating, and i really don't have the patience to figure it all out without significant stress.
and, when i booted with the new system, it was UGLY, and i know FOR A FACT that i'm going to have to spend as much time tweaking the system to my preferences as i am going through endless stacks of numbered files, and re-filing them in more-or-less the right place, for about the next 3 years.
just another reason to give up computers all together and become a hermit. 😒
i heard from the data recovery people. they said:
There’s ~4 billion sectors on the 2TB drive. Head 0 died with ~55 million sectors left to read (very small percentage). It’s at the end of the drive so it was probably zeroes anyway. The main issue is that the metadata has been overwritten and the directory structure and file names are gone. This means that the files will have the correct extension but no names and no parent folders.
so, what they recover will be, essentially, files with their proper extensions — .ai, .otd, .doc, .otf, .txt, .mp3, .mp4, .html, .pdf, .eps, .jpg, .flac, .gif, .etc… — but with numbers, instead of file names… and if, as with the files from audacity, the project file uses ancillary files in the same directory, then the project files won’t open until ALL the ancillary files have the correct names, and are in the correct directory… 😒 they said, because of the way i was attacked, actual file recovery is not guaranteed, and recovered but corrupt files are billable, which means that i MIGHT end up with no readable data at all, and STILL have to pay for it. they said their “standard” service costs $600 and takes 5+ days, whereas their “expedited” service costs $1,000 (like moe said, everything costs $1,000 😒) and takes half that amount of time.
i contacted the place that built my last computer, InfoTech, when they opened, at 10:00 this morning. i gave them the specifications for a new computer (pentium G6400 4GHz, 16GB DDR4, Intel UHD 630, 2TB SATA HD, with the 1TB SATA SSD i’ve had since 2018 installed), and they said that they were going to send me an invoice, but, as of 3:00 this afternoon, i haven’t seen an invoice from them. once i’ve got the actual computer taken care of, i’ll ask them about a replacement for my WD cloud drive… although, i think i may avoid further western digital products, at this point. 😒
miraculously, i seem to have all the parts for this month’s incense of the month to be sent out with a minimum of hassle. i suppose that’s a good thing.
so, i still haven’t heard from ace data recovery, because of the holiday weekend, but i decided to get my computer ready to take the new old data (if it still exists), by installing the 1TB SATA drive i’ve had sitting on my desk since 2018, which is the first time i thought i was going to need it…
however, it turns out that, because i got the “low profile” case, the last time i bought a computer (which, according to the label on the back, was 2015), there isn’t enough room to install the SATA drive, despite the fact that it’s ⅓ the size of the “normal” IDE drive.
i have two options. i can either buy a not-low-profile case, and pay someone to transfer all the internal shit (because i’m not skilled enough to do it, any longer), OR, for about $200 more, i can just buy an entirely new computer. 😒
it would cost around $700, give or take, to get a new computer, and have the 2018 SATA drive installed (thus making it a 2 HD system right off the top), and, at that point, i could hook up the hard disk from the old computer, via USB or something, and probably have enough space…
and moe sez it’s okay for me to spend that amount…
so, i guess i’m getting a new computer, as well. i remember when i would have been really excited at the prospect of a new computer, but, at this point, it’s JUST ANOTHER HEADACHE! 😠
today, i got the following message from western digital:
Western Digital is working on a Data Recovery recovery program and allow us some time for the program to be put in place. I understand you sent the drive to a Data Recovery Center. If he (sic) would like Western Digital to assist with the recovery cost, we recommend to wait for the program to be active.
Some My Book Live devices connected to the Internet are being compromised by attackers and in some cases, the attackers have triggered a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.
We are here to help. Although this product family is no longer sold or supported by Western Digital, we know some of our customers have been impacted and we want to help.If you have lost your data because of these attacks, we will provide data recovery services which will be available beginning in July.
We know how important your data is to you and are committed to helping you protect it.
We will provide details about how to take advantage of this program in a separate email.
For more detailed information and updates, please refer to the Security Bulletin listed below.
WDC-21008 Recommended Security Measures for WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo
https://www.westerndigital.com/support/productsecurity/wdc-21008-recommended-security-measures-wd-mybooklive-wd-mybookliveduo
the problem is, i NEED that data. it was driven home to me how much i need that data when i realised (this morning) that all of my federal tax records are on that drive… and they’re due soon… 😒 i DO NOT have the time to wait around for a “Data Recovery recovery program” that hasn’t been developed yet. 😒
“If he (sic) would like Western Digital to assist with the recovery cost, we recommend to wait for the program to be active.”… if “who” would like WD to assist…? I would, very definitely, like WD to assist with the recovery cost. unfortunately, i NEED that data NOW (actually, yesterday would have been better 😠), also, well, this IS july, now, and i haven’t received any indication that this recovery program is much more than a pipe dream.
my plan is to continue at the rate that i’m already going with the “recovery plan”, and if WD has any problems with my plan, they can shove it up their ass, and pay anyway! 😠
i JUST got email from the data recovery place, which says:
Thank you for choosing ACE Data Recovery. We have received your device in our lab.
…
We will be contacting you soon after the diagnostic’s results will be ready. Usually it takes one to two business days.
my impression, at this point, is that WD is GOING to “assist with the recovery cost”, whether or not they think they are now. it’s just a matter of how hard we (the class of people who lost data because of this negligence) are going to have to try to convince them. 😠
the cloud drive is on its way to dallas, to the temple of the computer wizards, who seem to think that they can actually retrieve data from a drive that has been wiped. whether they can, or not, remains to be seen, and if they can, actually, retrieve data, there’s no telling how much, but the expense increases with every file they retrieve, and i’ve got A LOT of files on that drive.
the current conjecture is that an anonymous, malicious, mindless, skript-kiddie found out about the bug that they’ve known about since 2018, but haven’t done anything about it because it’s a “legacy” device that hasn’t been upgraded since 2015 (despite the fact that MANY WD cloud drives are still in use all over the world), and wrote a script to search out all the IP addresses of MyBook drives it could find, and wipe them…
because they can… 😒
L0L! 🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕
but, according to the latest theory, they didn’t overwrite the data, they just removed the allocation tables… they did a “quick” erase, not a “complete” erase… so the data is, probably, still there, as long as something hasn’t overwritten it, and, since the first thing i did when i couldn’t login was to shut it down, the chance that it’s still there is relatively high. it’s up to the experts, and whether or not i have enough money, to determine whether or not i see any of that data again.
and, as far as remediation goes, i think i’ve learned enough to install the 1TB drive (which is not big enough to store 2TB of data) that i’ve had sitting on my desk since 2018, but i haven’t done it yet, and i haven’t even started to search for a replacement cloud drive, or a backup system, because i’ve been going through an existential crisis, AND temperatures that have been an average of 35°F hotter than they have ever been, which has, essentially, shut down any hope of doing anything other than hiding and hoping it’s all going to be over soon. 😟
but climate change is a myth, created by china! 😒
it’s 25°F cooler than it was yesterday, but it’s still 10°F warmer than normal, for this time of year, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be getting better any time soon.
so, my Western Digital MyCloud Live bit the dust the other day. i spent most of yesterday stressing, and figuring out what was wrong, and beginning to figure out how to fix it (and not getting very far, because of the stress).
then, this morning, i wake up to this: CVE-2018-18472…
Western Digital WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo (all versions) have a root Remote Command Execution bug via shell metacharacters in the /api/1.0/rest/language_configuration language parameter. It can be triggered by anyone who knows the IP address of the affected device, as exploited in the wild in June 2021 for factory reset commands…
and Action Required on My Book Live and My Book Live Duo
Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices are being compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers’ data is very important. At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device.
the only hope i have is EITHER that the MyCloud IP address was unknown, unknowable, or “small potatoes”, OR that this is for My”BOOK” Live, and what i’m dealing with is a My”CLOUD” Live, and that CVE-2018-18472 applies to the My”BOOK” and not the My”CLOUD”…
but what is the probability of those things happening? 🤬
(actually, now that i think about it, the probability is fairly low: i BOUGHT the MyCloud device in 2014, and i’m pretty sure that i received firmware updates well after the 2015 date that they mentioned here, but… it’s still worrying.)
actually, i couldn’t POSSIBLY be that lucky… i was looking at the back of the device, and it very clearly says “MyBook Live”… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
word now is that western digital has known about this since 2018. 🤬
some good news, for a change… i’ve written for a quote from Ace Data Recovery, which is a partner with western digital. i’m as confident as i can be (which isn’t much) that they have a MUCH better chance of actually recovering my data than anything i could do. of course, because of the fact that it is currently after business hours on friday, central time, and the fact that they don’t work on weekends, i’m probably not going to hear anything until monday, at the earliest. however, this gives me some time to work on the problem of where to put it once it has, actually, been retrieved.
my cloud device is not a cloud device.
it was working fine two days ago. by the time i discovered it wasn’t working, yesterday, it was too late to get tech support on the line, so i got them on the line today.
what they said is that my WD MyCloud Live is old enough that it’s considered a “legacy device” and they don’t offer service for it any longer.
so ALL of my hybrid elephant records, ALL of my “Incense of the Month” records, ALL of my appointments, ALL of my digital artwork, ALL of my pictures, ALL of my music… EVERYTHING is gone.
😟
ETA: i talked to the folks at western digital this morning, and what i learned was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
i bought it, and had it configured by 140127, so it has only been six years, not the eight that i was complaining about originally… doesn’t make me feel any better about losing access to that data. 😟
the device is a WD MyCloud Live device, which is a “legacy” device which is no longer serviced.
the fact that i had the drive partitioned four ways, and primarily used it on linux, means that, even if it were able to be serviced, they wouldn’t do it. they support windows and mac, but not linux.
despite the fact that western digital disks are used on linux systems ALL THE TIME… 😒
it MIGHT be accessible directly, by plugging it directly into the computer, instead of a router. i plugged it into my mac laptop, and a new icon appeared on the desktop called “MyCloud Live”. it contained four “public” folders (documents, pictures, music, and another that i don’t remember), but they were all empty. also, it said i was logged in as “guest” and my disk doesn’t have a “guest” login, so my guess is that mac logged me into a new, blank partition.
which means that i MIGHT be able to access it from linux, if i can get it to log me in as something other than “guest”…
when in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles…
ask if anybody has a clue on kubuntu forums dot net…
the guy there said that, in all likelyhood, it is running an embeded linux OS, and, if nothing else, i could take it out of its enclosure and add it as a new hard disk on my computer, as long as it works.
however… 😒
at this point, i’m going to HAVE TO get a new cloud server to replace the old one (more goddamn money spent on this damn technology… 😠), and i don’t want to do ANYTHING with the old one until i have a new place, however temporary, to store all <900MB of shit. AND i just happen to have a samsung 1TB SATA disk — had it new, in the box, since 2018 — but because i don’t actually know how to install a new hard disk on a linux machine, i haven’t done so.
so, MAYBE everything isn’t gone, but it’s going to be a few stress filled days until i get it all figured out and get everything settled down to what passes for “normal” these days. 😟
i took a mushroom hike today. three 🍄🍄🍄 mushrooms, for the record. took them in a gel-cap. they took about an hour to come on. the whole hike was from 1:30 or so, until around 4:00.
then, there’s this…
and, look! 😉 i’ve moved that annoying post down where i can’t see it. 😉
so, i made this tweet yesterday:
this afternoon, approximately 24 hours later, this is the kind of reaction it’s having:
if there were only some way to get #NationalStrike #GeneralStrike #TaxStrike #LaborStrike #BankStrike #RentStrike #DebtStrike #MortgageStrike #MinimumWageStrike #CreditCardStrike #PeoplesStrike #PeoplePower #EatTheRich #RaiseTheWage #GuillotinesNeeded #WeAreClosed the same kind of response… 🤯
three days later, and $1,000 poorer, ganesha the car has returned to the land of the living… or, at least, to the land of the functional. it now has a brand spanking new alternator to replace the fried one that left me stranded by the side of the road on friday.
moe says “everything costs a thousand dollars”, and she’s right… 😒
i remember the first time i saved up $100. it took me almost two years… and that was without a lot of everyday expenses, and with an “allowance” (i was about 12 years old).
at least $1000 comes a lot easier now than $100 did then. 😒
today and tomorrow are what passes for SACBO this year. basically, it’s a tailgate party in the public parking lot in fremont where, two years ago, snake suspenderz performed it’s last performance.
i got up this morning around 9:00, and went about my business until around 9:45, when i remembered that i’m supposed to be at SACBO today. moe had a karaoke party last night, which used my microphone and amplifier, so i rushed around and put them back in their respective boxes and i was JUST walking out the door, when i suddenly remembered…
yesterday, around 15:30 or so, i was on my way home from getting the last supplies for the karaoke party when, suddenly, my car died… i was driving along issaquah-hobart road, north of highway 18, and suddenly the radio turned off, and wouldn’t turn back on… then ALL of the idiot lights on the dashboard (including a couple i have never seen before) started blinking rapidly, and randomly, before they, too, shut off. the speedometer and the tachometer quit working… the power steering quit working… but i was still moving forward, and there really wasn’t a good place to pull over, so i decided that the best thing to do was get as close to home as possible before the car died…
which happened before i got to highway 18.
this is another one of those instances which is REALLY STRANGE to me, because, in the past, when things like this have happened, i, and everybody i know, immediately goes into “WHEN IN TROUBLE, WHEN IN DOUBT, RUN IN CIRCLES, SCREAM AND SHOUT” mode and stays there for at least a week, while transportation and money to fix the vehicle are sorted out.
but this time?
i called moe, and told her what happened. after confirming my safety, she said she would come meet me, and pick up the groceries that were sweating their lives away in my car (the air conditioning quit working). she also recommended that i call triple-A and arrange for a tow. she said i shouldn’t worry about my car being borked, because we just bought a third vehicle not too long ago (a red ford F150 monster, fondly known as “big red”). when moe got to where i was, it turned out that she had already called the fix-a-car shop, and had made arrangements with them to see the car on monday. she said “it’s annoying, but it’s not the end of the world”…
the tow truck showed up about an hour later, and i rode home with my car…
and totally forgot about SACBO until this morning.
um…
i guess i’m not going to SACBO this year… 😕
AND because i’m being a perfectionist about it, and not being satisfied with the work that i’ve already done… seriously, there have been a couple of times when, despite the work that i’ve already done, i’ve thought about trashing the whole thing and starting over, because ONE TINY DETAIL is slightly askew, which nobody except the most hard-core thelemite would notice…
but, see, that’s the thing… i’m making this because I AM a “hard-core thelemite” (among other things), and, seriously, i want it to be as close to the original as absolutely possible, while, at the same time, being 40% smaller, and entirely made by hand…
AND, BUT, ALSO… a NEW CAR!! 😒 no, no, no… AND because i have been depressed enough that, even when i am doing nothing else, for EXTENDED periods of time, i have been having difficulty finding the motivation to work on it, and i kind of DON’T want it to turn into “depression art”, it being a spiritual piece, and everything…
what i am doing to combat depression:
possibly other things i don’t recall at this time.
whether those things are actually having any effect remains to be seen. i’m afraid to think of what comes next if they’re not having any effect. 😒
so, the weird weirdness with my web site was ENTIRELY caused by the osCommerce web site…
which i haven’t even thought about since 2016, because the previous web designer was supposed to have deleted it, once i had successfully migrated to wordpress…
but which wasn’t deleted (despite the fact that it was one of the things i paid her to do 😠), and continued to “function”, without a “head”, for FIVE YEARS…
if nothing else, i suppose, it says something about osCommerce’s resiliancy and ability to continue to function despite being headless and updateless for the past 5 years. i wonder if i could treat wordpress the same way, and expect the same result. i suspect, probably, not.
it’s still there, physically, but it has had it’s hooks into the system removed, so it is no longer functioning. the next step is to figure out which parts are wordpress parts and which parts are osCommerce parts, and delete the osCommerce parts.
in other news, ezra has come up with an idea that needs internet and a web host to work, and, well… i’m the next best thing to a web host, these days… apart from the FUMTU with osCommerce… 😉
in a new twist, the web designer that i worked with prior to the current web designer i work with — the one who blew a gasket for some still-unknown reason — was, as a part of what i was paying her to be a web designer, to delete the old web site files, once i had successfully been migrated to my new site.
unfortunately, apparently she blew a gasket before she actually did that.
and i didn’t know until… well… today.
my current web site is running PHP5, but there was an error which showed up in the log which was an uncaught variable that doesn’t exist in PHP5… in fact, it doesn’t exist until PHP7.4… and, upon further investigation, we discovered that it came from a document that is from osCommerce, which lead to other osCommerce documents, which lead, basically, to the entire osCommerce web site, which has been trying, and failing, to run PHP7.4, and generating WEIRD errors.
it had been beheaded — i.e. it didn’t have an internet-facing interface — but it is all still there.
it should be deleted. 😠
quoth the web developer: I’m going to guess, they’re going to come back and tell us they see nothing wrong. However, they will modify the server and then when I get back in there to test it again, it’s going to work. They just have a problem admitting when they’re wrong so they’ll fix it but tell us that it works fine.
quoth i: i don’t care how it’s fixed, i just want it to be fixed.
they have access to the dashboard, but they’re in a different time zone, so i have to be patient. 😒
ETA: i just got an email notification that says: A user with username “webhost-python” who has administrator access signed in to your WordPress site.
and then a note from YET ANOTHER technician who i HAVEN’T TALKED TO BEFORE (😠), who, apparently, tried the login, looked through the ticket history and decided that they don’t know enough to do anything about it, saying “I will assign this to our developers and they will get back to you.”
so, it begins…
tomorrow… 😒
i gave the web developer my login to the open support ticket at the host provider. there hasn’t been any obvious action yet, but i’ve emailed with the web developer, who worked out a temporary solution which may work out if his attempts to communicate with the host provider don’t work out… but, as i said, he hasn’t even logged in, much less done what the host provider asked of me, which was to “clearly lay out the issues you’re facing and the solution you need done to resolve this issue”.
i don’t know what the solution is, because i don’t know what is causing it. my web developer seems to think it’s the database engine at my host provider, because he has some sort of advanced tool that tells him when things aren’t working correctly. my host provider says he’s full of shit, that his proposed “upgrades” will break things for everybody else, and won’t even talk to the him unless he logs in as me. unfortunately, i know little enough about database engines that any input i can offer would be totally meaningless.
i feel a little bit better, because, now, instead of "doing this as a courtesy as this is not included as part of your Web Maintenance", they have now, actually charged me money, so i am, actually, paying them to fix my shit, and the temporary work around that he proposed, while not ideal, would certainly fix the problem for at least a year.
but i seem to recall going through another database fiasco last year around this time, and, if this is going to become a regular occurrance, i think i’ll pass, thanks. 😒
ETA: the web developer has logged in as me, and given a detailed description of exactly what is wrong, exactly why he thinks it’s wrong, examples of identical installations that follow his guidelines that don’t experience the problems i’m having, and a variety of different solutions to the problems he’s found. the host provider has yet to reply. because of the fact that they’re on eastern time, there’s a good chance we won’t hear anything until tomorrow.
i’ve noticed a couple of things that are… screwy… about my web sites.
intermittently, i get random SQL errors. they only appear once, and when i reload the page, they disappear, but it’s sort of alarming.
and then there’s the “not HTML” FUMTU, which usually works, but has decided not to for a few days now.
so, i contacted my web developer, who said that my database needed “upgrading” to prevent these, and future problems.
not knowing that much about databases, i contacted my host provider, who said that the “upgrades” he proposed are actually DOWNgrades, and implementing them would break the databases for EVERYONE who shares the server i’m on.
so, i got back to the developer, who said that the reason he stopped using this host provider two years ago (which was about the same time i started using this host provider) was because “their policy” was to avoid communication with “third parties” (i.e. i’m a customer of the host provider, and the guy who i pay to know more about the web than me is a “third party”).
while they didn’t actually deny that this was “their policy”, the host provider went out of their way to emphasise that i am their customer, and if i wanted to include my web designer, i would have to give him my login, because they weren’t going to create a special login for him.
so i did that.
i figure, whatever happens, i can change my password once this whole thing is resolved. it is also A LOT easier than trying to convince the host provider to create a login for someone who is not a customer of theirs…
then they switched their tactics, and had a different technician chime in (one with whom i have not talked about this particular problem), who stated “let your developer know that it is already upgraded and using a stable version. If he is unable to diagnose this issue then another developer may be needed…”
this was AFTER i gave my web developer my login, so that he could participate in the “conversation”…
i wanted to say “HE’S RIGHT HERE! TALK TO HIM, NOT TO ME!!” 😠🤬😠🤬
but i didn’t…
but i wanted to… 😒
the web developer was busy yesterday, and (like most “businesses”) he doesn’t work on the weekend, so i’ve pushed back the impending storm until monday…
but…
the web developer has already said “we’re doing this as a courtesy as this is not included as part of your Web Maintenance” and “if they can’t do what we’re asking them to do our hands are tied.” AND the host provider has already said “we do not have a way to resolve something like this as the server itself is not causing the issue and the database server is already up to date.”, which gives me the very strong impression that, when monday comes around, the web developer is going to show up and make demands, the host provider is going to say no, and we’ll be right back where we started.
