By the way, I have a star named after me and I own one square inch of Irish soil so I am a Lord of the Emerald Isle. You may call me your Lordship. Greetings from the interior of my cerebellum (and a weird and very strange place that it is),
The best thing I've ever done while attempting to write is to get a great writing aid and spell checker. You should too. It's called Grammarly and it is free to bums like me and probably you too. You can get it 100% for free at Grammarly dot com (They are paying me ZERO to endorse it).
I've had a bunch of hobbies in my life. My problem is that when I stop doing one thing to pick up another I never get rid of the stuff that went with the first hobby. My thinking is that someday I will come back to it and I might need it. Also there is always some expense involved so who wants to throw away all that money you already threw away once?
Some hobbies I have had out of necessity, like learning auto mechanics. I could never afford and still can't really pay an auto mechanic to do things I can do myself. Between my Dad and Uncles and my older brothers, I've learned how to do a bunch of things over the years. Sometimes I've been able to pass what I have learned on to a few friends and other times it was just stuff I had to do to my own automobiles. I haven't taken a car in to have the brakes done ever. Other things like changing the oil, I hate doing and make sure someone else has that mess to deal with. When I was a younger man, I would tackle engine repairs with gusto, now I tackle engine repairs with a tow truck.
It was interesting learning about torque and then learning also about how to get a broken screw out of the hole and then also learning to use a tap and die set. One always followed the other when you followed Dad's advice of "one more turn ought to do it, SNAP". I have really never owned a garage so I had a blast laying on the wet ground and changing a starter because I was too stubborn and probably too cheap if the truth is told, to pay someone else to install it. I learned to patch my own holes in my tires of every kind for the same reason. It was easy and cheaper for me to do it myself and I didn't have to wait, I could just do it. I would tackle just about anything and did that for a long time. Then something changed.
One day I woke up and thought to myself that the prospect of lifting that transmission into place and the chance that I would get oil or transmission fluid in my hair one more time was more than I could bear. I started to see the value in finding a trained mechanic and paying the price to have some things done for me. The last big project I attempted was in my wife's car. It took three of us and a good session with "The Google" to figure out how to take the alternator off and replace it on my wife's 2006 Ford shitbox Fusion car. That damn thing was crammed in sideways on a transversely mounted front wheel drive engine. You almost had to take the entire front end off the thing to get to it. You had to remove all of the shrouds under the car, that's about 20 screws right there. It just went on and on and truthfully if my good friend PJ had not come, marshaled the project and lent a very needed hand I would have probably shot that car right where it was parked. We got it fixed and I traded that bastard in on a vehicle with a warranty. That guy from India can quit calling now. I got it covered, I learned that lesson finally.
I shied away from working with wood for the longest time because I could never cut two pieces of wood to be the size I wanted. Then my buddy Rich, who is a terrific carpenter, took me under his wing and showed me the ways of the mysterious wood. I've never looked back although I have to admit, I still have fairly rudimentary tools and I build pretty simple things. I can't really do big stuff anymore, because I can't handle the big sheets of plywood anymore, so I work on projects I can build with smaller pieces. It's more fun anyway. Oh and by the way, the secret? Don't forget to take into account the width of the saw blade and know which side of the line you just marked that you should cut on. That was an eye-opener right there. You wouldn't believe the difference that made in my projects. Square stuff, all of a sudden was square, stuff didn't rock anymore, doors actually closed, I mean my god, It was Magical.
Thankx Rich!
I learned to operate machinery in high school when I started to become a machinist and those abilities have transferred over pretty nicely. Using power tools, in general, has always been my thing and I have quite the collection of stuff I've only used once. Of course I thought I would use it every day when I bought my scroll saw, but who knew? Because of the crossover skills involved in machinery operation and repair along with carpentry I have taught my self a great deal about home repair too. The best lesson I ever learned about home repair is If you cannot do it, get a professional. Especially if you are doing anything with electricity, do it right the first time because doing it wrong can kill your whole family.
I taught myself all about computers through books, hands-on learning, and a few classes over time. I don't compile code like Windows source code but neither does anybody else. I can, however, take any computer apart, figure out what is wrong with it, fix or replace the bad part down to soldering the new part in place on the motherboard and reassemble the beast and it will run. I used to work on a lot of cell phones replacing parts, screens and speakers, and the like. Then apple made taking their phones apart potentially fatal to a circuit if you forgot to unplug the battery. So I retired my phone skills after the iPhone 5. Too much of a headache and too expensive. No one can fix dead hard drives but I've brought a few into the light from the brink of death. I've made laptops sing like they were brand new and have breathed new life into old machines so often that it is second nature. The translation is, I have a lot of computer junk laying around. At least three closets full. Yeah, I'm a hoarder.
I taught myself to write code and to write programs in three different computer languages. How you say? By screwing up a lot. I started in the '90s working with these cartridge and cassette tape driven machines called TI-994a's all the way through today. I learned to write old BASIC line code and would go by the Radio Shack in the mall and fiddle with their demonstration machines, inputting line codes that would ask questions at breakpoints, and it would drive the poor salesmen mad trying to get my crap off the screen and their demo programs to run once they noticed it. It was a diversion and quite fun for a while. Then they wouldn't let people play with the machines anymore. Oh well. I learned to write Visual Basic and vb. net stuff to satisfy problems I ran into. I once created a series of personal software programs that then took to work and ran on a back-office computer in a restaurant that replaced and consolidated all the paperwork we had to do into ones that were based on date. Pick a date and print whatever form you wanted. Of course, it took me a while to do it, but everyone loved it because you could always see the data, and a day or a week or a month was just a matter of picking dates and voila! --> report! It wasn't but a couple of years after that when they instituted their own back-office systems that did the same thing and allowed the numbers to be transmitted to the office on-demand as well. It was fun though.
I remember I once thought that in order to schmooze with the big boys that I had to learn to play golf. It turned out the big boys didn't want to schmooze with me and although they played golf, they thought any of their underlings that played had too much time on their hands and didn't have enough to do. Ah! You only have to hit me with a brick one time and I get it. So I took a few golf lessons and started to play with friends and my older brother whenever we could. It turns out the best golf lesson I ever got was in a softball dugout. I asked a man I knew named Ollie how he held a golf club and he showed me his grip. You know, I used that grip right up until I had to stop playing because of this disability crap that has just about flattened me.
I never said it but thankx Ollie!
And now, here is something that I hope you will really like!
- Man there is a lot and I mean a lot of misinformation floating around about this Covid-19 virus. I have seen things that don't make any sense at all multiply at such a rapid rate that even though I am pretty sure I have a grip on reality, I'm not so sure about the majority of us. People are talking about chips being implemented to track us, how there have been no cases of flu this year, about how masks are an infringement of their freedom and oh by the way, about how they do absolutely no good, they are mixing in their chemtrails and Coronavirus stories, talking about how it is a hox, about how the CDC has said a ton of stuff (that they haven't said) and literally hundreds of other things all the way down to how the government is paying hospitals and other healthcare concerns a ton of money to misreport deaths as being caused by the virus. The same government that says Ketchup packets is a vegetable suddenly has the wherewithal and the ability to track 350 million people? On top of all that? Go back to work people, open the bars, go see the beach, but stay 6 feet away from each other. Uh-huh.
I do not think that anyone is really all that interested in my opinion on the subject because of the amount of time they have invested in their own "5G causes Covid-19" theory, however, if you are interested even a little bit there is a ton of information available on Wikipedia. The reason I am promoting it there, is that I happen to know that everything that is posted on Wikipedia about the virus