and all of this is IN SPITE of the fact that i am paying BOTH of these entities to make sure that my shit is kept up to date! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
🤬
this morning is the second in a row that i have woken up at 4:00 in the morning, and can’t get back to sleep. 😒
it is THIS EXACT PHENOMENON that makes me want to give up internet forever and go live in the woods, like a hermit, not interacting with anyone! 😠
i’m REALLY glad someone else is maintaining my business web site these days. 😒
seriously, if it had been left up to me, i would have given up a LONG time ago, and would probably be out of business, because the web design business has gotten REALLY confusing.
example: the places in WordPress where HTML code is not, actually, HTML code…
there are places which display HTML code, and where that code occurs on the back end, it is actually rendered as HTML code in the browser, but if you want to edit the HTML, you have to copy the ENTIRE page, go to another location (or use an actual text-based code editing tool) and paste the ENTIRE page into that location, make the edits, save them in that other location, copy them from that location, go BACK to the original location where you copied the original code from and paste the new code in, and THEN save the original location…? 😕
and, to make matters even worse, as far as i can tell, there’s no way to tell which locations are HTML, and which locations only LOOK LIKE HTML… you’re just expected to know. 😠
as far as i can tell, backed up by a professional web designer who does this for a living, that’s the routine that works, and it has actually worked for me, in the past… but not this morning… which is frustrating beyond belief…
in my day, if something LOOKED LIKE HTML code, it WAS HTML code, and could be edited as such, wherever it occurred. 😠✊
the following login failures were counted on my server last month:
1167 from admin
938 from [login]
25 from przxqgl
11 from user
10 from root
6 from test
to reiterate what is now on my sidebar, my login is NOT “[login]”, “login”, “admin” or “przxqgl” — or “user”, or “root”, or “test” — and i automatically block the IP ranges of anyone who tries to guess my login, so you might as well try to break into someone else’s shit, ’cause it’s not happening here. 😒
the first HPOI that i bought, way back in april of 2018, included 26 kg of MSD 7 “Africanas” Powers.
i bought it because, at the time, i thought it was a requirement to order more than one scent, when you’re ordering in bulk from the manufacturer. i now know this to be false. i made a number of assumptions about the first HPOI that i, now, know are false.
nevertheless, today, 3 years and a few weeks later, someone actually BOUGHT ONE POUCH of 7 “Africanas” Powers…
and, oddly enough, i still have pretty close to 26 kg left. my guess is that it’s going to last me a while. 😉
why does google have no entry for “One-World Temple of Enlightenment and Chinese Laundry”? 😞
they’re starting the process of “permitting” buskers at the pike place market (i.e. they’re starting the process by which one applies for a “permit” to be a busker). 😒
because of COVID, they’re not actually allowing buskers at the pike place market… yet… but they’re starting the process of permitting them, so that when they get the okay from the health department, buskers can, officially, “return” to the market. 😒
but, if my memory serves, they’re only allowing tubas on a case-by-case basis, they’re not allowing any other cup-mouthpiece brass instruments of any kind, regardless of how quitely they’re played (but loud, obnoxious, reed-mouthpiece, brass saxophones are perfectly fine), and they’re not allowing ANY electronic amplification of any kind, for any reason. 😒
oh yeah, i forgot… technically, the “official rules” say “MUTED” tubas… i don’t actually own a tuba mute. very few tuba players i know own a tuba mute. tuba mutes can cost $300. i don’t know of a NON-tuba-player who can even describe what a tuba mute looks like… i’m not going to buy a tuba mute just to play at the pike place market. i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again. tuba mutes are ridiculous! 🤬
not only that, but i no longer have a busking partner. 👎😒
so, do i apply for a permit, or not? 😒
so, for some time now, i have wanted to make a reproduction of The Stele Of Revealing, and i got started the other day. but very quickly, i realised that, if i want to make it a “good enough” reproduction rather than a reproduction that would only look good if you didn’t look too closely, i would need to know the original dimensions, and have a reasonably accurate idea of what the heiroglyphs look like, and what the other artwork looks like, and i would, then, need to reduce them from their original size to the size that i ended up deciding i was going to make it — approximately a 40% reduction.
because i’m an artist, i know that, usually (in the absence of photocopiers, or proportional cameras), the tool used to make miniature reproductions is a proportional divider. i have used them before, know what they look like, and know that they can be very expensive. i didn’t want a really expensive one, but i also did not want something that somebody (most likely me) made out of plywood, because it wouldn’t be accurate enough, so i went to ebay, and discovered the exact tool i needed — from the picture, i deduced that it was, largely, the same tool i used in high school, when i was first learning about proportional dividers.
they arrived in the mail today. they are… um… not what i expected.
what arrived in the mail was a finely machined set of proportional dividers with sharpened tool steel points, and an engraved scale for both circles and lines. it is stamped “J.H.Weil & Co.” and it came in a velvet-lined case with antique gold writing on the outside that says U.S.C.E., which i take to mean U.S. Army Corps of Engineers… my impression is that, under normal circumstances, this could be as much as a $200 tool, but, because of the fact that it appears to be a vintage, military tool, it could be worth a lot more… this is a tool that is, pretty much GUARANTEED to be accurate to at least one thousandth of an inch… and it cost me less than $50!
so, i just wanted to give a shout out to Next Stage Vintage… they suprised the hell out of me! thank you! 😉👍
and i am going to use it to reduce The Stele Of Revealing… 😲
i’ve griped about this before, but it has surfaced again, so here’s another…
“ye olde” stuff, and people who yell “hear ye” are NOT using the same word, and it all has to do with three, but primarily two obsolete letters; ƿ which is called “wynn”, þ which is called “thorn”, and ȝ which is called “yogh”.
ƿ is pronounced like “w”. þ is pronounced as a voiceless “th”. ȝ is pronounced like “y”.
it also has to do with the fact that the letter “y”, itself, is a relatively recent innovation, and it wasn’t really decided exactly what the letter “y” was going to “do” until the late 1800s or early 1900s. prior to that time, the letters ƿ, þ, and ȝ were in reasonably common use, and people used “y” for wildly different reasons, depending on what flavour of proto-modern-english they were speaking.
“þe olde” is pronounced “the old”. when we were in the process of figuring out what “y” did, some enterprising printers got it into their heads that “y” could be used as a substitute for þ, and then things got out of hand.
again, while we were in the process of figuring out what “y” was supposed to do, the letter ȝ was falling out of fashion. “ye” — which was originally spelled “ȝe” — is the nominative case of the second person plural pronoun, which, in modern times, is “you”, and some other enterprising printers figured that they could use this new fangled “y” thingy as a substitute for ȝ, and, thus, instead of “hear ȝe”, we now have “hear ye”, even though the letter ȝ is actually more closely related to the modern letter “g”.
and then there’s ƿ, which sort of looks like “y”, if you squint — and, considering that corrective lenses were still a curiosity, there must have been A LOT of printers who couldn’t see very well. but the fact that it is pronounced like “w” means that it can only come down to stupid printers who didn’t know, or couldn’t see the difference, and mistakenly set ƿ as “y” as a typographical error.
and the fact that people don’t just KNOW this stuff is something i find very frustrating. 😒
this is an example of bounded chaotic mixing producing strange stability:
210504 Carrey Creek, Taylor Mountain – Hobart, WA — although it’s not as high resolution as i would have liked… however, at almost 500mb, i couldn’t be too choosy.
this exact phenomenon is what people are talking about when they’re talking about God, in whatever form. 😉👍
okay, there is a mathematical theory (which is NOT what most people THINK is a theory) which says “bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability”.
i have gotten in trouble with mathematicians for “taking this too liberally”, but it works, regardless of what they think.
the theory is that if you have an instance of bounded chaotic mixing — in this case, the “chaotic mixing” of H2O molecules, “bounded” by the banks of the stream, that if you take away that boundary, temporarily — say, for example, a waterfall — that the boundaries will, more or less, hold, until that chaotic mixing is forced into another boundary. in the case of a waterfall, “bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability” is the reason why you can stand fairly close to the base of a waterfall, without getting wet, but eventually — and nobody can tell exactly when, but the probability increases the closer you get — you WILL get wet.
men will be familiar with this phenomenon when they pee… 😉
in the case of this video, the bounded chaotic mixing is violently changing course, and the strange stability is, just before it does so, there’s a place where, even when the video is slowed down, you can see a roundish, perfectly clear patch of water, that stays more or less in the same place… strange stability: nothing is keeping it there, no bubbles go through it, even though, everywhere around it, are bubbles and ripples…
and it is exactly the same phenomenon that people are talking about, when they talk about God.
somebody else says “god” did it. i say, bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability.
when i say i believe that God both exists, and doesn’t exist, at the same time, creating no contradiction, this is what i am talking about.
“What Would You Think If I Sang Autotune” by Evolution Control Committee.
“Whole Lotta Royalty Payments” by Evolution Control Committee.
i found this book in a “little free library” today… i’m having a lot of fun imagining what it COULD BE about… 😉 
as soon as i figure out how to list “1 postcard for $1.50 or 10 postcards for $10.00”, they’re going on the web site. 😈
ETA: they’re up! 😉👍
i learned something about our neighbours down the street… 😲
i’m not going to say who or what, but it explains some things, and i feel REALLY sorry for some of the members of their family. 😟
i hope they get what they need, soon, although, at this point, it doesn’t seem very likely.
i now have four people on the Incense Of The Month list, one of whom is a person i gifted a membership to… so, three “random” people, and one “deliberate” person.
it’s a REALLY good thing i decided to keep records, because, otherwise, i would already be completely hosed. i’m still not sure what to do at the end of this year, when my original two have run their course… of course, i will send 12 months worth of incense to everybody, regardless of when they signed up, but how to deal with the ones who chose to sign up after two, three or four months is something i didn’t think about when i was first starting this… i suppose i’ve got the rest of the year to figure it out, but that doesn’t mean leaving it until the middle of december before deciding, as tempting as that sounds…
it also means that there are only 21 slots left before i close the IOTM club to new entries… 😉
i applied for a performer spot at the shoreline arts festival today.
it’s a juried selection, and the jury decisions are confidential, so if i get selected, i’ll know, but if not, i won’t know until it happens.
this is the “audition tape” i sent them
trillium — picking parts off a trillium plant can kill it even if the rhizome is left undisturbed… so don’t. around here, they are T. albidum, T. ovatum, and T. petiolatum. all the ones pictured here are ovatum. 😉
today i harvested 19.5 grams of bud from my two small, stressed plants. i planted them in 2020, shortly after we moved. one of our neighbours gave me a couple of clones from the plants that he had, which had already started to bud. i put them under lights, and, basically, forced them back into vegetative mode by changing the lights and lengthening the cycle, which made them start sprouting malformed leaves. then they got even more stressed because i had them under lights in the uninsulated garage, where the temperature regularly got down into the upper 30s for a few months, and the plants started turning purple… which is something i have read about, but never actually seen before. i didn’t expect much, but 19.5 grams is nothing to sneeze at. and, if the state of my fingers after harvesting them is any indication, i’ve got some sticky bud here… 😉
post-inaugural smoke-test, indicators are high! 😉👍👍
oh, and it’s legal, AND i have a permit to grow up to 15 plants! 😎
also, the 5 button head screws referred to here, FINALLY showed up… they left pacific NINE DAYS ago… i could LIMP there faster! honestly! i could DRIVE from my house to pacific and back at least 500 times in nine days! do better, UPS. 😒
i got the nuts that fit the screws, i took the loupe part off the old, broken frames, and mounted it on the new, unbroken frames, with entirely new screws and nuts, and washers from the repair kit the denmat/perioptix people sent me. the new screws are TINY alan-key drive… mcmaster-carr doesn’t have philips-head screws that are 2-64… 😒 i don’t actually have an alan-key small enough to tighten them, but i’m pretty sure i got it tight enough with a wrench on the nut side. 🔧
ETA: it turns out i do have an alan-key that is small enough, and i did get it tight enough with a wrench… HOWEVER in my final look-over before i put it back in the box, i noticed something i hadn’t before, which is that the hinge is completely broken, and, while the repair kit they sent me has a replacement hinge, it’s actually the part of the hinge that is a molded part of the magnifier, itself, which means that i cannot fix it, because it is an integral part of the actual optical piece… replacement parts for which, i already know they no longer make. 😒
at this point, it’s still in one piece, and functional, so long as you don’t move the hinge around too much, but the hinge has already failed and cannot be repaired. it’s just a matter of time before the whole thing falls apart. 🤬
i also burned a hole in my eyebrow, when i was grinding down the screw so that it wouldn’t poke the wearer in the eye, and i put the frames on to test them too quickly after grinding… 😉
workshop, workshop, workshop, workshop, workshop, workshop…
there are quite a few nit-picky details i have left out, and some people who helped a great deal, who i haven’t identified, in the attempt to make this less overwhelmingly verbose. sorry.
a few weeks ago, moe asked me if i could do some improvised repair work on a magnifying loupe belonging to her clinic.
what she brought me was a perioptix loupe, which was originally mounted on a pair of safety glasses, the frames of which had broken… and then been not quite repaired (a number of times, apparently) with the surgical equivalent of duct tape.
seriously… why smart people with degrees, DOCTORS, think sticky cloth tape is an appropriate medium to affect the permanent repair of a broken surgical instrument, is WAY above my pay grade… 😕
she also brought me a set of oakley “safety” glasses (i’m not sure if they are actually SAFETY glasses, because you can remove the lenses, and replace them with shaded lenses, which were included), the frames for which would be an almost perfect replacement for the broken perioptix frames… except that the frames are a “skosh” thicker, and thus, the screws that hold the loupe on to the original frames are not quite long enough to fit through the test hole that i drilled in the oakley frames, when i accepted the project.
thus commenced the arduous and frustrating task of finding screws that would fit.
first thing i did was measure the screws. what i came up with is that the screws are NOMINALLY 2-64 threads — i say “NOMINALLY” because they’re REALLY small (although not as small as most pivot screws for most musical instruments), and when threads are that small, unless the manufacturing is INCREDIBLY precise, there are going to be not-quite significant, but noticible differences between what the “standard” is, and what appears “in practice”.
then, i started casting around for somebody who had the correct size screws, reasoning that i’ve already got washers and nuts for the screws, so, if i can find someone who has 2-64 thread screws that are A LITTLE longer, i can save having to buy nuts for them. i figured that places that sell optical equipment would be a good place to start, but they all said that 2-64 is “a lot bigger” than they use currently, and, also, if it’s optical, they measure things using metric, rather than imperial measurements.
after checking with a few optical places, i confirmed that the screws were 1) probably metric, and 2) WAY bigger than the screws that are used in MODERN optical devices…
the magnifying loupe is around 7 years old, and they have already stopped making replacement parts for it. 😒
so, i figured that it would probably just be easier to make the screws myself… because that’s a skill that i have…
however, musical instruments usually do things with imperial measurements (at least, here in the land of imperial meaurements), and i trained as a musical instrument repair technician: i don’t even HAVE a metric thread-pitch guage…
so i contacted a friend (the guy who rebuilt my trombone slide a couple of years ago), and asked him if he had a metric thread-pitch guage, which he did. i brought one of the screws to him, and he told me, with confidence, that it was a 2.4-52 metric thread.
as i said previously, unless the manufacturing is REALLY precise, there can be enough “slop” in the threads that it may actually fit in more than one die, so i went out to find a 2.4-52 metric die, so that i could make my own screws.
home depot and lowe’s, as expected, didn’t have it, and i drew blank expressions from the employees who i asked if they knew where i might get something that small. 🤷
mcclendon’s was a little better: they, too, didn’t have anything that smalll, but they suggested that i go to swift tools, in auburn, which “caters to machinists”. i went down there… and their showroom is closed, due to COVID. 😒 so i CALLED them (from the parking lot in front of their location), and said that i was looking for a 2.4-52 metric die…
and they didn’t know what i was talking about. 😒
they said that there AREN’T ANY standard metric dies that are 2.4-anything. if i wanted a 2.0 die, they had them, and if i wanted a 2.5 die, they had them, but they had never heard of a 2.4 die, and, while they could have one specially made, it would be expensive, and i would have to be sure that it was what i wanted before they could even start on that project, because it would be expensive, and if it wasn’t what i wanted, i would have to pay for it anyway…
reaching the end of my rope, i contacted another friend who has the ability to get just about anything, and, with A LOT of back-and-forth, arm waving, and measuring things with my micrometer-caliper (which measures down to .00001 inch), we determined that it’s NOT a metric screw, that the screw’s outside diameter is EXACTLY the standard for an IMPERIAL 2-64 screw (down to five decimal places) and that all of these people who had been telling me that it was metric were, probably, wrong.
he, then, directed me to the McMaster-Carr web site, where he gets a lot his weird shit, and, sure enough, they actually have exactly the screw i needed… so i ordered a package of five, and mcmaster said that it would be delivered on monday.
by the end of tuesday, i was wondering where my screws were. the UPS web site, apparently, doesn’t know where it is… according to the UPS site, the package left pacific (which is just down the road from us) last wednesday morning, and then the package vanished… the web site now says that it’s scheduled to arrive on friday 4/23, but it still has the package leaving pacific, on a UPS delivery truck, LAST wednesday 4/14, and it hasn’t been seen since, so i don’t hold out much hope. calling UPS is a lost cause: their automated “customer service” robot assured me that a real person can’t help me, if the package didn’t arrive, to contact the sender, and unceremoniously hung up on me without even giving me a chance to speak to a real person.
so, i contacted the sender, who, graciously, sent out another package of five miniature screws, this time by fedex, which arrived this morning. 👍
except…
these screws are, guaranteed, 2-64 screws. the nuts that i have, which are the original, perioptix nuts, SHOULD fit…
but they don’t. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
perioptix, apparently, had PROPRIETARY screws and nuts made to mount their magnifying loupe, just to make things EXTRA DIFFICULT for anyone (like me) who has the audacity to repair one of their products, rather than just buying a new one. 🤬
fortunately, McMaster-Carr doesn’t JUST have screws… and, for some unknown reason, the screws were 5 for $10, but nuts that will fit the screws are 100 for $2.
they’ll deliver them (by fedex) on wednesday. 😒
i took a hit of LSD today.
it was one of two that have been in the freezer for AT LEAST 20 years, and maybe as many as 30… my recollection is that i actually obtained them during one of my “oh my god the world is going to end any day now, and i’ve got to have an emergency stash, just in case” phases, and has been hanging out in other people’s freezers when it wasn’t in my own, and when neither one was handy, it was on my altar in an airtight bag, in an airtight film canister…
but, it was AT LEAST 20 years old, and i really had no idea what to expect.
and, i just realised that i grossly underestimated how old those were… i think i got them after i lived in mount vernon, and before i moved to seattle, which was in the 1993-4 range…? gawd i’m old… 😒
i dropped at 10:00 am, and by 11:30 i was totally thinking it was a dud. then i got a text from lisa, who wanted to come at 1:30, and get their (well, not exactly “their”, but it’s a long and unrelated story) pressure washer, and, i decided that, if it was a dud, then it would probably be safe for me to drive to 4 corners, and refill their gas can (which i had almost completely drained, in my two day attack on the slime front deck), and i did so, without any perceivable distortion… but by the time 1:30 came around, i was feeling a little something, and i figured, oh, well, delayed release, but it’s something… and by the time 2:00 came around, and lisa actually showed up… well, i had been sitting out on the front deck, talking to the hummingbirds. 😉
after she left, and against my better judgement (but i was high on acid, so pretty much anything i did would be against most peoples’ better judgements), i drove the 3 miles from our house to the back side of taylor mountain TRIPPING MY ASS OFF and wandered up taylor mountain for a few hours.
first, i came across this rock:
it was by the side of the path, not far enough out to be a hinderence or something to trip over, but about six inches from the outer edge of the path, and as i walked by, i suddenly became aware of the fact that that rock has been watching me, every time i walk that path, ever since i first started going there, about three months ago… that rock is AWARE of me… at which point i had to fight off a strong desire to turn the rock upside down, to see if that would affect it’s awareness of me, but then i realised that it would only make it more aware of me, because i was the person who turned it upside down.
then i went up to the washout, where road “A” doesn’t go through any more, and meditated for an hour or so, and played with the tube…
i REALLY want to get up there with my harmonic flute and electronic doodads, but it wouldn’t help an acid trip, and i’d just watch the lights blink, anyway (this alludes to one of the many, many times i took acid in the early 1980s, when i was in college, and thought i would try to make the synthesizer work… and i ended up hooking it up so that every light blinked in a random fashion, but made no noise, and then turned out the lights in the studio, and… you know the rest 😉).
then i walked up to the intersection of road “A” and road “H”, to the place where the beaver pond washed out road “A” (this is the “upper washout” on road “A”, the one i have been to before, is, apparently, the “lower washout”), where, at 4:30 in the afternoon, on a tuesday, i ran into a random guy and his dog, who were out for a walk…
this is like the time a few years ago, when i was on mushrooms at 5 Mile Lake Park, near our old house, and this random jogger came up and asked me if there were sharks in… the… freshwater… lake… 😕
he looked at his watch, and said that he was shooting for three miles, and he was only at two and a half, and walked on up the trail…
on the way down the hill, i recorded an instance of 4’33” which i uploaded to johncage dot org. you can listen to it here.
i made it back to my car around 5:30 pm, and drove the 3 miles back home. it’s now 7:30 pm, and i’m still high… if experience is anything to go by, i’ll probably be tripping until at least 10:00…
i guess it’s a really good thing i didn’t take the other hit when i thought the first one was a dud… 😉
i prefer the gentle, insistent urgings of mushrooms to the “kick upside the head” of LSD, but, when it comes to getting me “out of my mind”, either one of them will do the trick.
the latest OM card… i may send these out to Incense Of The Month Club members… 😉
today is exactly one year from when we moved into our new house.
we’re all unpacked and settled in, we’ve gotten the fence installed — and destroyed, and rebuilt… hershey and bucky, two of the three errant dogs, seem to have vanished… i’m now on antidepressants, although i also have spores and am gearing up for a fungus growing setup… i’ve only played music a handfull of times in the past year, and my busking partner has moved away, so there’s no more busking, or snake suspenderz, or peanut envy. the moisture festival was virtual, this year.
hopefully the coming year will be less chaotic, and more musical, and psychedelic than the previous one.
if you have avogadro’s number of avocados, can you make a whole mole of guacamole?
let’s talk about tommy tuberville, okay?
as you can see from the pronounciation guide at wikipedia, he pronounces it “TUBBER-vil” even though the way it’s spelled implies that it should be pronounced “TUBER-ville”… right?
TUBER… like a potato, right? “tuber-city”… 😉
to me, this is a very strong indication that this is a person who got called “potato-head”, or “french-fries”, or something similar, during grade school, and it had such a profound effect on him that decided that he was going to make everybody pronounce his name differently…
… and, when he wasn’t successful at that, he decided to devote his life to beating all of his rivals’ college football teams, and, eventually, becoming the U.S. senator for alabama, and aligning himself with a monumental loser, so that people would forget that they ever called him “potato-head”… 😉
tommy potato-head…
the son of the emasculated mr. potato-head… 🤣
i had one relatively large mushroom, approximately half a gram, or so, and some leftover stems and pieces of cap that, all together, made up, maybe a gram, total… i.e. not very much, under the best of circumstances, and they were, also, at least three years old… so they weren’t particularly powerful, anyway…
… but… 😉
i definitely felt something — a little shimmering and sparkling around the edges of the forest — and the antidepressant effects are plainly evident. 😉
i went for a walk up the back side of taylor mountain. i started out going down the carey creek trail, which hasn’t been open since i’ve lived here. i walked down that for about half a mile, until i got to the edge of a king county park (on the map i found, it’s called “donkey engine”) when i noticed that i had been walking down a railroad grade, it started getting more steep, and i realised that i wouldn’t want to be walking uphill when i was coming down from a mushroom trip, so i turned around and went back the other direction.
where i parked was at the southeast 208th st. “back” entrance to taylor mountain, right across the street from the dire warning no trespassing cedar river watershed signs. after walking down the carey creek trail, i walked up “road G” until i came to the intersection of “road A”, which was closed because of a washout… evidently, a couple of years ago, at least, because there was a fairly well established trail through the washout, that skirted the “official” “road closed” signs and fences. 😉
and, i walked from the washout to the intersection of “road K”, which is when i realised that this end of “road A” connects up to the end of “road A” that comes out at the “front” entrance to taylor mountain, about 5 miles up issaquah-hobart road, just off highway 18.
here’s what i saw:
to my mushroom-induced mind, this moss took the form of a tall, shapely woman with long hair, walking away from me… it doesn’t look anything like that now, but it was startlingly clear enough that i took the picture AND remembered what it was.
the tree growing out of this stump is four feet in diameter. the stump, itself, is around twenty feet in diameter. 🤯
i was tripping on mushrooms, so, of course, i had to take a picture of the sky, through the trees… 😉
this could be another “Tree of Being”… i’m not sure, but it speaks to me… 😉
this is taken at the end of an overflow pipe that is supposed to sluice water away from the washout… it was, evidently, uneffective, because it is well above the washout. it is a place that, insinctively, i stuck my head into, and started humming to find the resonant frequency. it’s definitely some place that i should return to, accompanied by my harmonic flute and electronic stuff… and, it’s especially appropriate because it’s a spiral, and i was tripping on mushrooms (although, by the time i came across it, i was already mostly down from my trip 😉)
the “moisture festival” started yesterday. i’m “in” it, as the tuba player for the sancapators and the fremont philharmonic, so, technically, i’m “in” two shows, but i’m not actually in them, and neither is anybody else. basically, this year, the moisture festival is four shows, on april 1, 2, 3, and 4, and they’re all videos that are “streamed” online — which, somehow, means that you have to buy tickets to see the shows “live”, and after a certain period of time, you won’t be able to see them any more, whether or not you have bought a ticket, but it, somehow, doesn’t prevent you (or, at least, me) from downloading the videos to my own computer, once they have been “streamed”, which, somehow, gets around the limitations that they put on them…
there is a lot of modern technology that i haven’t caught up with… i still haven’t completely figured out “podcasts” (apparently you have to have a “podcast license” now? ah, i see: it’s only if you want to play stuff that other people have copyrighted… why bother? 😕), or “streaming”, in spite of the fact that i have already been in one “streaming” performance, and two more are coming up very soon… and terminology like “based”, “stan”, and “ratio” still elude me… but i might as well get used to it, because it’s only going to get worse as time goes on… 😒
we’re having our first post-vaccine house party tomorrow. my understanding is that it’s going to be everybody who works at monique’s clinic (because they’re all vaccinated) coming over to get drunk and sing karaoke… and eat, and have our first official fire in the fire pit… and, then, sunday, after the final moisture festival, a couple of friends (who are also vaccinated) are coming over for dinner… things are… nope, they’re not getting “back to normal”, but, at least, i’m not having to live in fear of republican’t “christian” anti-vaxxers as much. 😐
it’s supposed to be windy and rainy all day today, with the chance of snow overnight… 😒
so, in spite of the rain, i pressure washed the rest of the deck anyway, because if it’s going to snow, who knows when i’ll be able to finish it.
i started around 10:00 am or so, and finished about 4:00 pm. but now it’s done, and who cares if it snows.
the friend with the deck sander, who is a professional house painter, came over to check the nails, to make sure they don’t need knocking in before he starts with the sander. in his professional opinion, the deck was not stained, but hasHAD an impressive collection of what he referred to as “common deck slime”… which would explain why it was so slippery.
one year ago yesterday we closed on our new house.
today, i started pressure washing the front deck, possibly for the first time in 10 years or more. the deck, for the entire time we’ve lived here, has been a trecherous place to walk, when it is wet — and, i mean, TRECHEROUS… even being careful, i have suddenly and unexpectedly found myself on the ground after the frequent rain showers we have around here. i’m not sure, but i think that, at one time, it had been stained a dark brown, but it hadn’t been sealed, and, quite quickly, the dark brown stain started to mask some dark brown mold that was allowed to spread, unchecked, until the house was sold to us, last year.
and i have, FINALLY started to pressure wash it… with a gas-powered pressure washer, loaned to us by monique’s boss. unfortunately, it was stubborn enough that i didn’t finish, and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so i don’t know if i’m going to get a chance to finish it until monday.
i started around noon, and gave up when monique got home, at 6:30 pm. once i get it pressure washed, a friend who has a deck sander is going to come by and sand and seal it for us, so that it doesn’t turn into an ice-skating rink every time it rains.
Miramar’s The Perfect Storm, otherwise known as Zorah, the fourth fastest dog in the universe (by two-tenths of a second), died today. she was 17. she was a very good dog. 😢
so, i went down to pick up my HPOI this morning.
i didn’t have to spend three quarters of the day dealing with testy customs agents, indifferent import brokers, and recalcitrant shipping managers, and paying almost $500 to various people i had never heard of before, who had practically nothing to do with my shipment…
i arrived, was directed where to go, submitted two documents, had the lady scan my driver’s license, and then she gave me a piece of paper (with my scanned driver’s license on it), and told me to go “down the hall, to your left”, where i walked into a big wire cage. on the other side was a warehouse, full of wares. a friendly-looking guy with a grey beard under his mask, came up, asked to see my paperwork (😉), and then told me to pull around to the sally-port and he would meet me there. i backed my car up to the sally-port, and the guy came with a forklift, carrying three big boxes… i loaded them into my car, and drove away.
total elapsed time, LESS THAN 20 minutes.
total money that exchanged hands, $0.00!
it’s SO! MUCH! EASIER!! when i know what i’m doing, have done “the needful”, and have everything ready BEFORE i show up… 😎
and, i think i may have enough incense, now… 😉
so, here’s an interesting twist…
the people i have been talking to on the phone, at US customs (two different CBP air cargo officers, to date), have all been demanding two things: one, that the document they need to see is the “bill of lading”, and the commercial invoice and the master airway bill that i have are not good enough (pay attention to that last one, because it’s important), and, two, that the shipment be manifest in their system, which (allegedly) doesn’t happen until the flight leaves the ground, before they can even think about releasing it.
okay, “bills of lading” are for ocean cargo. if it’s air cargo, the “bill of lading” is called a…
wait for it…
“master airway bill” 🤦
so the broker i’ve been talking to (the one who cleared my shipment the last time) recommended, now that i actually have an email address for US customs air cargo, that instead of going at them on the phone (her precise words were “Customs does not have much patience, and if they have to read too much or explain too much they will just send you to a broker, as they are not obligated to clear low value shipments.”), i should just send them the MAWB and the commercial invoice, with the flight information, and ask them to clear it “under section 321”. so i did.
half an hour later, this was their response:
> Please be advised that AWB 125-91897142, arriving today 3/19/21 on BA49, has been entered and released.
they got the date wrong. this is not for a shipment arriving TODAY, it is for a shipment arriving SUNDAY… 🤦🤦
however…
because of the fact that they actually GOT the master airway bill number correct, i SHOULD BE able to bypass customs on sunday, and just go pick up my shit.
and the broker agrees.
so, come sunday, one of two things will happen. either:
one, i go down to WWFS, pay them their cut, and pick up my shit, or…
two, i go down to WWFS, get the run around, leave, come back on monday (after having talked with a CBP officer on sunday about why their release wasn’t actually a release), and have to pay them their cut PLUS a 24-hour storage fee, before i can pick up my shit.
i pray to the incense god that it’s going to be the first option, because i really don’t have the energy for the second.
ETA: it’s not arriving sunday, it’s arriving TONIGHT! (which is why they got the date “wrong”… it turns out mr. joy gave me the wrong date). because of the fact that it’s already been cleared through customs, AND i have beat the rush (and the $36 extra charge for paying them in person, using CASH ONLY 😒) by paying my ISC online, i can go down FIRST THING TOMORROW and pick it up without incurring extra fees whatsoever!! WOOT!! 😎
the HPOI have left india, and are now in london. their estimated departure from london is 210319 14:25Z, and their scheduled arrival time is 210321 17:25PDT.
i’ve been on the phone since 9:00 am (it’s 11:00 am, now) and talked with two different customs agents, and four different… i don’t know what they’re called, but they work for US customs, WWFS, and british airways cargo service, and they are PARTICULARLY annoying… and i’ve FINALLY gotten someone who understands that i’m trying to avoid extra storage fees, understands that the US customs office is closed on sunday, AND has the ability to find, and send me the document (the bill of lading) that US customs says doesn’t exist in their system. as soon as that happens, the shipment can be cleared through customs before COB friday, so that i can pick it up sunday and avoid the additional storage fees! 👍
not only that, but i’ve got their name, phone number, email address and physical address, so if they DON’T send me the bill of lading in a timely fashion, i can, physically, go down there and STRANGLE them and STILL have all the paperwork before the US customs office closes for the weekend. 😈
as soon as i have the bill of lading, i can do everything but FORCE the customs flunkies to clear the shipment, in spite of the fact that they, pretty clearly, couldn’t give a flying fuck whether or not i will EVER be able to pick up my shipment.
GRR! 😠
the HPOI is leaving bangalore tomorrow. it arrives in seattle on…
SUNDAY!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
and, because of the fact that it doesn’t leave until tomorrow, the people at US customs won’t even TALK to me, because my shipment isn’t in their system yet… despite the fact that i’ve got ALL the paperwork they want, plus a “Certificate of Insurance” which they didn’t ask for, but they want anyway. <grumble, mutter> 😒
i am now preparing for imminent arrival of HPOI
aside: study the etymology of the words “imminent”, “eminent”, “immanent”, and “emanant”. look for sources.
they sent me an air waybill… or an airway bill… or something like that… and are, allegedly sending me a commercial invoice tomorrow. the customs agent seemed to think that it was those two documents that i needed to clear the shipment myself, but, because of the fact that “TRITAN TRADEX, LLP” advised me to “do the needful” but didn’t tell me what “the needful” means (i’m assuming it’s because they think i know what i’m doing… 🤣), i’m getting anxious again.
i emailed the customs agent, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet, and, because of the fact that they mentioned that the air waybill and the commercial invoice are all i needed, i’m having to assume that means that i’m going to be receiving the shipment within a few days, i’m going to hope that they reply VERY soon…
but, on the up side, i’m getting 99 dozen boxes of ANOTHER incense that nobody else in the united states imports for resale on the web. 👍😉
why do people who use IPVanish still try to crack my web sites?
why do people who use IPVanish seem to think that i WOULDN’T have a 30-character passphrase and 2FA enabled on my web sites?
why do people who use IPVanish STILL try “Admin123” and other idiotically simple logins from easily tracable IP addresses (despite IPVanish)?? 😕😒
this morning, my wife got what appeared to be a “legitimate” email, but it was delivered to my spam box.
here’s what i know:
it purports to be from the “Colorado State University” department of “Veterinary Continuing Education”, with the URI “CSUvetCE dot com”.
it was delivered by way of an open relay in germany, using at least two other open relays in other, eastern european countries.
my wife CLAIMS that the “Colorado State University, Department of Veterinary Continuing Education” is a legitimate business for which several of her colleagues work.
there is an EXTREMELY good chance that, if someone from the “Colorado State University, Department of Veterinary Continuing Education” were to send my wife an email message, it would come through the mailservers at colorado state university, IN COLORADO, and NOT through several open relays in other countries.
it was addressed to my wife, using an email address for ME, which i haven’t used in at least 5 years.
when i visited the “manage my subscriptions” page at “CSUvetCE dot com”, it listed my wife’s name, only her last name was in the “first name” slot, and her first name was in the “last name” slot, followed by my email address, the physical address where she works, except that instead of being on mercer island, it was listed as being in “medina”, which is a suburb of bellevue, about ten miles away from the actual address location, on the mainland. and, it listed the zip code as being the one where we currently live, which is neither mercer island, nor medina.
the same “manage my subscriptions” page has her listed as the “chief executive officer” of “at home veterinary services”. she does NOT work for “at home veterinary services”, and she is NOT the “chief executive officer”.
when i tried to change the “STATUS” of her subscription from “subscribed” to “unsubscribed”, it didn’t work. i tried it multiple times, and every time the page reloaded, the status said “subscribed”.
so i checked… “CSU” is CHICAGO state university, and their URI is “CSU.EDU”. COLORADO state university’s URI is “colostate.edu”, and the ACTUAL “Colorado State University, Department of Veterinary Continuing Education” is at “cvmbs.colostate.edu”.
now, i don’t KNOW whether or not “CSUvetCE dot com” is a spammer scam or not, but i know that EVERYTHING i have found so far leads me to the conclusion that it is a spammer scam. 😒
also i don’t know why someone would go to SO! MUCH! TROUBLE! to put together a web site that tries its DAMNEDEST to look like a legitimate business, just to lure the relatively few people who are in the veterinary industry into submitting their information to a spam list.
but, as i said… EVERYTHING i have found so far leads me to the conclusion that it’s PRECISELY what they have done…
weird.
ETA: okay, this is getting weirder now… after a bit more poking around, i found an announcement on this page which appears to indicate that CSUvetCE dot com is, in fact, a legitimate page, and not a spammer scam… which, then, makes me wonder EVEN MORE about why the email was sent via open relays to an address that had OBVIOUSLY been scraped from who knows where… like… does the Colorado State University Department of Veterinary Continuing Education care THAT LITTLE about the ethics of the emails they’re sending out? do they even CARE?? 😒
ETA, part 2: i wrote to them, asking why they have a scraped address on a form that doesn’t work. their response said they couldn’t find that address on their mailing list. i wrote back with all the details, including a screen shot and a URI to the spot they said they couldn’t find. they haven’t responded… yet…
i’m back to thinking that this might be a spammer scam masquerading as a legitimate business, and the legitimate business doesn’t have the first clue what is going on. 😒
i am fully vaccinated, which means that i can get out and do stuff without anxiety… and, because of the fact that we moved (last year at this time 😒) i’ve got a bunch of places that are a 5-minute drive (or a half-hour walk along a busy rural highway) away from home, which i have been, more or less, unable to “explore” because of the fact that i wasn’t fully vaccinated.
today i went to big bend park in maple valley, and walked along the old railroad grade. the railroad grade actually cut off a part of the cedar river, which, i imagine, was the original “big bend” that they’re talking about.
here are some things i saw.
i really like the place we’re currently living, and i REALLY don’t want to move again (ever, in my life, if possible), but if i were to allow that possibility, here’s a house i wouldn’t mind living in, and it’s not even that far from where i live now. 😉
and, finally, here are some signs that are posted in this “neighbourhood” park… 😉
i did it. i just paid $1,480 to be shipped three cartons, 99 dozen boxes, of an incense that, as far as i have been able to tell, you can’t get, online, ANYWHERE ELSE in the united states.
there must be something wrong with me. 😒
that makes it easy… 😒
the guy isn’t going to sign up. apparently he rents, and his landlord won’t allow burning incense indoors. 😒
philistine. 😒
someone new just signed up for a VIP IOTM club account. i’ve had two members for two months, and now someone new signs up…
so, do i start them where i started everybody else? or do i start them at the same place as everybody else, and extend their account past the first of next year? or do i just arbitrarily end their account in december, because they were late signing up? do they even expect their account to end in december?
or what? 😕
for now, i’m starting them with everyone else, because that way i don’t have to figure out who has which account, but i imagine that i’m going to have to straighten this whole thing out, eventually.
and it couldn’t have come at a better time, because now i am even more confident that my impending purchase of HPOI will turn out well! 😉
that is a statement, not a question. 😉
i am beginning the process of importing another HPOI in a few days. 999 Lord Krishna Puja Agarbatti has become one of my best sellers. it was part of the original HPOI, which arrived three years ago, and, while i have sold NONE of the other two incenses, i have almost completely sold out of 999: of the original 33 dozen, i’ve probably got 4 dozen left… so, this time, instead of getting one carton of three different kinds of incense, i’m getting three cartons of one kind of incense… 33 dozen boxes per carton, 99 dozen boxes total, $1.24 a box, with a 400% markup… and, if current trends hold, that should be enough to get me through the next few years… sending out one, two, or three boxes a week… 😉
and, once again, as far as i can tell, NOBODY imports 999 to the united states… NOBODY… 😕 it’s weird, but i’m not going to argue.
it seems odd, however, that i am not anywhere NEAR as worried about it as i was, even for the last HPOI, which was not even a year ago. i think part of this is because I gave the shipper some knowledge that he didn’t have: he was going to arrange ocean freight again, and i told him air freight would be better. he said that air freight wasn’t possible, because of the “flammable nature of the product”, to which i responded “that’s strange, because i just received the same product by air freight in october of last year”. he said wait, while he confirmed this, and a week later, he sent me an invoice, and it’s coming by air freight. 😉 then there’s also the fact that i made contact with the customs agent AHEAD OF TIME this time: she knows that i am going to be expecting a shipment which will need to be cleared, and as soon as i have details, she’s going to be available to make sure that i don’t have to go through the hassles that i did last time. 👍
we’ll see how it goes. the fact is, i could be a little short on money, which would mean that i would have to borrow from the home account, but even that doesn’t worry me that much. it would probably only be a couple hundred dollars, and, for sure, i could pay that back within a month or so. i feel confident that i’m going to have enough money to cover it, though, and that, in the end, it will be something that brings in money for a while. 👍
and it appears that the antidepressants are working. 😉
i got 2 orders for one box of aparajita, each, yesterday.
i got 2 more orders for one or two boxes of aparajita last night. they both came from the U.S. (most of the time, when i get orders overnight, they’re from countries in the eastern hemisphere).
i didn’t take the first two to ship out because i wanted to fill the other two, and i had to go to my circus class this morning.
while i was at my circus class, i got another order, for one box of aparajita, and one other item.
ETA: while i was putting together the three new orders i got, i got ANOTHER order for two boxes of aparajita. 😕
as far as i’ve been able to tell, there’s no way of telling where people heard about Hybrid Elephant, short of asking them at check out, and there’s no way to guarantee that they’ll answer at all, much less answer correctly.
i find it very weird that i can go along for months with one order per week, or less, and then, suddenly, i’ll get 5 orders within 12 hours, and they’ll ALL be for one box of aparajita. 😕
the only thing i can figure out is that someone must have mentioned Hybrid Elephant, or aparajita, on their podcast — and i’m still not completely sure i understand what a podcast is, or how it gets distributed, so i have, literally, no idea whether or not i’m even CLOSE to correct. 😒
although i won’t argue with the money, that’s for sure. 😉
snow is mostly gone… there’s still some large piles, where whoever it was that ploughed our street piled it up at the head of the road, and in the ditches, but everywhere else, it’s gone.
i had to take a ladder out and climb up to clean out the gutter, in front. it had collected a bunch of tree detritus and, what with all the melting snow, combined with torrential rain, the gutter was totally clogged and overflowing into our driveway… it all ran away from the house, though, and once i cleared the obstruction, the downspout did what it was supposed to do, so that’s good.
i’m the default tuba player for the SANCApators at the moisture festival, this year. the moisture festival was cancelled, at the last minute, last year (because of COVID), and this year, instead of having live performances, they’re releasing some videos of performers that would have been live, except for COVID… and their regular tuba player is ill (no word on whether or not it’s COVID) and can’t make the videos that they asked for from the musicians, so i got tagged. last week i got the parts, and the tracks to play along with, so i practiced for a few days and sent the videos to “doc” sprinsock, so that he can combine them with everyone else’s videos and — hopefully — get some reasonably “together” music out of the whole deal…
but i’m not holding my breath… particularly with the thing that said “Rock” for the style, but the backing track was played as straight as an arrow, with no “swing” or “rock” stylings at all… and that’s what i played, because there was no way to “swing” a part that hadn’t been recorded to “swing”, so… i’m not holding my breath. we’ll see what happens when everybody else’s videos are part of the mix. 😖
no word on the phremont fillharmonic’s addition to the chaos, yet. i contacted kiki last week, and she said she’d heard about it, but is waiting for further instructions from “the powers that be”, whoever that is.
and i think the antidepressant may be working. i’m not sure i agree with georgia doctor, who wanted to boost my prescription back up to the level that was causing me frantic anxiety and restlessness, plus she wanted to add ANOTHER antidepressent — lexapro — to the mix. at the time, i wasn’t sure whether it was working or not, so i said i’d rather wait on the new scrip until i had a better idea of whether the current one was working, and she agreed to hold off… which is good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is reinforcing personal boundaries.
and she had never heard of psilocybin… 🤯
because of her accent, i asked where she’s from, and she said she’s from “africer”… but i can’t imagine a psychiatric nurse-practitioner who has never heard of psilocybin. i said that the “common” name for them is “magic mushrooms”, and she immediately started ranting about heroin and cocaine, and said that it’s possible that they contained psilocybin… 😕
so i still don’t have any solid information about the interaction of bupropion and psilocybin, which is a little scary, but within tolerable limits. and actual mushrooms are still a ways off, yet, so there’s still time to gather more information.
but the fact that there’s some “good” stuff happening in my life seems to indicate that something has changed.
my shoulder is REALLY sore, and i’m feeling kind of low-energy, but no other side effects.
which is kind of bizarre, since moe was sick (but went to work anyway) for 12 hours after her second dose.
on the other hand, moe’s mom had her second dose and it didn’t make her sick, so… 🤷
we still have 2 to 4 inches of almost-snow everywhere that isn’t paved, but bits of the lawn are starting to show through, and the roof is melting. meanwhile, everywhere outside of an approximately 5-mile radius from us, is back to normal, with no snow whatsoever. microclimate. 😒
happy Fart Out Loud Day.
i got the second dose of the COVID19 vaccine today.
snowpocalypse 2021 is officially over.
we still have anywhere from 2 to 6 inches of mud, slush, almost snow, or sort-of snow, on everything that is unpaved (which includes both of our driveways), but once we get past the driveway, everything has been plowed, and the snow is melting rapidly, even at night.
the hobart post office has a graphic up behind the window which is a picture of the grinch in a santa claus hat, and the legend “LET IT SNOW… somewhere else!”. i would tend to agree, in spite of the blatant intelectual property theft. 😒
tomorrow i have my circus class (YAY! 🤡) and an eye appointment. thursday i get my second covid vaccine.
there’s still a lot of snow, pretty much everywhere…
but it’s 44°F and raining, and the forcast doesn’t get below 37°F for the rest of the week…
we’re probably going to have snow around the edges for a few more days, but my guess is that it will go away quickly.
ETA: okay, apparently today is “presidents day” — it’s my recollection that it’s actually the 16th 22nd, but today is monday, or some horseshit like that — anyway, i’m pissed off because i actually thought i would drive down to the post office to ship out a package i got the order for on sunday…
yeah, driving and snow don’t mix, but i learned to drive in the snow, so i figured it would be okay, just to go down to the little store and back, right?
i had to clear 11½ inches of snow, ice, and slush from all over my car.
then i had to get it out of the driveway. then i had to drive it up to where there were tire tracks that i could use to get some traction — fortunately, they started in front of our neighbours’ house, next door. then i had to navigate the tire tracks which were OBVIOUSLY made by a larger vehicle than mine, so i could only get the right set of tires, or the left set of tires into the track, and the other side was sliding along the center space, where the snow, ice, and slush were higher than the bottom of my car. then i had to navigate those same tire tracks up a hill that kids have been sledding down for three days. then i had to pull over to the side so that two cars that were going in the opposite directions could get by. then i had to pull onto a busy, 50-mile-an-hour road (not a freeway, or even a highway: it’s hobart-ravensdale road, otherwise known as 276th avenue southeast) from a dead stop on a road covered with ice. then, i had to pull into the parking lot, which was full of ice and a disabled car…
THEN i found out that the post office was closed because of some FUCKING holiday! 🤬
so i reversed my course.
completely.
okay, so i didn’t back into the driveway, like i usually do. and i didn’t pull as far into the driveway as i usually do, but all in all, i made it out and back, in severely adverse conditions, and i didn’t get stuck ONCE.
grr… stupid fucking holidays for a fucking president that is a total joke… and i’m talking about the current president, as well as the former one. 😒
and don’t look up “presidents day” in wikipedia. it’s full of shite about george washington and the julian calendar. 😒
11½ inches of snow in 24 hours.
it’s raining now, but it’s supposed to start snowing again after dark, which is in about an hour…
i walked out to the main road. it’s clear and wet, with patches of slush. the snow accumulation off the road is pretty similar to what we have here… but in order to get out to the main road, you have to drive UP a hill that kids have been sledding on for two days. it’s possible to drive up the hill, but only barely.
and, because of the fact that they’re there, we also had a couple of downed trees. they didn’t hit anything, and they’re not across the road, but it’s not over yet, and i haven’t been out further than the mailbox — it had come open, somehow, and was three-quarters full of snow, which was on top of the letter that i was hoping the letter carrier was going to pick up — so i don’t know what “the real world” is like… supposedly, we have a “micro-climate” around our neighbourhood, and the weather is substantially different about a mile away, on the main road.
this is the one of the… i’m not sure whether it’s an “advantage” or it’s a “danger”… of living in the remote wilderness.
at this point, it’s not an awful lot different than any other day, during COVID. 😒
but the dogs love it.
stupid fucking weather…
some newbie weather-guesser (strangely enough, he’s the only one that moe believes — and, seriously… what happened to harry wappler? 😕 oh… he died… 10 years ago… 😒) predicted snowpocalypse starting yesterday and going through the weekend.
so, naturally, everything that was SUPPOSED to happen got cancelled, because nobody around here knows how to drive in the snow. 😒
including MY FIRST CONCERT IN A YEAR! 😠
and, the thing is, i KNOW how to drive in the snow. it’s just that i don’t like doing it around here, because nobody else knows how, and it’s, like… dangerous… and stuff… 😠
and then, wouldn’t you know it… it didn’t start snowing yesterday — more than a few flurries that didn’t stick… and it didn’t start today, and now they’re saying that it won’t start snowing until tomorrow. 😒
i get my second covid vaccine a week from thursday (210218), but i’m scheduled to play my first concert in a year on saturday the 13th (9:00 pm, streaming to fecesbook, eventually posted on youtube), and, wouldn’t you know it, cliff mass, the only meteorologist moe believes, is predicting 12 inches of snow, starting thursday and lasting AT LEAST through saturday…
and if it snows, it’s almost guaranteed that i won’t be able to make the concert… 😒
a number of things have happened since the last time i posted this — which, admittedly, was less than a week ago, but they’re significant enough to warrant another post.
the first is that i have now attended three weeks worth of circus classes. today i walked the entire length of the tight wire, backwards, with a pole in only one hand… and when i reached the end, it was a surprise. i thought i had two or three more steps to go. yay! go me! 👍
i talked with jo, the coach, about foot juggling, as well… she said they’ve got the doohickey that you lie on to do foot juggling, so… 😉
also, i got confirmation that my spore order was received, and i got confirmation that my order was shipped out, AND… they’re arriving friday!!!
(woo hoo!!!) 😉
so, i am feeling A LOT more positive, and i still can’t tell whether the medication is having any effect…
AND…
it is my understanding that i probably shouldn’t take mushrooms while i’m taking bupropion, because mushrooms are a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and there’s some danger of an adverse reaction to the inhibition of the uptake of norepinephrine and dopamine that bupropion does… and i’m not sure how to ask dr. akinyele about this, because of the legality issue, combined with the fact that she’s far enough away from me that she doesn’t have any concept of the political climate of the region in which i live.
(but the spores will be here friday, so i’d better figure it out pretty soon…) 😉
i got the following notification from my anti-cracker service:
A user with IP addr 2001:41d0:305:1000::1250 has been locked out from signing in or using the password recovery form for the following reason: Used an invalid username '[login]' to try to sign in.
The duration of the lockout is 2 months.
User IP: 2001:41d0:305:1000::1250
User hostname: hr914433990.reseller.mis.ovh.net
User location: France
i’ve been seeing these login attempts using “[login]” for some time now — and why, in the name of all that’s holy, would ANYONE use, or allow another person to use “[login]” as a username, is beyond my limited imagination, but that’s not the main reason this notification caught my eye…
it’s because of the user hostname, which is a reseller host at ovh.net 🙄
i’ve been dealing with spam and cracking attempts from OVH for AT LEAST ten years. unfortunately, it’s nothing new… but this is the first time they’ve tried to get around my blocks by using an IPv6 address.
and it wasn’t OVH directly, it was a reseller, but the fact is still plain that OVH STILL enables spammers and crackers to work with impunity from their networks.
FUCK OVH! 🤬😠👎👎‼
and add 2001:41d0::/32 to my block list! 🙄
a number of things have happened over the past couple of weeks, which disguise whether or not the medication i am taking is actually working. those things are:
and the fact that i had to rely HEAVILY on my disability weighs heavy on my conscience. if i had NOT emphasised my disability, i would probably not have gotten the vaccine until march or april, and the fact that i got it means that someone else, possibly someone more deserving, did not get it — and won’t until who-knows-when, because they ran out and nobody knows when they’re going to get more. 😒
so, i’ve been taking this “medication” that’s “supposed to” inhibit the uptake of norepinephrine and dopamine” in my brain — but who knows for sure what it really does… not even dr. akinyele is 100% sure — but which also causes all kinds of wonderful side effects — which were to the point of intolerable until we reduced the dose, and are still perceptible although not as emergent…
seriously… they prescribe a “medication” among whose side effects are ANXIETY, to treat… ANXIETY… next thing they’ll be telling me is that homeopathy works… 🙄
and i can’t tell whether the “anti-depressent” effects of this medication are improving my mood…
or if the external effects of four years of overt #drumpf and a year of hiding out from covid are finally starting to wear off.
i talked to the doctor on monday. she reduced the prescription from 150 mg to 100 mg, and that seems to have made all the difference… although i’m still a little shakey, and i have a tendency to fly off the handle a little bit more than normal (😉), i’m not frantically anxious and pacing, like i was last week. whether this is “the right” medication for me remains to be seen, and i still think IT’S STUPID that i have to be ADDICTED to this drug, which causes anxiety and a tendency towards touchiness, but is “legal”, instead of taking psilocybin, which works A LOT better, for A LOT longer, and has NO side effects, but is “illegal”. 😒 IT’S STUPID! 🤬
bottom line, i’m looking into growing my own mushrooms, because that seems like it’s a lot easier.
we’re already planning a post-covid-vaccine party at our house, in about three weeks, for all the people at the clinic and their families, because… hey, we CAN…
IT’S STUPID that i have to be “addicted” to this drug — it supposedly takes a couple of weeks to “start working”, and i’m not supposed to stop abruptly, because it has “unpleasant withdrawal effects” if i just stop taking it — which has current side effects (i’ve only been taking it for four days!) that i do not like… like volatility, restlessness, and anger (on top of the already short fuse i have as a result of my injury), as well as physical effects like ears ringing, jitters and lack of focus… as well as interacting with alcohol in a way that makes me not want a beer, or a shot of rum, every now and then… 😠
a brief list of side effects i have been experiencing for the past couple of days: anxiety, irritability, restlessness, shaking, tinnitus, trouble concentrating, anger, need to keep moving, sweating… 😒
rather than take a drug that is “illegal” — psilocybin — but has NO side effects (except for ones that are “fun” 😉), works better, lasts longer, doesn’t require me to be “addicted” to anything, and won’t care if i have a beer now and then.
IT’S STUPID IT’S STUPID IT’S STUPID 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
it has all the negative effects of LSD, but none of the positive effects. i can definitely see how this might lead people to commit suicide… which is another side effect. 😒
#drumpf is now the only president in history to be impeached twice.
however, he’s not going to be removed from office, because “the senate is on vacation” until the 19th, and they don’t really feel like it… so they’re not being recalled, in spite of the fact that the democretins have “raised questions”…
which means that he’s going to get his stipend, and his $1 million per year travel allowance, and his security, and his staff, and all the other “perquisites” to which REAL presidents are entitled, and he’ll have the opportuntity to run again in 2024, which he’s already said he’s going to do… if he were removed, he would get NONE of these perquisites, and he would be prohibited from running for public office EVER AGAIN! 🤬
as far as the insurrection goes, the FBI has made more arrests, including “q-shaman” — who successfully hunger struck to get the jail to quit refusing to feed him “organic food”. 😒
which reminds me, i wonder what the PHBFH would have made of all this. she was crazy, but i don’t think she was “drumpf supporter” crazy
and there are STILL more than a few republican’ts who are convinced that #drumpf won the election, and that biden is an election-stealing, baby-raping, satan-worshipping liar who is going to turn the country into a communist dictatorship.
like, republican’ts in the senate, who hang around with (presumably) sane people. people who make our laws, and have ALREADY announced that they’re filing articles of impeachment against biden. 🤯
i’ve come up with an idea for a bumper sticker. it’ll have a really big, brightly coloured Q, and in smaller type it’ll say “Questioning Reality”… 😒
i’ve hung around with some crazy people, and have actually believed some CRAZY things, but this is beyond the worst i could have imagined in my most frighting nightmare.
Agador died today. he was at least 20, and snakes like Agador usually only live to be 10 or so, so it was sort of expected, and not a real big surprise, but now the bookshelf next to the window in my office looks lopsided. Agador was a wild-caught snake that lived as a classroom science project for a few years before he came to live with us. and, yes, we named him after Hank Azaria’s character in The Birdcage.
i’ve taken the plunge, and contacted a psychiatric nurse-practitioner (in georgia, more on that later) who has prescribed bupropion, at the recommendation of my counsellor, who knows me better, but doesn’t have the necessary piece of paper that allows her to prescribe controlled substances. they tell me that it’s going to take a couple of weeks for it to start having an effect. i’ve been taking it for 3 days, and i’m pretty sure i can feel the effects already — kate (my counsellor) says that it’s a mild stimulant. georgia-doctor didn’t say anything like that, so i’m not sure who to believe — but they’re not what i expected… the big one is that i hear about new atrocities and i know how depressing they are, but instead of getting depressed (like i know i would), i just don’t care. 😕 which i don’t particularly like. also, there’s the same general kind of feeling that i had when i was taking acid, minus the hallucinations and the feeling of invincibility (which was the fun part): i’m verging on jittery and i have been going for really long walks for a couple of days; i have been EXTREMELY productive over the past couple of days, and EXTREMELY focused. they say that it takes a while for the drugs to build up in your body, but i’ve taken enough psychedelics to have a really good handle on what my body is doing, when i’m taking a new drug, and i’ve definitely noticed… something. 😒 now i have to check with the georgia-doctor to see whether or not i can take psychedelics as well. i’m not looking forward to that conversation. 😒
georgia-doctor is dr. olajumoke akinyele… which is a mouthful, but i think i’m pronouncing it correctly now that i’ve actually talked with her. english is not her first language, but i don’t know where she’s from. i’ve heard similar accents from people from zimbabwe or mozambique, but i’ve also heard similar accents from jamaica, as well. i did a fair amount of research, and discovered that there aren’t any psychiatric nurse-practitioners in the greater seattle-tacoma area who 1) are accepting new patients, and 2) accept medicare. there are NPs who are accepting new patients, but don’t accept medicare, and there are NPs who accept medicare, but aren’t accepting new patients. however, dr. akinyele is registered in the state of washington, despite the fact that she’s actually in alpharetta, georgia, and telehealth is “a thing” now, so… 😐
because of the fact that they were, for the most part, MAGA chuds, and not real, honest-to-god terrorists, they didn’t do anything more than break a bunch of windows, urinate and smear feces all over the walls, break furniture, steal nancy pelosi’s stationery, and a bunch of other meaningless, mindless vandalism, and then claim that it was all ANTIFA’s fault (hint: it wasn’t).
oh, and one guy, who was trying to steal a picture (of tip o’neill), accidentally tazed himself in the balls and died, and a lady carrying a gadsden “don’t tread on me” flag, was trampled to death, bringing the death toll to five. 😒
the FBI has currently made around 80 arrests, with more, allegedly, in the offing, but the FBI is “having difficulty” identifying people like the “Q-shaman” and “Bigo”, whose identities and general locations i knew about two days ago, while the insurrection was still in progress. (“bigo” has, since, been arrested, and, my guess is that it won’t be too long until qshaman is also in custody)
it’s really a good thing that these people weren’t more organised or had a better idea of what they were going to do once they had stormed the capitol. there were a few of them that had sort of a clue; the right-wing social media was rife with people encouraging kidnapping, murder, and general mayhem, for at least a month beforehand, but there were a only few of the MAGA chuds that actually came equipped for such things. for most of them, once they had broken into the capitol, they had no clue what to do next.
pelosi has invoked the 25th amendment, and said that if trump’s cabinet won’t remove him, congress will impeach him, AGAIN… they PROBABLY won’t have enough votes to remove him from office (again), but he’ll go down in history as the only president ever to have been impeached twice.
ETA: trump’s cabinet is resigning, rather than invoking the 25th amendment. this points out that they knew they were wrong, even before this whole thing started blowing up. if their own base hadn’t screwed up so badly, they all would have gotten away with it! #ImprisonALLTheMotherFuckers!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
ETA: donald trump’s personal accounts have been banned from all social media. not only that, but apple and google have given parler (the right-wing twitter alternative, for people who have been banned from twitter) an ultimatum: either put together a realistic moderation policy or be banned from downloading. this, of course, caused a run on parler, and it’s currently offline all together.
it’s too bad they couldn’t have done this four years ago…😒
ETA: moe gets vaccinated next week. nobody knows when i get vaccinated. they say “may – december, information on phases 2, 3 and 4 coming soon”. “people experiencing homelessness” get vaccinated in april. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
MAGA chuds have overrun the US capitol, in washington DC.
the capitol police let them do it. 😒
tear gas was deployed in the rotunda. at least one person has been shot.
the mayor of washington DC called in the national guard. the national guard said no. they’re sending in the national guard from some other state (virginia?), because the washington DC national guard could, potentially, come under the control of the acting POTUS (because biden hasn’t been inaugurated yet), which would not be ideal, at this point.
so this is how america dies. 😒
it’s 2021.
does anybody have a reason to celebrate which is NOT related to tradition or #drumpf, which would actually make a difference to most people?
didn’t think so. 😒
VEWPRF was made only a little bit more tolerable this year because the pandemic has made everything else so awful that there didn’t seem to be as much energy put into the decorations and the public displays of “christianity” that there usually are…
but, because of the pandemic, we did NOT have things like the profusion of money-making gigs for performers, and the big, lavish dinner parties, and the exchange of massive quantities of commercial products, and the mass, forced, fake “love for all” like we usually have, either, so it all, sort of, evens out into a generic awful that has been, more or less, constant, since… oh, i don’t know… march? january?
so they’ve discovered a vaccine for COVID19… at the same time that they’ve discovered a new varient of the COVID19 virus. at this point, they’re pretty sure that the vaccine will work for the new varient as well, because of the fact that it’s a mRNA vaccine, rather than one based on dead or disabled virii, but, in part, because of the fact that it’s a new vaccine technology, the anti-vaxxers are even more suspicious of it, and quite a large number of them have already said they won’t get it…
what i’ve heard is that people who know seem to think that, if we can achieve masking, social distancing, and vaccines for 100 days, we MIGHT be able to “open up the economy” again around june of 2021… but, with the republican’ts and other assorted “christians”, anti-vaxxer/anti-masker idiots who will fight anything they don’t understand, and deliberately refuse to understand anything that’s not in the bible, i sincerely doubt that we’re going to see ENOUGH masking, social distancing, and vaccines to accomplish much of anything other than the opportunity for the idiots to say “see, it didn’t work”…
and the more “important” you are seems to be the determining factor in who gets the vaccine first. #drumpf got it, in spite of the fact that he’s already had it, and he’s (allegedly) already taken hydroxychloroquine as a “prophylaxis” (which it’s not, despite all the hype he gave it). my brother, who is a RN, got his last week. i don’t know IF i’m going to get it, let alone WHEN… maybe when i turn 65…
thailand has had 4 deaths from COVID19… FOUR! 😒
1 Hour Device Repair (the one in redmond, not the one in issaquah) repaired my device for free, because they have a lifetime warranty on the repair that they did a few months ago.
as it should be.
they also apologised for the guy in issaquah sending me down the wrong rabbit hole.
this has been a very early, abrupt and completely satisfactory end to this battle. 👍
the Incense Of The Month Club 👉SIGN UP SHEET👈 is now available. go and sign up for a year’s worth of rare, vintage, not-available-anywhere-else incense, and, maybe some other goodies, as well.
go… sign up now! you know you want to… 👍😉‼
also, i broke down and signed up for a facebook page. i am now @HybridElephant, so you can “like” me on facebook, and tell all your friends… or whatever you do on facebook these days… 🙄
tablet became brick.
took it to 1 Hour Device Repair in issaquah, who told me that the charging port was damaged.
took it to the genius bar (two days later), and they tested it, and told me that the charging port was fine, but “have you had the display replaced?”
why, yes. yes, i have… by the people at 1 Hour Device Repair… 😒
the charging port is fine, according to the genius bar drone. he tested it, and it works fine. the display, however, is another question. according to the genius bar tests, the tablet is in “recovery mode” which normally displays a “connect me to power” icon, on the display, but, wouldn’t you know, the display isn’t working.
so i called 1HDR and talked to someone, who, it is my guess, is the “owner” of the 1HDR franchise in the area (if it is a franchise operation, which it appears to be), a young woman with purple hair and an eastern-european accent, and brought it in to the location in redmond, which is where it was repaired before. the FIRST THING she said, when she tested it, was “i don’t know why anyone would tell you that the charging port was the problem.” and didn’t even respond when i told her that it was the 1HDR repair guy in issaquah…
which tells me something about the 1HDR location in issaquah that i didn’t know before. 😒
long story short, she’s going to have to keep it for one to two weeks, because she doesn’t stock the screens because they’re so expensive, and it’s the holidays, and there’s a pandemic…
and she said that it’s a free replacement, because there’s a lifetime warranty, as long as i can prove that there’s no external damage that would have caused the display to fail. the fact is, she looked at it very closely, and told me that “sometimes the displays fail”… but i’m not ruling out the possibility that, once she gets it open, she’ll discover some “damage” that voids the warranty. i don’t know of any “damage”, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. 😒
so, fine. keep it. it doesn’t do me much good as a brick, but then…
i realise i’ve got an appointment on telehealth, and another appointment on gotomeeting tomorrow, which i’m going to have to attend using my phone, which is about one-eighth the size of the tablet (tablet is 12.9″ ipad pro, third gen; phone is iphone 6SE, which is 5″)…
this is going to be “interesting”… 🤦
i woke up this morning and checked my email on my tablet, like i usually do. nothing seemed amiss, as i browsed twitter for a half hour or so, then i put the tablet to sleep, came downstairs, plugged the tablet into my downstairs charging port, heard the chime as it connected, and walked off to get my morning soylent…
when i got back to my office, about 5 minutes later, i tried to wake the tablet up, but it wasn’t having any.
i tried a number of “tips” that i found on internet (using my computer) for waking up a sleeping tablet, and elicited some interesting responses — siri, speaking from a blank screen, saying “i’m really sorry”, for example, and various official-sounding chimes, boops and bongs — but no screen action whatsoever.
i took it to the guy at 1 Hour Device Repair, in issaquah, who said that he thought it was the charging port that was damaged, because the device he hooked it to was saying .09 amps when it should be at least 1 amp. he said that it’s working, but, because of the fact that the charging port is damaged, it doesn’t have enough electricity to run reliably.
so, i made an appointment at the genius bar (because it’s new enough that i think i might still have apple care for it) on wednesday.
that doesn’t sound bad, does it? except for the fact that i can’t login to twitter — which is pretty much my ONLY social contact these days — because of the fact that i have my authenticator for my 2FA login on my tablet… i have an authenticator on my phone, as well, but it doesn’t have my twitter account, and the only way to get a 2FA authentication for my twitter account is from WITHIN my twitter account, which i can’t get to because the authenticator is on my tablet. i don’t usually use twitter on my phone, so i never updated the authenticator when i started using 2FA on twitter.
😒
5 weeks after the election, and #drumpf still hasn’t conceded.
his final “legal” attempt to overthrow the election, an attempt by texas to challenge the votes of other states, was rejected by the supreme court today, because it was ridiculous, and he still hasn’t conceded.
126 republican state representatives signed an amicus curiae statement that supported the idea of throwing out SEVEN MILLION legal votes, which makes their continued existence as republican state representatives a violation of amemdment 14, section 3 of the US Constitution…
and he STILL hasn’t conceded…
i don’t think he’s going to concede.
i think we’ll have to drag him out, by his heels, kicking and screaming. 😒
so, my registration for Fruck-Tump.com is due in a little more than two months…
is there any point in renewing it?
i got my first inquiry about the Incense Of The Month Club today, which is good, because i was beginning to think that nobody would respond. alledgedly, there will be something that i can actually see, rather than just conceptualise, later on in the week. also, i shipped out 3 packages this morning, including one that wasn’t aparajita.
today is my blog’s birthday. 13 this year, which is strangely appropriate. 😒
i recorded the tuba part for a collaborative effort to create the panto 2020 “Welcome Song”, but since we can’t actually meet to rehearse, we’re recording the parts, which, presumably, will be together enough that they will be able to be combined together, and then emailed to the people who have come to the pantos in the past.
i experienced the clarinet part, and the “click track”, which was kiki playing the song on the ukulele and singing, along with a metronome. without the click track (which, i’m assuming is the ultimate goal), the clarinet part and the tuba part ended up staying together… mostly… and the times when it seemed like we were going to lose the beat, miraculously, found the beat again in a lot less time than it would have taken if we had been in a live rehearsal.
but it’s really weird playing the tuba part without all of the other parts, only knowing that they will be put together at a later date.
#drumpf still hasn’t conceded, and his lawsuits are getting tossed out as fast as he can file ’em, but, ultimately, i think he’s going to try to make an end run around losing the popular vote and the electoral vote by “declaring” the election invalid, refusing to accept the results, and going to the supreme court (which he has stacked with sycophants) to make the final decision. he has made statements within the past 24 hours that include “just get rid of the ballots”, and “there will be no transition”, and “biden can’t enter the white house without proving that his ballots are legal”, which don’t make it sound particularly like he’s intending to go anywhere. and, while i would like nothing better than to watch as he was dragged out by his heels, kicking and screaming like a three-year-old having a tantrum (which, i have no doubt, would happen, if it came to that), i seriously doubt that any president that comes after that would have any chance of pulling the country back together again any time within my lifetime, i don’t care who he is, or how fast he impliments universal health care and universal basic income.
someone must have mentioned hybrid elephant on their podcast or something like that, because i have gotten FIVE incense orders today, including two that were for one box of aparajita… yes, the way things work out, i charge them more for shipping than i do for the incense — does it sound familiar? 😉 — but i decided that i’m not going to argue with them any longer. if they want to order one box of incense, that’s fine… unless they order a box that costs $1.50 or less, in which case i’ll write them and find out if that’s REALLY what they want to do, because that’s kind of ridiculous.
one from spain, that came in over last night, and then four from north america that all came in within an hour of each other. in reality, i have no clue why they are clustered like that. the podcast thing is the only thing i can think of that would cause clusters of orders like that, but i really don’t know. if it is because of someone’s podcast, i wish they would let me know about it. i don’t have a lot of social media connections, but i don’t have none, either.
i put the preliminary Incense of the Month Club page up. nobody’s responded yet, but i haven’t mentioned it much, and it’s still not showing up where i thought it was supposed to, but that’s something i’m going to have to discuss with the web designer.
in other news, #drumpf still hasn’t conceded, and he’s filed a whole bunch of lawsuits, most ALL of which have been tossed out for lack of evidence.
ETA: 201119 i’ve received two MORE orders, for one box each… REALLY weird… 😖🤯
someone tried to crack my twitter account again today.
second time in a month.
i have a 25-character passphrase, and 2FA enabled.
according to HowSecureIsMyPassword.net it would take a computer 28,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to break the passphrase… and then it would have to do the same thing for the 2FA…
they were not successful. 😒
Trump Tees Up a New Type of Coup: In Plain Sight
by Ted Rall, 201111
Donald Trump revolutionized political campaigning. It was by accident. Because he was too lazy to prepare for or memorize a stump speech, he ad-libbed his rallies; TV networks gave him $2 billion worth of free airtime because something he said might prove newsworthy. Because he was cheap, he made appearances at any random dump that would have him for free; he used the money he saved on big data research that paid off handsomely.
Now the president is attempting to revolutionize the art of the coup d’état.
Leaders of broad-based movements who want to overthrow an existing government usually agitate for revolution in plain sight. The activism of a popular front attracts new recruits.
A coup is the opposite of a revolution. Unlike revolutionaries, who need the masses to succeed, coup plotters require secrecy. A coup is usually carried out by a very small group of insiders. Coup schemers are not interested in, or have concluded that they cannot, obtain popular support. They do not seek to transform society. They simply want power. It is an attempt by a minnow to swallow a whale.
Without the protection of millions of adherents and operating outside constitutional norms, politicians and/or military men who plot a coup must take over the government by surprise. Leaders of the outgoing regime have to be in prison or dead, and thus powerless, before their supporters realize that their nation has been seized by a small faction. A coup d’état is over before it begins in the event that some element of the conspiracy comes to light before the zero hour. The classic example of a failed coup is Operation Valkyrie, the 1944 attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler and overthrow of the Nazi government of Germany by a group of military officers. The plot unraveled when Hitler survived a bomb attack and went on the radio.
Successful coups include the 2004 overthrow of democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, whom the CIA kidnapped and spirited away to the Central African Republic, whose president Ange-Félix Patassé had himself been deposed in a coup a year earlier, the Taliban-supported takeover of Pakistan by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999, and the bizarre 1993 self-coup by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who illegally shelled and dissolved parliament.
All of these events seemingly came out of nowhere. By contrast, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a coup attempt in plain sight.
Defying tradition, Trump is still refusing to concede the election since the Associated Press and other media organizations called the race in favor of Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7th. Without presenting evidence of fraud or other wrongdoing, he has filed several lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the vote count.
Most top Republicans are supporting Trump, or remaining silent and refusing to congratulate Biden. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the U.S. Senate. “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” said McConnell. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”
Asked whether he planned to congratulate Biden, Ron Johnson (R-WI) replied: “Nothing to congratulate him about.” Even as world leaders called to acknowledge Biden’s win, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
Roger Stone, the political adviser and loyalist pardoned by Trump, previewed the possibility of a post-election military takeover in September. If Trump lost, Stone said at the time, he ought to declare “martial law,” invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, nationalize state police forces and round up critics and political opponents including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “the Clintons,” and journalists because they’re involved in “seditious activities.” On November 2nd Stone said Former CIA Director John Brennan, Former FBI Director James Comey and other former officials who offended Trump “must be tried and convicted of treason” and then “they must be hung by the neck until dead.” Stone is still tight with Trump: news just broke that the president had the IRS wipe away Stone’s bill for back taxes, which totaled $1.5 million.
Attorney General William Barr, following Stone’s recommendation, ordered the Department of Justice to investigate irregularities and improprieties in the election.
In order to enforce martial law Trump would need, and has, widespread support among the police. He would also need the military. Though inherently reactionary, active-duty troops have moved away from the president in recent months. So he is replacing top Pentagon brass with compliant loyalists likelier to follow his illegal and unconstitutional orders.
On November 9th Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who refused to deploy troops against Black Lives Matters protesters in June. “In my experience, there would only be a few reasons to fire a Secretary of Defense with 72 days left in an administration,” Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and an official in Obama’s Pentagon, said. “[One] would be because the President wants to take actions that he believes his Secretary of Defense would refuse to take, which would be alarming.”
“Two White House officials said later on Monday that Mr. Trump was not finished, and that Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, and Gina Haspel, the CIA director, could be next in line to be fired. Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the nation’s national security bureaucracy — would be without parallel by an outgoing president who has just lost re-election,” reported The New York Times.
In a major, unprecedented transition-period shakeup, policy chief James Anderson, intelligence boss Joseph Kernan and Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart have also been fired from the Pentagon. Anderson’s replacement is retired Army General Anthony Tata, a nutty far-right white nationalist who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” said Islam was the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and used a racist slur against CNN host Don Lemon. He will do whatever Trump wants.
What’s going on? Stupid impetuous drama? Or a real coup?
If it turns out to be a coup, it may well prove that teeing it up in plain sight improves its chances of success. Trump’s supporters, disproportionately prone to violence and more heavily armed, are watching and waiting. They can only pitch in as paramilitaries or freelance goons if, like the rest of us, they see the dark days ahead.
Then Trump’s coup becomes a counterrevolution.
Coups For Dummies
by Clay Jones, 201111
On November 10, 2016, President Obama hosted President-elect (sic) Donald Trump in the White House. Vice-President Joe Biden hosted vice-president elect (sic) Mike Pence in the VP residence. First Lady Michelle Obama gave a White House tour to Melania Trump. Today, it’s November 11, 2020, and instead of inviting the future president of the United States to the White House, Donald Trump is hiding inside his bunker in denial he lost. What makes this even worse is that he has enablers. These enablers are helping Donald Trump thwart democracy.
Republicans are pointing out that Democrats whined about the 2016 election. This is true. I whined. I didn’t like the results. I still don’t like it. But while I said the election was tampered with and Russia meddled, I never said any ballots were fraudulent. No Democrats opposed the transition of power. Today, the Trump administration is not allowing a transfer of power.
The Trump Administration could still pursue legal challenges over the election while allowing the process of a transition to happen. That would be in the best interest of the nation. Instead, offices are not being created for the transition, funds aren’t being released, and the next president isn’t even being given security briefings. These were all acts afforded to Donald Trump when he was the incoming president (sic).
The United States condemns leaders of other nations who refuse to leave office and give up power after losing fair elections. Now, our leader (sic) is refusing to give up power and is hiding inside his palace sending his minions out to help him stage a coup. Donald Trump has not been seen since last Thursday.
Mitch McConnell is supporting Trump’s legal challenges even though there isn’t any evidence of massive voter fraud. Lindsey Graham is telling Trump not to concede. McConnell and Graham both won their Senate elections last week but neither one of these two men refused their opponent’s concessions.
Ted Cruz says allowing the media to declare the winner is not how we do it in America. Except, he was more than happy to accept the media’s declaration of a winner in 2016. He was more than happy to accept their declaration in 2018 when he won reelection to the Senate.
When asked if he had congratulated President-Elect Joe Biden yet, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, whose state went for Biden, said he doesn’t have anything to congratulate Biden for.
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said, “We have got to allow our courts to hear these allegations of voting irregularities by the president.” You may as well allow the courts to hear allegations of lizard people running our government too because you have just as much evidence of that as you do of voter fraud.
North Carolina’s Thom Tillis was finally declared the winner of his race yesterday and he said about the presidential election, “Every vote legally cast must be counted.” Who says they shouldn’t? Who says they haven’t been counted? Guess what. Tillis didn’t stop his opponent from conceding saying, “Every legal vote must be counted” bullshit.
Isn’t it fucked up that right after you elect someone, that they make a pronouncement against democracy and fair elections?
Attorney General William Barr is releasing the Justice Department’s legal hounds to fight Trump’s loss in the courts. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani is holding press conferences outside dildo shops claiming the election was stolen from Trump.
It’s funny Democrats stole the election for Biden while simultaneously losing the Senate and seats in the House. It’s also funny that it hasn’t occurred to any of these Republicans claiming fraudulent ballots, that they also have their names on those “fraudulent” ballots. If we’re going to wipe out who won the election, that should also mean we wipe out all those Republican victories. Should we wipe out McConnell’s, Graham’s, and Tillis’ victories?
Each government department is being told to prepare their budgets for next year as though the administration will still be operating. As if they’re still going to be in town and not all applying at Fox News at the same time. And Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the nation’s top diplomat has said there will be a “smooth transition…to a SECOND Trump administration.”
What the fuck? The top diplomat or the world’s leading democracy is telling the world we don’t obey election results anymore. Pompeo said the eletion has not been decided. It has LITERALLY been decided.
Can you imagine the outrage if instead of conceding the election the day after, Hillary Clinton had refused to admit defeat, mounted legal challenged, and claimed the election had been stolen? Can you imagine if instead of inviting Trump to the White House, President Obama had refused to release transition funding?
In Michigan, Trump beat Clinton by 10,704 votes in 2016. In 2020 in Michigan, Biden beat Trump by over 146,000 (and still counting). In case you’re a Republican, 146,000 is greater than 10,000.
In Pennsylvania, Trump beat Clinton by 46,765. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, Biden beat Trump by over 48,000 (and still counting). In case you’re a Republican, 48,000 is more than 46,000. Now, Trump is suing to overturn the election in Pennsylvania.
As the counting continues, Biden is heading for a 306 electoral vote win. That’s the exact same amount Trump won with in 2016. How are they going to win the presidency by overturning one state without any actual evidence of election fraud? They would need to overturn more than one state. Maybe they can do it in Georgia where the two GOP senators are calling for their own Republican Secretary of State to resign because they don’t like that his count shows Donald Trump is losing.
This is banana republic type shit here, people. This is a coup attempt. Maybe people like Pompeo are just trying to appease Trump for now. Maybe Pompeo is a coward. He wants to appease Trump’s base for when he runs for the Senate in Kansas or even for the presidency in 2024, if Trump doesn’t. Or maybe, he’s afraid of being fired two months before he’s scheduled to lose his job. Trump is already lashing out and firing people.
Maybe people like Mitch McConnell, John Kennedy (not the good one), Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Thom Tillis, and Ted Cruz are all just big, fat ass kissers. Or…they’re trying to steal an election and are engaging in a coup.
I predicted before the election that Joe Biden would win… but I did not predict he’d take the White House because I was afraid the Republicans would try to steal the election. Even before the election, Trump said the only way he could lose was if there was corruption and voter fraud. Boy, did I call it or did I call it?
We know this about Trump supporters: They are all cowards. They have made their party into one of a cult. They put one man before their nation. They are putting one man before democracy. They don’t care if they turn our democracy into a dictatorship.
The Trump administration will NOT legally continue, but the resistance must.
#drumpf is refusing to concede, has directed the attorney general william barr to “investigate substantial evidence of voter fraud” (despite the fact that their IS NO evidence of voter fraud), and is refusing to turn things over to a transition team. mitch mconnell and mike pompeo have both stated that they support a second #drumpf term. he’s fired a whole bunch of people within the last 48 hours, including directors at the pentagon and the FBI, and replaced them with “loyalists”. 😒
this despite the fact that biden won the popular vote with 50.8%, compared to #drumpf’s 47.5%, and is projected to win the electoral vote with 306, which is the largest difference since the 1930s.
biden says he’s “dissapointed”, but doesn’t think legal action will be necessary. 😒
if this isn’t a blatant attempt at a coup, i don’t know what is. if this happened in any other country, the US would send in the marines to ensure a democratic government emerged. 🤬
we’re going to have to drag him out of the white house by his heels, kicking and screaming like a child having a temper tantrum. 😒
p.s. (he’s NOT the president of the united states, and never has been.) 😒
and then, there’s also this:
it’s official now: #drumpf is our lame-duck president. the first time a president hasn’t won re-election since 1992.
big surprise. 😒
but democrats didn’t take the senate, and democrats actually lost seats in the house… which means that the changes that #drumpf made in the supreme court (a “lifetime-appointed” body) are going to be a lot more difficult to chalenge, and expanding the supreme court is, also, pretty much out of the question… and #drumpf got to choose three supreme court justices, who are, now, going to determine whether or not his claims of election fraud are actionable… a qanon believer is on their way to the senate… “nothing, fundamentally, is going to change” says our “new” leader.
meet the new boss. same as the old boss.
it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but biden won. however, as biden, himself, has said, “nothing, fundamentally, will change”… so, now, it’s “fascism light”, rather than “fascism extra-bold”, but, essentially, the same font. 😒
we’ve got a couple months of a lame duck session, wherein #drumpf has every occasion, opportunity and encouragement to screw things up even more badly than he already has, and then, naturally, when he finally steps down, the first thing to happen is that biden will pardon and absolve him of any crimes that he may have committed.
but at least he didn’t actually win… again… woo. 😒
if you ask me, it looks more like a bottle of cologne than a bottle of tequila. 😒
Snake Suspenderz – Even Your Best Friends Won’t Tell You
Snake Suspenderz – Naughty Monkey
Snake Suspenderz – Misery Loves Company
Snake Suspenderz – Say Hello To Mr. Snake
sketch, the drummer for snake suspenderz, died in april of 2019, shortly after the moisture festival, which put an abrupt end to our performances as a band, but there was intense talk of finding another drummer for a few months. a couple of options were tossed about, and one got far enough that we ended up saying that we were going to contact her… but i’m not sure we ever did… i didn’t hear anything about it…
and then COVID happened, and, basically, everything got cancelled, and so nothing was done about it…
and now hobbit has decided that he has to move to kalamazoo, because that’s where his partner, lucifer, has to move, because she has to take care of her mother. lucifer and hobbit both worked at the market, for a large part of their income, and the market has, well… basically, been shut down, except for a VERY few day stall vendors, the high stall vendors, and the restaurants.
even bavarian meats, which has been in the market since before i was born, has closed up shop.
but, because of the fact that hobbit is moving away, there will be no more snake suspenderz, no more peanut envy, no more accidental rhino, and no more busking for me, at all, unless (until?) i can find someone else who plays a treble, chord instrument (strings, keyboard, accordion), who wants a solid bass line… or if i can find places to take my harmonic flute where they won’t chase me away after five minutes… 😢😒
i met hobbit in 1995, when i went to work for micro$lop. he and i were hired helpdesk geeks, and we got together because we also played music… and then it turned out that he and i knew a lot of the same people, and eventually we figured out that, about 15 years before that (1985 or thereabouts), we had been at the same party, at danny shadygrove’s place, and hobbit and my sister (who i didn’t know was there) shared a shower together… at the time we worked at micro$hit, we also played in a band called PropellerHeads (this was before the software called Reason, which was originally made by a company called “Propellerheads” came to be), and, using different instruments, the same people (me, hobbit, and malcolm “malcat” atterbury) were also in a band called Peanut Envy both bands were in existence, more or less, until around 1999, when we all went our separate ways. then hobbit and i met up again in 2004 or so, after my injury, when i started playing with snake suspenderz, an already existing band which was sketch, hobbit, thaddeus and a bass player whose name i don’t remember (because i never actually met him, he had moved away by the time i came on board). i started busking with them shortly afterward. and, when sketch died, hobbit and i resurrected Peanut Envy, and busked as a duo by that name until… march of this year.
i wonder what i will do next?
something, i hope. 😒
the fence is (allegedly) being fixed on thursday, by the guy who is the friend of the neighbour who is (still) being a dick about paying for the fence, despite the fact that the dead tree which destroyed it was on his property. 😒
the guy who is (allegedly) fixing the fence has already run down a whole list of (bogus) complaints he had about the current fence — i get the impression that he’s not particularly impressed with the quality or consistency of the fence materials, despite the fact that we had the fence made by a different company than the one which made the gates, and that the whole thing was built during the peak of the first round of COVID…
but i get the very strong impression that the guy is going to do everything possible to get away with doing a halfway job and begging off, never to be heard from again, which is why i’m going to be keeping an eye on the work progress, when it happens. 😒
election day is (finally) tomorrow. in spite of the fact that he was impeached, we managed to survive (barely) four years of #drumpf, and i’m not sure, even now, that we’re going to vote him out tomorrow… and, even if we do, i’m even less sure that he’ll leave without making a BIG fuss, and/or flagrantly cheating… and even if we do manage to eject him into the sun, there’s going to be A LOT of #MAGA #chuds who will be stubbornly unwilling to accept it, and even if we are actually able to eject him into the sun, they’re not going to be so “easy” to deal with, nor will they just “go away”, once the solar ejecting has actually been accomplished.
i keep saying it’ll take us at least a hundred years to recover from #drumpf, and i’m not sure we have a hundred years left, even if we do, miraculously, make him and his cronies just vanish.
in other news, i made a new page for the Incense Of The Month Club, but i can’t figure out how to put the background image on it that i want, so it’s not linked anywhere, yet. i bought a 1½” diameter button press (because why not), and now i’ve got to round up some civic organisations which want buttons for some campaign or something.
also, i never heard back from kent.
good. 😒
i ended the last post with “i will never figure out these people”, and, after looking, half-heartedly, at the other options on the web for aparajita, i think part of what may be motivating people like kent is the box, and not the incense itself.
the old box is very distinctive, and it was used in, basically, the same form (they changed the colours, slightly, some time between the 1960s and the 1980s) pretty much ever since they started producing incense in boxes… the company has existed since the 1920s, so it’s a very distinctive and recognisable brand…
the new box is just a design change. the incense is exactly the same.
i had a customer a few years ago (who am i kidding, i haven’t heard from him in 15 years), who bought aparajita from me. he was a guitar player from new york, who had actually played with george harrison and ravi shankar, and he bought it from me because i was the only agarbathiwala who carried “the authentic” aparajita. it was through him that i learned about ALL the knock-off, “look-alike” brands of NOT aparajita that were out there. i learned a lot more, once i knew what to look for, and i’ve actually got a collection of “not aparajita” boxes. when mavana changed the box design, he was intensely frustrated, because he said the incense was different. as with everything from india, they have a very strict recipe that they follow to the letter… most of the time, ganesha willing… so the end product is 99.5% reliable… but that other .5% can be REALLY out there.
personally, i have NEVER noticed a big difference between the incense in the old box (yes, i still have several old boxes, and some of the “look-alike” boxes, for comparison) and the incense in the new box…
but, for some people, “aparajita” apparently stopped existing when they changed the box. i found at least two web sites where aparajita was listed, along with pictures of the old box, that said something along the lines of “out of stock, discontinued”…
but, look, people… i’ve got loads of it, right here! 😉
i had to go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for moe. the pharmacy was closed for lunch, so i went across the street to the safeway, to get food. as i was checking out, my phone rang. it was an “unknown caller”, which usually means that it’s a robot/scam call, and i am usually able to tell this within a VERY short period of time after answering the call…
so i answered it.
it was NOT an automated fraud call at all, but i had some considerable difficulty understanding the guy, because of the fact that his phone was cutting in and out like a crazy monkey, not to mention the ambient noise at the checkout stand in safeway, but eventually i worked out that it was kent, from laguna beach, who is an agarbathiwala (he didn’t use that word, but that’s what he is) and he is interested in purchasing wholesale quantities of aparajita, for resale in laguna beach.
wonderful… i think… but… 😒
he can’t figure out how to use my web site. apparently he’s accessing the web site on the same cell phone from which he’s calling me. that, combined with the fact that i don’t use my cell phone for web access most of the time, means that he can’t find the incense he wants, and i can’t direct him, because i don’t know what he’s seeing.
also, i tell him that, as far as wholesale orders go, i already put the word out to a number of agarbathiwalas that i know, who, either, didn’t respond at all, or responded by telling me that boxes of aparajita aren’t available in the US, and the only way to get it is to go to india, buy it in bulk, bring it back, and put it into your own packages.
which is patently false, according to my own, personal, recent experience…
so i get the very strong impression that this guy may be one of those people who want to use me and my years of experience and connections to stock their own stores with exotic incense.
which is only exacerbated by the fact that he says, if it can’t be a “wholesale” order, he’ll just mark up my price (which is really reasonable, given what i had to go through to get it), rather than buying at a “wholesale discount”… 😒
he wants to make an order over the phone — another typical ploy used by these people. i, patiently, tell him that i can’t process credit card payments any way other than the web site, and if he wants to order over the phone, it will involve him snail-mailing me a check or money order, which will have to clear before i will ship out anything.
oh, he says, sounding disappointed…
okay, he says, he’ll check out the web site, and make an order.
i go to the pharmacy, pick up moe’s prescription, and am on the way home, when the phone rings, again. it’s kent, again. he can’t find the incense he’s looking for. also, he wants to know how long it takes me to ship things out, and how i ship things. i explain it as succinctly as i can, and get off the phone, because, well, i’m driving… 😒 but the phone rings again,it’s kent, again and he STILL can’t figure out my web site. 😒
i expect that, by the time i get home, he will have made an order, and called me to ask why i haven’t shipped it out yet… 😒
but…
then he texts me. i’m back at the point i was at when i was checking out at the safeway, with all the ambient noise, but i’m at home, and there’s no ambient noise, there’s just this text message, which is a photo, and nothing else. i know it’s from kent, because it’s the same number that he has been calling me from, but there’s no text, just a photo. the photo is, from all appearances, a photo of a computer screen which has four overlapping photos of a VERY OLD box of aparajita.
by this time, i have gotten home. i text back that the manufacturers of aparajita changed the design on the box a few years ago, and text him a couple of photos, one of the new box, and one of the old box, with the reassurance that it’s exactly the same incense, only the box has changed.
and then…
nothing.
no order, no more phone calls, or texts… nothing.
i will never figure out these people. 😖
both our tests came back negative today, but moe sez that she’s not sure about her test, because she spent A LOT of time around the lady from texas who did test positive, so she’s still wearing a mask around the house, and especially when she’s interacting with me… but i get to sleep in the bed, again, rather than sleeping on the other end of the house, on the couch.
there are 6 english words that contain the letters “M”, “E”, “O”, and “W”. they are:
MEOW
MEOWS
MEOWED
MEOWING
HOMEOWNER
HOMEOWNERS
i learned that years ago, and every time i use the word “homeowner”, insinctively, i think “homeowner”…
honer’s meow…
there’s a title.
our brand new fence, less than 4 months old, was completely destroyed, last week, when half of a dead tree on the neighbour’s property decided to fall on it, and then, when the neighbour decided to cut down the rest of the tree, and it, also, fell on it…
our homeowner’s insurance would have paid to get it fixed, if it had been a live tree on the neighbour’s property, but, because of the fact that it was a dead tree, the neighbour was “negligent”, so our homeowner’s insurance won’t pay. the fence originally cost $10,000, and the contractor said that he could SAFELY cut up the remainders of the tree and fix the fence for $4,000. the neighbour wants to “chip in” $500, but he’s refusing to pay any more than that.
AND… moe confirmed yesterday that she has, 100% been exposed to COVID, along with everyone else who works at the clinic. they are switching to a new clinic management software package, and they had someone from texas fly in to train all of them. they were fine the first day, the second day they started feeling sick, and went for a test, which was positive, and now the entire clinic has to close down. and, because of the fact that moe and i slept in the same bed, the probability is very high that i have been exposed, as well. she gets tested through her insurance, but i don’t know how — or even IF — i’m going to get tested, yet…
the 1918 pandemic took three years to go away, and they didn’t have to deal with a toxic government who wants everyone to die, and only the basic rudiments of germ theory.
and people wonder why i am depressed… 😒
getting old sucks. 🤬
i got home this afternoon, and took the small doggie outside, and, as i was going down the stairs from the deck, my right foot hit a slippery spot on the third step from the bottom, and i fell, bruising my back and legs, and scraping my right arm, which reached out for support, but reached in the wrong direction, because of my brain injury. 😒
the dog experienced a rather rough landing, but she wandered off without more than an “oof” when she hit the ground. she’s fine.
i lay on the ground for a few minutes, deciding whether or not anything was broken (as far as i can tell, nothing was), and breathing hard, because my back REALLY hurt, while the doggie wandered, obliviously, around the yard.
fortunately, i had my phone, so i called moe, who called the neighbour, who came to help me, but all she actually did was pick up the doggie, because i couldn’t bend over.
at this point, i have taken ibuprophen and applied ice, and i can sit down without too much difficulty, although i can still REALLY feel my lower back, and i probably will be able to do so for the next few days.
in other news, i got my first order for 10 boxes of aparajita today. the guy actually wrote me while i was in the process of updating my web site, and wanted to make a “special order”. my guess is that i’ll have two or three more orders for 10 boxes, before the week is out… at $90 bucks a pop… 👍😉
also, i got a new monitor. the old one is an VGA 17″ flat screen from a few years ago. the new one is a HDMI 24″ flat screen from this year… it’s awesome, how much real estate is in the difference between 17″ and 24″
okay, as i reported here, the HPOI arrived on friday, at 1730. i went to WFS, but was informed that i had to get the shipment cleared through US customs, before i could pick it up.
customs operates under “normal” business hours, i.e. 9-to-5, M thru F, so i figured i was going to have to wait until monday.
the “carrier certificate” that WFS gave me said that i had to pay an ISC fee, which worked out to $89 if i paid it online, or $125 if i paid it in person, so, while i was waiting — saturday and sunday — i took the opportunity to pay it online, so that i would have yet another impediment taken care of before monday.
the “carrier certificate” also, CLEARLY said that the date that storage charges started accruing was 201012, which was further impetus to get things rolling as quickly as possible.
note, that THIS ENTIRE TIME i have been getting EXTREMELY CONFLICTED messages about whether or not i would need a broker. at this point, everything i have heard leads me to believe that i would NOT need a broker to pick up my shipment of incense.
this morning, i contacted customs, got their new address (because they just moved, and nobody at WFS knew where), and went down to clear my shipment.
when i got there, i talked with a US customs agent, who told me that, because my MAWB said that the value of the shipment was more than $800, but less than $1,000, i would have to have a broker clear the shipment.
way back when i was arranging all of this, i specifically remember (backed up by email from 200824) arun giving me precise numbers: “USD 7.45 PER DOZENS”, which amounts to $357.60 for 48 dozen boxes. i also specifically remember (backed up by a different email from 200824), arun telling me “Please note Air freight is additional.”, so when he sent me a proforma invoice that said $986.40, i presumed that it meant “$357.60 for the incense, and $628.80 for shipping”… but it wasn’t itemised, and i overlooked that point.
i SHOULD HAVE gotten an itemised MAWB, but i didn’t.
so, i spent some time on the phone, talking with brokers, who quoted me around $400 just to get my foot in the door, and then i connected with lisa, from Frontier North America — a very nice, helpful lady who is going to get my business the next time around — who assured me that, because i was actually paying more for shipping than i was for the actual product, that she would clear my shipment, and provide a surety bond, for $182.22, so i said go for it, and half an hour later, my shipment was cleared through customs.
miracle. 😒
then, i went back to the airport, to WFS, who informed me, because i didn’t have a broker, who could clear my shipment on friday, after business hours (despite the fact that customs was CLOSED for “normal people” like me), that i had to pay a $110 storage fee — which was EXACTLY the thing that i was trying to AVOID by picking up the paperwork on friday, after normal business hours — and then they had a problem charging me the storage fee, because i had already paid the ISC fee, and they couldn’t charge me as a “guest” because the computer wouldn’t let them create two different accounts with the same MAWB number. finally, they told me that their web site wasn’t meant for people with iphones, which meant that i would have to go home to use my computer at home to “set up an account” so that they could charge me a storage fee, before i could pick up a shipment that i was already there to pick up… 😒
fortunately, after talking to two other managers, i finally talked the third manager into waiving the $110 storage fee, and, after scanning my drivers’ license (because my passport wouldn’t fit in their automatic scanning device 😒) they “gave me permission” to pick up my HPOI.
and i managed to get through the whole thing without swearing, losing my temper, or stomping out of various offices, as good as it would have felt.
now i’ve got a web site to update. 😉
the HPOI arrived yesterday.
according to the people at Worldwide Flight Services (which is the umbrella company that handles British Airways Cargo in seattle), i have to pick up documentation, take it to customs, so that it can be cleared, pay an ISC fee (Importer Service Charge, which is, basically, their way of “legally” taking a cut of my action), and then they can release the shipment to me.
customs is closed over the weekend. also, they just moved, and nobody at WFS knows what their new address is… 😒
and, because of the fact that WFS doesn’t accept credit cards, i would have had to pay $125 for the ISC fee, if it weren’t for the fact that i actually went down to the airport last night to pick up the documentation (so that i don’t have to go through that step on monday, when customs is open), the guy pointed out that i can pay the ISC fee online, and it will only cost $89… so i did that.
the “documentation” they gave me is, basically a “carrier certificate” which is a receipt for services rendered by the carrier (which is what i pay the ISC fee for), four copies (out of at least seven, total) of the MAWB, one for the destination airport, one for “my agent” (which is me), one for the consignee (which is also me), and one “extra copy”, a “MAWB/CBV Acceptance Statement”, which basically, says that the shipment isn’t anything vague or illegal, is being shipped by a legitimate shipper who is not a criminal, and is being received by a person who is not a criminal, and a MYSTERY ENVELOPE which is stapled shut, THREE TIMES ON BOTH ENDS, which, from indications of the writing on the outside, was stapled shut in india, when the shipment was loaded, and i have NO CLUE what it contains…
now, all that’s left is for me to wait until monday, contact customs, find out what their address is (i think it’s in burien, but i’m not sure), go down and get the documentation stamped, and then go back to the airport to…
PICK UP HPOI!!!‼‼‼😀😎👍👍👍
whew…
we moved in to our new house in march.
in october, approximately eight months later, i saw my first deer in our front yard.
according to moe, there have been deer in our front yard, and our back yard, before now, but this is the first time i’ve seen them.
i got a phone call, yesterday, from suni, at CEVA Logistics, whose first language is english, and who doesn’t pepper her communications with bizarre, multi-letter acronyms that i don’t understand…
and, what she told me was, essentially, that arun has been right all along — which makes me VERY glad i didn’t send that email that i felt like sending him a few days ago…
basically, they’ve shipped out today, at 0700 bangalore time, on BA118, there’s a stop over at london heathrow, and then it’s on to seattle, on BA49, and i should have 31kg (68.34lb) of incense by friday at 1730. someone at the airline is supposed to contact me immediately upon arrival — although how is still somewhat of a question… they don’t have my phone number, and if they have my email address, it’s not on the MAWB. the only address that IS on the MAWB is my street address, so, theoretically, they could snail-mail me, but that would take longer than it took for the incense to get here, so i don’t think that’s a viable option… and i still don’t know exactly how they are supposed to contact me, but i suppose i’ll find that out on friday…
and a WHOLE BUNCH of my customers are going to be extremely happy. i guess this is probably as close to being a “drug dealer” as i will ever get… 😉
okay, that last bit is a lie… i actually was a drug dealer, for a while, about 30 years ago. i sold weed and acid to a few friends for about 6 months, until the supply dried up… but it’s that sort of feeling. 🤣
this is my imaginary response to the email that i got from arun’s customs clearing agent, melvyn.
obviously, since i’m posting it here, you can presume that it is because, if i actually sent it, i probably would NOT be receiving any incense from arun, any time soon.
On 03/10/2020 00:34, sspf wrote:
> Importer Security Filing (ISF)
>
> It is USA Govt Compliances. Hence consignee Clearing
> aware about this.
so, when you said, on 200930 that i wouldn’t need a customs clearing agent, you were… what?
wrong? 😒
On 30/09/2020 01:04, Arun Mysorein wrote:
> Hello, No need for any agent, you can talk to airline ,
> take delivery order
> and get the goods from the airport.
it should be fairly obvious, at this point, that this is NOT the way it’s going to happen… 😒
> It should filed
> online 72 Hrs before the last departure air/ seaport station.
meaning that, if you notify me when the shipment is loaded on the airplane, it’s already too late.
could you PLEASE notify me 72 hours BEFORE the shipment is loaded, so that i won’t have to pay more than i already do, for things that i won’t use?
> If we file from here the agent
> will take $ 100 for this service. It is better consignee
> Or their agents do at their end.
so, let me get this straight: $100 is too much for you to pay, but it’s perfectly okay for ME to be saddled with extra fees and fines because i don’t know these things, and, because YOU think it’s okay to tell me the EXACT OPPOSITE of what i should know in order to AVOID paying these extra fees and fines.
and, once again, MELVYN references an agent, which, you have assured me, i don’t need! 🤬
if i hadn’t already sunk more than $900 into this incense deal, i would cancel it right here and now. 🤬
this is NOT the way to do business and have me as a customer. 🤬
so i wrote to arun at mavana, concerning my impression that he had not given me all the information. he wrote to his customs clearing agent(!), melvyn — and copied me — who informed him (and me) that the consignee’s customs clearing agent(!) should have been aware of all this…
the immediately previous email i got from arun said that i would not need a customs clearing agent, or a single entry bond. now, his customs clearing agent tells me exactly the opposite! 😒
melvyn also said “If we file from here the agent will take $ 100 for this service. It is better consignee Or their agents do at their end.”
in other words, it’s better for the consignee (me) to pay this, rather than “us”, because “It is USA Govt Compliances.” and it costs “us” more money that the consignee could be paying.
the problem, if all of the web sites i’ve been reading are correct, is that, from the consignee’s (my) point of view, the customs clearing agent’s fee is $125, the single entry bond is a minimum of $75, and that’s before we start talking about fees for the ISF.
so, it’s an extra $100 from them for the ISF… which they are, apparently, unwilling to pay…
or it’s an extra $200 from me before we even get to the ISF… 😒
and i know, from past experience, that if the shipment gets loaded without the ISF being filed, then i have to pay $400 for a continuous bond, rather than $75 for a single entry bond, plus i get to pay another $400 (or more, the maximum is $10,000) for importing without an ISF. 😒
i’m guessing that i’m going to have to pay more money to get this HPOI into the united states. 😒
this had better be worth it. 😒
first the guy doesn’t know what ISF means, then he says i have to file an ISF, but doesn’t give me all the documentation to do so, and the only “resource” i have is a web site whose “toll free, 24/7” help line has a recording which says to leave a number, and they’ll call back (and they don’t), or leave a message that includes ALL of my contact information, including my social security number, on an un-secure (not https) web form — NO THANKS, FRANK! 😠
then, literally EVERYTHING i’ve read seems to indicate that, along with the ISF, i have to have either a “continuous bond” or a “single entry bond”, and a customs clearing agent, but the guy says neither of those things are necessary: “you can talk to airline , take delivery order and get the goods from the airport.” not only that, but i can’t even find where i’m SUPPOSED to file the ISF, except this, same “resource” that wants me to submit the information over an un-secure web form.
so i broke down and started up kmail, to retrieve the email addresses for the people i was in contact for the last HPOI go-around, two years ago, and contacted one of them, with the information i have… the last time i was in contact with them, they were USL Cargo Services, but i hit their web site, and it says that, as of a year ago, they’ve merged with another company, and are now CEVA Logistics… but their uslcargoservices.com web site and email addresses still appear to work, so we’ll see what happens… just to make sure, i also completed the easy-to-use form at cevalogistics.com as well.
grr… 😒
the information that the guy has been giving me regarding the ISF is, substantially, wrong… which leads me to believe that the other information that he has been giving me is also wrong.
hopefully, the whole story about how he’s the CEO of mavana is not wrong, as well, otherwise i’m going to be REALLY pissed off!
the main concern, at this point, is the “continuous bond” — which only lasts for a year, so it’s not really “continuous”, but only in relation to a “single entry bond” which costs $10 for every $10,000 worth of product imported, with a minimum of $75 — and the “customs clearing agent” fee, which is $125. both of these “extra, add-on” fees were sprung on me at the last moment, last time, and ended up with me having to pay “extra, add-on” FINES before they would let me have my stuff.
all of this information is coming from TurboISF, a web site that i found after the last HPOI came in, when i was still seething about having to spend almost the same amount in “extra, add-ons” as i spent for the incense itself. hopefully, i have been alert enough to avoid the fines, this time. 😒
part of what i am worried about is the ISF, which nobody told me about last time, which resulted in my having to pay a $400 fine for “importing without filing an ISF”… but, apparently, the ISF is only needed for ocean cargo… and, if it is needed for air freight, nobody has told me about it yet… but nobody told me about having a “broker” or a “continuous bond” last time, either, and i ended up having to get one at the last minute, at extra, added expense…
but, i paid the money this morning… i initiated an international wire transfer to india, so they’ve got my money, now, and if they don’t actually send me incese, at this point, i will be extremely pissed off.
the latest is that i send them $1,000 and they send me 48 dozen boxes of aparajita, by air freight.
i have to wait until tomorrow to wire them the money. i tried today, but international money transfers have to be done on the same day, and, apparently, that day ends at 1300 hours, PDT, so i have to try again tomorrow.
this appears to be A LOT easier than the HPOI that i ordered two years ago… and a lot less expensive… but i seem to recall that a lot of the charges the last time around were ones that were added on by freight companies, intermediaries, and the federal government, so it’s not over yet. 😒
this is the basic layout, so far:
people sign up in one of three two ways, either:
1) they pay $10, and get however many sticks of whatever the incense of the month is, that month. they can do this for as long as they like, up to $120, or 12 months. they don’t get anything extra.
not this… the “Incense Of The Month Club” is a subscription service. if people don’t want to “subscribe”, they can’t be a part of it.
also, it will make it SO much easier determining who gets what
21) they can pay $100 lump sum, all at once, for a “mundane” account, and get 12 months of however many sticks of whatever the incense of the month is, that month. that’s $10 a month, with 2 months free. they don’t get anything extra, but they do get 2 months free (woo hoo! free! 😒). this decreases in price by $10 a month, so in february, it costs $90, in march, it costs $80, in april, it costs $70, and so forth, until it costs $10 at which point it sticks at $10 and they can go month-to-month with the level 1 people. they get the first two months free, and after that, the price goes down $10 a month. basically, people who sign up in january get two months free, people who sign up in february get one month free, and after that, they pay $10 a month until december.
32) they can pay $8.50 a month, $102 total, lump sum, all at once, for a “VIP account”. they actually pay less per month, but, because of the fact that they’re actually paying more, overall, as well as getting however many sticks of whatever the incense of the month is, that month, they also get 🎉🎊EXTRA GOODIES🎊🎉, such as buttons, OM stuff, stickers, little good luck charms, random incense, and other bizarre stuff i have lying around. this offer is good for the first 3 months, and then it vanishes, leaving level 1 or level 2 for those people who want to sign up late, and as a motivation to sign up earlier.
i have 22 “limited edition, vintage” incenses, in packages ranging from 112 grams up to 750 grams, which means, theoretically, i could do this for two years (if i wanted to repeat two of them), but, for now, i’m a lot more interested in seeing how it works, and if anybody actually signs up, before i want to go making plans too far in advance. the incense i’ve got means that if, by some miracle, i actually get 25 people who sign up in january, i can send them anywhere between 5 and 15 sticks per month. if you count in the shipping, that comes out to almost exactly what they would pay for one pack of incense that you CAN find on the web.
this should be interesting. keep your eyes peeled for upcoming information about the Incense Of The Month Club‼‼😎👍
our BRAND NEW, not even three months old yet, 6-foot security fence, has been destroyed by a falling tree.
it was a dead tree, on the neighbour’s yard, that fell… it didn’t even have the decency to fall all at once; it broke off about 20 feet up (remember, it was dead), and the broken part fell on our fence… it didn’t hit the shed, and nobody got hurt, which is a good thing, but still…
FUCK 2020‼‼
Flimflam Phloem
Gunko
Ham Maze
Vàsqueeze
Wendy’s House of Pho
Self Hostage
Acceptable Bones
War To Salvation Church
Can I ask a state trailer park?
No Tw Eeze About It
AI Pastor At Your Door
Are you happy now?
Overachiever Acadamy
Of course I’ve had it in the ear before!
Blasphemy Attorney
WEAR EVERY HUGO THEIR YOUR
i have become more and more aware of the existence of “subscription services” (and have actually signed up for a few, myself), where you sign up, and pay a chunk of money, and then you get pins, or buttons, or stickers, or candy, or what-have-you, once a month for a year.
my impression is that they’re really “trendy”.
so, i have decided that i’m going to have a go at creating one myself.
mine is going to be the “incense of the month” club: you sign up and pay a chunk of money (i’m thinking between $75 and $100), and, in return, once a month, for a year, i’ll send you between 10 and 25 sticks of special, rare, unavailable anywhere else on line or off, incense… and maybe a little blurb about the incense, and a sticker or a button or something, if i want to add some extra zip to the whole thing.
at this point, i believe i’ve got enough “special, rare, unavailable anywhere else on line or off, incense” to fill 25 or so subscriptions for a year… honestly, i can’t imagine more than a handful of people subscribing, at all, but i’ve been wrong before…
i think, at this point, the hardest thing for me may be the fact that, in order for this to even come close to having a chance, i’m going to have to “talk it up” on “social media”, the whole idea of which turns my stomach.
so, anyway, look for the "incense of the month" club announcement coming in january.
a fire truck, with all of its lights on (but no sirens, as this is a residential neighbourhood) just drove past our house.
we live almost at the end of a dead end street, so i went out to see if i could see what was happening.
what i saw, was the fire truck, with all of its lights on, turning around at the dead end, and then driving back up the street.
WTF, right?
then, about five minutes later, i saw an ambulance, with all of its lights on, drive past our house. when i went out, it, too, was turning around, and it, too, drove back up the street…
WTELF???
Ruth Bader Ginsburg — which means #drumpf is going to get to appoint yet another lifetime supreme court judge… thrill! 😠🤬
the postmaster general, louis dejoy, the republican mega-donor to #drumpf, who has no actual experience with the post office, but who was, nevertheless, appointed to be postmaster general by #drumpf; who, in september, 2020 (yes, that means last week), was blocked, by a court ruling, from sending out false or misleading information about the election, and when secretaries of state requested that he show them examples of the mailing he was planning to send out, he refused to do so…
… has sent out false or misleading information about the election! SHOCKER!!! 😲
how many things can i count on this postcard that are false or misleading? 😠
1) it was sent to me, a voter in washington state, where we have had ALL MAIL-IN VOTING FOR AT LEAST TEN YEARS! and, yes, i am aware that it was actually sent to “Postal Customer”, and not directly to me, but the fact remains that i, and hundreds of thousands of my closest neighbours, LIVE IN WASHINGTON, WHERE WE HAVE MAIL-IN VOTING!! 🤬
in my opinion, the biggest “false or misleading” thing about this poscard is that it was sent to anyone in washington state! 😠
2) “start today…” go to this URI… but when you follow the link, all you find is MORE false and misleading information… especially if you live in a state (there are 10 of them) which has all mail-in voting…
3) “request your mail-in (often called “absentee ballot”)”… except that, in states where they have all mail-in voting (once again, there are 10 of them), they’re NOT called “absentee ballots”, which are, in fact, an entirely different sort of ballot, for a different purpose, altogether.
4) “Add postage…” my ballot is postage paid. does that mean i have to add MORE postage? the aforementioned web site doesn’t have anything to say about that.
5) “at least 7 days before election day.” does that mean that, even if i drop it in a ballot drop box 5 days before election day, that my ballot won’t be counted? as before, the aforementioned web site doesn’t have anything to say about that… 😒
and, as far as murdering people goes, if i can’t murder someone important, like #drumpf, pence, or dejoy (which, i admit, is pretty unlikely), or someone more local, like katie daviscourt (seriously, look her up… she’s a certified nut case with a dangerously wild imagination and a BIG audience), i’m perfectly happy to murder myself, so you other people don’t have anything to worry about. 😒
ETA 200921: HERE is a link from the secretary of state for washington, that has a lot more reliable information about the election than anything you can get from the federal government these days… 😒
i’m where the blue dot is.
we’re further away from the wildfires at the new place than we were at the old place, which is futher to the left, and more towards the bottom, in between pacific and edgewood, just north of the puyallup fire.
moe sez we’re going to be okay, but the sky has changed from blue, to grey, to orange, within the last half hour, and there’s a fine layer of ash everywhere.
and there are STILL people who insist that “global warming is a hoax”…
😢
today, i got two letters(!) in the standard mail(!).
one of them was an official letter from the DOR, telling me that i had, recently, assigned myself “administrator” of my account…
except that it was addressed to the wrong name…
the other one was an unofficial letter, in a hand-addressed envelope, from a rental company which now, apparently, owns the property that i lived in EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO(!), informing me that they had received a letter from the DOR at that address (seriously, i haven’t gotten mail there for EIGHTEEN YEARS 🤯), and that i should update my address with them.
they included the letter they received.
it was a letter, addressed TO THE WRONG NAME, informing me that my business account does not have an administrator, and gives instructions on how to apply for the position.
that’s not the bizarre part.
the bizarre part is that the return address on the hand-addressed envelope is “YDPAGES”, all in uppercase letters, with the address 12819 SE 38th St., Bellevue, WA 98006.
the letter is on the letterhead for RNR Property Investments, at the same address, and is signed by the CEO for RNR Property Investments, whose email address is at ydpages dot com.
is this starting to sound a little sketchy to you? it is to me…
that address is, now, a UPS store (which doubles as a post-office box location). that address is also, literally, RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from the place i used to work before i got my job at software.com (which became openwave)… according to my handy list of when things happened, i worked there from 1996 to 1998… at that time, there were no buildings there, just raw hillside, covered with second growth forest. i used to eat my lunch on that hillside. i found psychedelic mushrooms on that hillside…
this guy, who sounds REALLY sketchy, somehow got standard mail for my business, at an address i haven’t used in almost 20 years, and mails it to me, and it gets here at EXACTLY the same time as a message from “the government” about EXACTLY THE SAME THING…
if i weren’t already paranoid enough, as it is… 🤬
while i was living at our old place, i used to walk through the neighbourhood, down to the park, through the park, and then back home, in a big, semi-circular, 4+ mile route.
something i have been unable to locate at the new place, despite the fact that we’re surrounded on three sides by the cedar river watershed, tiger mountain, taylor mountan, and a number of other places to hike, there is nothing within walking distance apart from the walsh lake overflow ditch road, which is just under a mile away from our house, and behind several layers of “NO TRESSPASSING” dire warning signs… 😒
but i digress.
fairly early on, after i discovered this route, i encountered a guy who would be sitting in a late-’90s-model SUV, probably a ford or a chevrolet, near the intersection of S. 380th and 42nd ave. s., in the unincorprorated area of king county just north of milton/edgewood (which is in pierce county). this guy would just sit in his car, engine off but listening to the radio. he was an “older” guy, probably between 60 and 80 or so, and someone — i don’t know if it was him, or someone else — moved the car from time to time. he was never sitting in the driver’s seat when i saw him…
and i saw him, in exactly the same place, in exactly the same car, doing exactly the same thing, day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine, for EASILY ten years, and, since we lived in the house for 17 years, there’s a good chance that it was fifteen years…
i was at the old house this afternoon, and i drove by the spot, and, sure enough, there he was, sitting in exactly the same spot… someone had moved the car, and the back hatch was open, but he was there, sitting in the passenger seat, listening to the radio…
i imagine that it could have been me, if i had been like 95% of the other people who survive having a brain injury… and i wonder why people like rick and sketch and simon are the ones who get to die, while i, who have had every opportunity to die, stubbornly defy all odds, and stay alive. 😒
i got prices from arun this morning. it looks like around $300.00 USD plus shipping for 40 dozen units (which works out to around $1.75 retail per unit, before shipping). why they didn’t send me the shipping charges is still a mystery, but it probably has something to do with COVID19, as that is the excuse for just about everything, these days.
at this point, i’m going to assume that the shipping (air freight from bangalore) is going to be TERRIFICALLY expensive, possibly amounting to more than the total cost of the incense itself. if that is the case, i may want to get more incense, to even things out a little.
i should also get in touch with the three or four other incense sellers that have contacted me, recently, and see if they’re willing to front some money for some rare, desirable incense, at which point i could, theoretically, purchase more than 40 dozen.
we are no longer a democracy, or even a constitutional republic. we are, now, a fascist dictatorship, under the rule of donald john trump.
if donald john trump decides that the election is unfair, he will make such a decision once the election is complete. if he doesn’t win, that will mean that the election is unfair.
we no longer have a president.
we have a dictator.
this has been announced, today, by his mouthpiece, kayleigh mcenany:
also, today, nancy pelosi told postmaster general louis dejoy to put back the post office infrastructure that he, recently, ripped out, in an attempt to thwart people being able to vote by mail, something donald john trump has clearly admitted to wanting done.
his response was to say that he has no intention of doing that.
if he doesn’t win, the election is “rigged”, but even if there’s a democratic landslide, he’s making sure that he’s going to win anyway he can, even if it includes cheating.
if that’s not fascism, i don’t know what is.
former president barack obama says that we can still save the country by voting.
fascists don’t let you “vote” them out of power. that’s not the way fascism works. 😠
Phishing Emails Used to Deploy KONNI Malware
if you are in the habit of using micro$not software, particularly the office varients (word, excell, power point, etc.), you should beware of the new “phishing” (specifically, “spear-phishing”) attack which uses an infected microsoft word document as the vector.
solution: don’t use micro$hit.
alternative solution: don’t use windoesn’t, or, if you do, don’t open ANY files that you receive in email, from ANYONE, if you weren’t expecting it, keep your antivirus software up to date, backup everything, and pray that something doesn’t happen anyway.
this is just the most recent extension of the exploder control controversy, started by my friend fred, back when W95 was current… except that, now, instead of calling it “OLE or “ActiveX” they’re calling it “VBA“, and it can do a lot more nefarious things to your computer than the exploder control could do — and the exploder control was relatively benign, in that it ONLY shut down your computer without your say so…
but micro$lop made a BIG OL’ fuss about it, when fred actually got it signed, because of the fact that it used ActiveX APIs in EXACTLY the way they were supposed to be used, and the automated process of signing didn’t take into account what the control actually DID, and whether doing that thing, at that time, was actually USEFUL… 😂🤣
by the way, the exploder control was SPECIFICALLY designed to work with W95 and IE3, so, unless you’re browsing on your grandfather’s computer, you’ve got nothing to worry about. 😉
i’ve done some more work with this and now it seems to be going more in the direction i was intending… but it’s got a bunch more work done to it, so i would expect it to at least be different than it was before, and, apart from some more glaringly obvious differences, for the most part, it is the same piece of music… and i like that.
Seven Different Tracks, Manipulated and Combined (with a subliminal message)
as you can probably tell, instead of being five tracks, it is now seven, and it has had the addition of the subliminal message, which is somewhat more complex than i originally imagined. the seven tracks are “This is the day”, “The problem with growing boys”, “Sing to jeezis”, “WWJD radio”, “It ain’t over yet”, “Veggie tales – the selfish song”, and “I’m a little weenie”.
yes, i was trying to make a statement with the choice of tracks. no, that is not the subliminal message. keep guessing.
all of the tracks are heard forwards, and only once, with the exception of “It ain’t over yet” which is heard once reversed, and once forward, at the same time. all of them have had significant modifications to their pitch, speed, tempo, and/or a combination of those things, in order to fit them within the required parameters.
this is not finished, and it’s sort of not going where i intended, originally, but i like it anyway.
originally, i intended it to be A LOT more chaotic, and incorporate at least twice as many source tracks, and then i intended to put a “subliminal message” into it, which you could only hear if you sped the track up about 500 times, and muted all the other tracks…
and played it backwards…
of course, this would be impossible to do, because of the chaotic nature of sound, and the fact that i intended the subliminal message to be on its own track, and whispered, and then stretched 500 times, which would render it, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as silence…
homeopathic music…
which would, then, be completely and totally overwhelmed by the absolute chaos of the other tracks.
bounded chaotic mixing produces strange stability.
and what ended up happening, instead, is that the strange stability that is produced by bounded chaotic mixing appeared a lot sooner than i expected, and it sounds completely different than what i had envisioned.
as i said, i like it, but it’s not what i originally set out to create.
and, don’t worry… i haven’t put the subliminal message in yet, so you can relax. 😉
music is frustrating some times, but it never ceases to be fun…
or at least distracting…
anyway, what i’ve got so far is called
200811 Five Different Tracks, Manipulated and Combined
which is fine for a “contemporary classical” piece of music, but probably not what this is going to end up being called.
can i just say that this song is one of the best ever written, in the entirety of human history.
and it was written by my good friend pliny, who is paranoid that “normals” will find out that he does stuff like this. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Have Sex And Die from MOTHRA! — The Musical
don’t “honour” anybody, even your parents, if they don’t respect your freedom to be unique. 🐉
more new music
Honour Is Bestowed On Those Who Deserve It
ETA 200811: it’s different today than it was yesterday. if you listened to it yesterday, but not today, flush your cache and listen to it again. it’s different.
at this point i’m going to have to start planning a release, eventually.
Blob Lardstone
ETA: bonus track also using bob larson sound sources: SATAN!
Pat Robertson’s Weird Way of Doing Sex
Emergency
171007 stairway
Θέληση
No Turning Back
the new house has a slime mold in the back yard!
apparently, it is triggered by “over-watering”, among other things… which makes sense, because i have run the sprinkler in or around that location for 4 days, now, including two days ago, when i “forgot” and ran the sprinkler for two or three hours… and last night it rained, so… 😉
in dutch it’s called “heksenbotar” which means “witches butter”. in scandanavian folklore, it is referred to as the “vomit of troll cats“. in english it’s called “dog’s vomit”. scientifically, it is called Fuligo septica. more information at Fuligo septica, the dog vomit slime mold.
so, i got a bunch of “christian” kiddie records on freecycle. they were actually CDs, but there were about 20 of them, and, usually, i collect these things off freecycle, to protect actual children from having to be brainwashed influenced by them. if they’re really awful, or if i think they have useful sound-source material, i rip them, and, then, usually, i shred and/or recycle them.
this is what happens when i think they might “have useful sound-source material”. 😈
it’s called No Turning Back and it makes me laugh… a lot…
the new house has water that is supplied from a local artesian well.
this means that, for the first time in 40 years, i am drinking water from the tap, CONSENTUALLY.
for A LONG time now — probably closing in on 40 years — if there was artesian well water, i would prefer that to anything else. if it wasn’t available, for a while, i used a filtration sysem. it’s not that i’m freaked out about flouride in the tap water, it’s just that i know the pipes underneath my house.
i discovered well #5 through whispered hippie lore, shortly after i arrived in bellingham in 1979, but i didn’t actually learn its location until probably 10 years later, when i was hanging around with ruth, who took me there a number of times. it was during this time that i got my first 5 gallon bottle, one that i liberated from the advertising company i worked for.
then i got a second 5 gallon bottle… and a third… and a fourth… and a fifth… and a sixth… and a seventh, which came to me shortly before we moved.
i haven’t been to well #5 since we moved. 5 of the bottles are out in the shed. the other two went away with the old house garbage.
we knew about the water source before we moved in. that was one of the deciding factors. basically, it saves the gas money to get to lynnwood and back… which was one of the reasons for the sixth and seventh bottles in the first place.
we did NOT know that the house has central air conditioning. we knew that it had a heat pump/air conditioner upstairs, but not throughout the whole house. when we took possession, the heater was turned off, and when i turned it on, it came up in “heat” mode, and the air conditioner upstairs didn’t work at all… so, we fell back on the old reliable fans, that we had from the old place, and figured we’d deal with it later. when later came, about a month later, i called a HVAC specialist to come out and evaluate. he reset the computer and taught us how to use it, and now we have central AC throughout the whole house… it turns out that the previous owner (who had the system installed in 2018) hadn’t been using the air conditioner, and had only been using the system for heat. the air conditioner upstairs didn’t work because, if one of the controllers is set to cool and the other is set to heat, even if it is turned off, neither of them work, and you have to turn the whole system off to reset the computer before it works again.
i have NEVER lived in a house with central air conditioning. at best i have had one of those air conditioners that hang out a window, or ones that have a vent to a window. to me, a house with central air conditioning was “fancy”, and the only people i KNEW who lived in a house with central AC were my aunt and uncle, who were lanndowner/farmers in central illinois. even my grandparents, who all lived in central illinois, didn’t have central AC.
i suppose this may be the price we have to pay to live in the vicinity of DJ, who came into the kitchen — AGAIN — about a week ago — if i hadn’t been there, the dog would have followed him — and, according to moe who talked to the neighbours on the other side, they think DJ may have taken a shit in their fountain… it could be, he wanders the neighbourhood with no pants… 😒 we put a digital lock on the front door, that automatically locks when someone who has the digital key passes through, so that there will be no more unwanted kid or dog in the kitchen. we’ve had to put up a visual barrier (shade cloth) on the fence, to prevent their dogs from bothering our dogs.
but the more we do to isolate ourselves, and fend off their kid, the more it just enables them to slack off and be lousy pet owners and worse parents. i’m afraid it’s just a matter of time before we have to call CPS, the police, or both. i’m aware of the fact that “the subgenius needs slack”, but when it comes to neglecting your handicapped kid, it’s going too far.
VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide — 🤣 VMware wants to stop using three terms – “ghetto”, “kill switch” and “taint” – but is yet to devise alternatives.
Black Lives Matter, and everything, but this shit is funny! 🤣
they are still making aparajita! i can order directly from the manufacturer!
APARAJITA WILL BE BACK!🎉🎊🎈🎊🎉
the latest about aparajita:
no good news, i’m afraid. i’m down to my last two boxes of aparajita, and then i am COMPLETELY OUT… for retail sale.
(my “personal stash”, of around a kilo, is the exception, of course.) 😉
HOWEVER, i am cautiously optimistic. an email i sent on 12th april has JUST been responded to by mavana’s representative in india, a guy named arun, with whom i have dealt extensively, in the past… 15 to 20 years ago…
he didn’t respond to any of my direct questions regarding aparajita, he asked how i was getting along in these times of global pandemic…
the global pandemic is fine, and all that, but I WANT MY APARAJITA, GODDAMNIT!
and it’s not JUST for me: i’ve got two other retailers who are breathing down my neck for it, and, just a couple of months ago, i had to PREVENT some unknown miscreant person from swooping in and buying ALL my remaining stock, just prior to ravi shankar’s birthday celebration — the only reason he wasn’t successful is that the first of his two credit cards was declined, which gave me the chance to go in to the web site and make the changes necessary to prevent him from doing so again — so i KNOW the demand is out there.
comet NEOWISE, as seen from approximately 47°18’16.5″N 121°06’07.4″W. the next time we’ll see it is in 6,700 years.
it was visible with the naked eye, but this photo was taken by my wife and her awesome camera which is controlled by her phone… the camera and the phone are separate objects, linked by bluetooth. she can make adjustments to the camera without actually touching the camera, which is essential when you’re talking about extended exposure times. this particular exposure was around 15 seconds…
also, the lack of having to develop the film and make prints before discovering how awesome (or shitty) the picture is, adds A LOT to the whole experience. 😉
a long time ago — probably mid-1970s or thereabouts — i was at the Marrowstone Music Festival at Fort Flagler State Park (which should give those people who know about such things a much clearer idea of exactly when this occurred) for a two week “intensive”, where we learned, rehearsed, an at the end of the two weeks, performed a concert of orchestral works.
a lot of the trombone parts were mostly rests, with occasional blasts of fanfare, or glissandos, or other suchlike “trombone” things. trombones in a classical orchestra have a reputation for being lazy, and jokers, but that’s only because we have nothing else to do! nobody writes for trombones in a classical orchestra setting!
it’s true! beethoven, the quintessential classical composer, wrote NINE symphonies for “full orchestra”, but he only wrote one piece that had parts for trombones, the Three Equale for Four Trombones, which is one of the most beautiful pieces in existence.
for the most part, the classical period was before what we know as the modern “trombone” existed, and, at best, the “trombone” parts that exist are usually parts for serpent or ophecleide which have been transposed.
after one morning rehearsal — where the trombones had rests and didn’t play at all for the 4½ hours of the morning rehearsal — we were all feeling a little punchy as we went to lunch. for some time, i had been warning the other trombonists that, if they left their instruments out, on the stage, when we weren’t there, something bad could happen to their instruments… i was thinking something along the lines of “someone bumped into your horn and now the horn has a disabling slide injury that will cost several hundred dollars to repair” or something like that, and i always put MY horn away, when i was not actively holding it in my hand, but, despite my almost constant, annoying reminders, the other trombonists left their horns on the stage as we went to lunch.
so, i developed a plan…
while the other trombone players were eating lunch, i attacked their horns.
trombones that have “attachments” (i.e. every trombone that is LOWER THAN a “tenor” trombone) have at least one valve, which lowers the trombone’s pitch. when that valve is not activated (most of the time), the trombone plays in B-flat, but when the valve is activated, it plays in F (or some other key, depending on other things). most trombone players that have a valve, only use it occasionally, to play notes that they would, otherwise, be unable to play reliably. the valve section of tubing is like a separate little bit of the trombone, that is only used occasionally. it has its own tuning slide, and, when the horn is being played without the valve, the extra tubing is sealed off from the main part of the instrument.
what i did was remove the tuning slides for the valve sections of their horns, and filled the valve sections with water. then, turning the horns upside down, i replaced the valve section tuning slide, and placed the horn, right side up, on the stand, so that it looked like it hadn’t been touched.
when they came back from lunch, they picked up their horns, blew a few notes, and then cycled the valve, which released the water into the main part of their horns…
BLLLOOOOP!!!
then they “emptied their spit valves”, thinking that their horns just had water that accumulates when they went to lunch… after about 5 minutes of emptying their spit valves, they gave up, and took the slides off and dumped the rest of the water out of their instruments…
all the while i was busting a gut trying NOT to laugh, which, among other things, would have disturbed the rest of the people in the rehearsal, some of whom were actually rehearsing by this time…
and, you know what?
they never left their horns out on the stage after that… 🤣
this is my current string ball. it’s about 5 years old, and it already looks different because i’ve added string to it. i use a very loose definition of “string”: there’s some metal cable and a fair amount of plastic in there as well… it’s a “string-like” ball, in that regard, but at this point nobody would know unless they actually unwound it… which, under the worst of circumstances, is very unlikely.
in the past, i have been the owner of a couple of string balls that were considerably bigger… one was big enough that, when i was holding it in my lap, you couldn’t see my head. i’m hoping that this one will reach that size, or bigger, eventually. 😉
our new house has a whole bunch of interesting things that were left behind by the previous owners. i get the impression that i would NOT have gotten along with them in the slightest (they were #drumpf-supporters), but this is one of the things they left behind. it’s better that way.
this is my office. it’s also the music room.
this is the music room part. i’ve got my piano and my sythesizer set up, for the first time since i got married (which was 22 years ago), and, because of the fact that i bought a mixer in the interim, i now have it set up so that i can use the synthesizer (a yamaha DX7) as a synthesizer AND as a MIDI-controller. as a MIDI-controller, i’ve got old, familiar Reason on my laptop, and i’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s MIDI-controllable on my tablet, which i haven’t played with at all, because i haven’t had room to set it up. i got the DX7 a SuperMAX+ upgrade a couple of years ago, which was also after the battery died, so i’m going to have to learn how to use it all over again from scratch, and i’ve got to reload all of the stock noises (which i’ve got, thanks to a MIDI-controlled patch library on my laptop), but that’s part of the “fun” of COVID19 lockdown… i’ve got the time to do that sort of thing…
this is the result of the “shakedown-cruise” of the audio studio, called The Diambola Mikado Fun Pack Mix #1*. it’s made from ONE of the samples in The Diambola Mikado Fun Pack by Ergo Phizmiz, which is taken from his work, called The Diambola Mikado.
last month i was going crazy, so monique took me to see the National Wild Horses Monument in quincy.
i don’t know why this photo came out so fuzzy, compared to the other ones… but, unfortunately, it’s the only one i got of this particular milestone, so you might have to squint to see it…
the other day i had occasion to wander through Celebration Park in auburn. when i first lived in auburn, in the early 1970s, what is now celebration park was a huge, essentially vacant lot that had some abandoned businesses on it. nobody wanted it as residential property, because it was in the flight path for the airport. at some point, in the distant past (before 1960) i think the property had been an airfield, or something like that, but, by the time i got there, that was long gone, as well. in the ’90s, when i was in bellingham, the city bought the property and created celebration park, but it still has a lot of the same aspects that made it a vacant lot, including a lot of wooded areas where homeless people camp, and drug addicts shoot up…
which is where i found this… interesting… little tidbit.
on the 4th of july, we went on a road trip, so that the dogs wouldn’t freak out because of all the fireworks. we went through the Ross Lake National Recreation Area and saw this waterfall.
BOUNDED CHAOTIC MIXING PRODUCES STRANGE STABILITY!
my 60th time around the sun was celebrated on saturday. never, in my wildest imaginations did i ever think i was going to be 60 years old… in fact, my imaginings never exceeded age 40, which means that i’ve been living new and unimagined territory for 20 years now.
we celebrated by having a “gathering” in our back yard. kiki, sasha, stuart, d. barnes and jesse, his son, and hobbit and lucifer, his… partner? i’m not sure exactly what their status is, but they’ve been together for 1719 years or so… and they all brought musical instruments, and we had a “jam session” in the back yard. monique made the german chocolate cake (my favourite), and cupcakes with raspberry butter cream frosting, made with raspberries from our back yard…
it was good to see those folks, after such a long time, and it was really good to play music with them.
* i am MORTIFIED! i read the title as “The Diambola Mikado” and named my piece “The Diambola Mikado…” and then i find out that the name is actually “The Dimbola Mikado”… i’ve already released my mix, and even presented it to mr. phizmiz — who didn’t say anything, which makes me wonder whether he’s just being polite, or whether he didn’t notice… oh GAWD, whatever am i to do??? 😭
i’ve never seen the movie “Soylent Green” (although i have read the book on which it was “loosely based”, called Make Room! Make Room!), but i’ve heard all the quotes, and seen a bunch of youtube excerpts…
so, when they first came out with a product called “soylent”, i was skeptical, to say the least.
but then, i had occasion to start drinking a “protein shake” on a regular basis, and i discovered that, while ALL the others had “sugar” as one of their first five ingredients, soylent contains NO sugar… yes, it has other sweeteners, but they are not within the first five ingredients.
and it tastes good.
then, they came out with soylent mint and chocolate, in a green bottle… “soylent green”…
i’m sure some executive, in some penthouse office somewhere, is chortling with evil glee at that one. 😼
and it tastes FANTASTIC!
seriously, i could get addicted to this stuff!
i realise it’s got a name that gives you nightmares, but it’s really good! you should try it… in part, BECAUSE of the fact that it’s name gives you nightmares! 😎👍
i finished a sculpture, yesterday.
i’m tempted to call it “Sweet Darling”, because that’s what the first, random person i didn’t know said when i showed it to her…
but it’s not particularly appropriate, and she was a high school music teacher for 30 years, so it may not be an entirely accurate critique…
maybe “Bob”-o-phone, or Tele-“Bob”… 😉
today is our 22nd wedding anniversary. i got monique a yellow rose tree to replace some of the cat-killing lillies that are in our front yard… or possibly to screen the (finally finished, two months late) fence from the outside dogs… who HATE the fact that, when they come to fence-fight, our dogs go inside, or don’t go inside, but don’t fence-fight, and get TREATS for not fence-fighting… i suppose i’ll let her decide where to put it, but those are the two spots i would choose.
as i said, the fence is finally finished… only two months later than it was supposed to be, but it makes SO! MUCH! DIFFERENCE! i actually watched DJ come up on the front porch (nobody was home but me), and when he got no response, he went around the side of the house, came across the 6-foot fence, and DID NOT come up on the back deck, or start hammering on the sliding glass door! 👍 seriously, i feel sorry for the kid, because his parents are totally overwhelmed, and have only the slightest clues how to deal with an autistic kid… and, apparently (i haven’t actually seen anything, but i’ve heard WAY more than enough to get a good idea), part of the way that they DO have of dealing with him, involves a fair amount of yelling and hitting… 🙁
i still haven’t found a place that i can walk, comfortably, when i’m on mushrooms, but, because of the fact that we’re, essentially, surrounded by state forests, watersheds and suchlike, i’m sure that i’ll find something, eventually. it’s been tough, though, particularly with the voluntary quarantining, social distancing, and constantly decreasing supply, i’ve been wanting to take mushrooms A LOT more than i have, recently.
i’m making a sculpture out of found objects, in a disused gohonzon that i’ve been carrying around for AT LEAST 20 years. so far i’ve used two 11 balls from two different sets of pool balls, a single, spike-heel, patent leather shoe that i found in the parking lot of the hospital where my father-in-law died, a grey ball from a track-ball-mouse-thing, several random pages from a gideon bible, a pair of reading glasses, a couple of old, but new-in-container antenna decorations from ivar’s fish and chips, a fishing lure, a couple of random vacuum tubes, a bunch of organ stops, a bright green, micro-fibre duster, and various parts of an old telephone… and liberal quantities of hot glue. it’s almost finished, but i still have to figure out what to make the “mouth” out of, and i’ve got to take apart the phone to get the cradle for the receiver out of it, because that’s the part that i’m using. i’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now. it feels strange to be “creative” after such a long time. but it feels strangely like home. it’s really good to have a workshop that i know where everything is (even though i’m still unpacking stuff), and not have to move stuff out of the way, or figure out where to put the other unfinished projects before starting.
it’s taken almost four years, but i think the united states is beginning to realise that, possibly, electing drumpf may have been a mistake… although we didn’t ACTUALLY elect him, the electoral college did that, but that’s an entirely different story. and it’s taken the fact that drumpf WAS IMPEACHED, along with 150,000 needless deaths from COVID19 (and climbing hourly) because of his incompetence, constant, blatantly overt lying, corruption and crony-ism, and weeks of protest over dramatically increasing police brutality… and we’re still not getting rid of him and reversing course on everything he put in place, we’re just talking about the possibility that, maybe, it might have been a mistake to elect him. 😠
and it doesn’t look like, if he’s actually voted out of office in november (which there is still a signifiant probability that he won’t be, for one reason or another), it’s going to get significantly better any time soon, despite the fact that, IF he’s voted out of office, the replacement will be a democrat. joe biden is the presumptive democratic candidate, and the only reason why joe biden is looking AT ALL good, at this point, is because drumpf is looking so PHENOMENALLY awful. joe biden waffles too much on things like cannabis and “black lives matter”, is less than exemplary in his recollection of his personal contributions to history, has a tendency to get confused and/or forget what he’s saying which, some have said, is a precursor to dementia, and he has a creepy, huggy, kissy, fondling attitude towards, especially, younger women and girls, that makes my skin crawl. 😖 unfortunately, from my point of view, the only logical candidate is vermin supreme, and if this weren’t such an important election for drumpf to LOSE, i would vote for him without reservation.
Æstholes
since monday, 200608, i have gotten SEVENTEEN new incense orders, which works out to 3.4 new orders a day, in 5 days. 🤨
under ordinary circumstances, i get 3 or 4 new orders A MONTH. 😖
someone must have mentioned my web site on their podcast, or something.
also, it may be that someone mentioned my web site on a podcast about ravi shankar or the beatles, because by far and away the most incense i have sold since 200608, has been aparajita. now there are approximately 35 boxes left before i run completely out. 😒
i’ve got another set of reflectors… blue ones… and that tree to the left has some definite possibilities… also, we actually have a hedge-trimmer, now… 😈
pretty much how it went for every interview i ever had… 😒
today is the third day of NOT using Kontact, the MUA that i have been using pretty much ever since i switched to linux, back in the dark ages.
i really liked kontact. it did EXACTLY what i wanted it to do: it handled all of my email addresses in a logical way, made it easy to switch from one email address to another, worked well with my business set-up, my installation of sigrot…
but it had a fatal flaw which i have been trying (and, mostly, succeeding) to work around for quite some time now, and that is its use of akonadi, which is the interface between the MUA and the SQL database that lives behind it.
for the first few years i didn’t even notice a problem, but then i upgraded my operating system, and everything blew up. i ended up installing the new operating system from scratch, and summarily trashing three or four years worth of collected email. it was a difficult process, but i got through it.
through the years, i have tried installing a number of MUAs, in order to try and get away from kontact, but either they didn’t do what i wanted, or they simply didn’t work at all, so i gave up and went back to fighting with kontact…
“the devil you know”, right?
after that, there were a number of times, primarily during updates or upgrades, when i had to battle with kontact/akonadi/SQL, to get it to work, and i had to trash a number of years of collected email at least one more time before reaching the point at which i am, now.
four days ago, i ran the operating system updates, and, after i was done, i tried starting up kontact, and nothing happened. i tried starting it from the konsole (rather than “clicking” on the “icon”, which is how you start it in the GUI), got a vaguely worded, cryptic message about being unable to start “hebrew.wgz.sizes.sonnet.plugins.hspell”, and then it hung up.
which is very odd, because i have never even installed the hebrew language pack, and have no idea why it would even be attempting to start the hebrew spelling dictionary…
i tried asking Kubuntu Forums for solutions, and got the same answer that i have gotten every OTHER time i have asked about how to fix kontact, which is “kontact is broken, install thunderbird instead”.
so i tried installing thunderbird (AGAIN), and, after having some “words” with my operating system about whether this new piece of software actually worked (or not), i successfully installed and more-or-less correctly configured it, and started using it.
it’s a little different than kontact… or, at least, my perception is that it is a little different than kontact. after some futzing around, i learned how to configure it to use more than one email address — actually, i may have done it “the other way” first, because the terminology for “accounts” and “identities” is slightly different on kontact — and, as far as i can tell, there is no easy way to add an “X-” header line to outgoing email, like there is in kontact, but that may just be because i have yet to find the place where such a thing is configured.
and, then, yesterday (after i had, more or less, given up on kontact), i discovered that kontact actually worked… it had been a few days since i had given up trying to start it, because of “hebrew.wgz.sizes.sonnet.plugins.hspell” not working, and, without thinking about it, i “clicked” on the “icon” and kontact sprang back to life!
so, the first thing i did was transfer all of my contacts, and most of my RSS feeds (i got bored and antsy, so i’ll finish them later) to thunderbird.
for some time, now, when i “quit” kontact (select “quit” from the “file” menu), i have had to go to the konsole, and “kill” the process that kontact was running, so that it would actually quit. i also discovered that “kill”ing kontact STILL allows incoming mail to be downloaded, a process that i don’t completely understand (it may have something to do with akonadi interacting with the POP3 mailserver).
also, for even longer (i recall at least two kontact upgrades that have had this behaviour, prior to the one i am currently (not) using), when i first start kontact, after booting up my computer in the morning, about 98.9% of the time it gets to the point where it’s displaying correctly on the screen, but before i have the chance to do anything, it puts up a dialogue box that says that there has been a fatal error and kontact will quit now. the dialogue doesn’t say what the fatal error is, and it only has an “OK” button, which makes everything disappear when i click it. under this circumstance, when i run “ps -u salamandir | grep kontact” in the konsole, kontact is, actually, not running (unlike when i select “quit” from the “file” menu), and if i restart kontact, it works without any further problems…
except that, sometimes (usually at least once a day), it freezes for anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, and when it does, there’s a very good chance (greater than half the time) that it will crash. usually this happens when i have just selected a message to reply to, and/or usually it happens when it is in the process of downloading new mail or RSS feeds. sometimes i can anticipate when it’s going to happen, when i have to reply to a message and it is in the process of downloading.
thunderbird doesn’t have these problem. when i select “quit” from the “file” menu, in thunderbird, it actually quits, and doesn’t keep downloading mail anyway. thunderbird doesn’t crash for no reason, or freeze and crash. it may not be kontact, but on the other hand, it’s not kontact.
my impression is that the operating system struggles when there is more than one MUA running, and, because of the difficulties i’ve been having getting kontact to quit, i don’t like to keep both of them running for long periods of time, especially since, apparently, kontact’s interface with the POP3 mailserver takes precedence, even after i “quit” and “kill” it, and even when i start up thunderbird first (which it shouldn’t, but it goes to support the fact that “kontact is broken”).
Rule #3 states “Spammers are stooOOpid.”
if you need an example of rule #3, i have one for you:
the spammer sent mail from a computer called… get this…
UCEBOX.CO.ZA
😝😂🤣🤪🤦😠🤬
for those of you who still don’t “get” it, not only is the computer in south africa, home to all things shady and illegal, but “UCE” stands for “Unsolicited Commercial Email”… in other words, “spam”.
it’s as though they’re saying, “fuck yeah, we’re so gawd-damned proud of the illegal spam we send, that we’re going to name our computer after it, and nobody will care, even if they do notice!”
people should have to take an intelligence test before being allowed into the human race.
seriously.
drumpf hasn’t declared it…
yet…
but he’s got the military “protecting” washington dc, which is illegal, and one tiny step away from him going for it.
i am antifa!
increasingly violent protests have been escalating globally. if we had all listened to colin kaepernick, way back when, we might have avoided this.
meanwhile, drumpf has issued an executive order making antifa a “terrorist organisation” — meaningless, as antifa isn’t an “organisation”, but convenient, because now drumpf can claim anybody is antifa, and have them arrested — and inciting violence on twitter with rhetoric recycled from the republican side of the ’60s-era race riots.
and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” means the same thing 50 years ago as it does now.
COVID19 has facilitated increasing fascism. it’s just a matter of time before drumpf declares martial law, and/or someone assassinates him.
something that would be supremely ironic, in drumpf’s case: “assassinate” is a word that begins with not one, but two “ass”es…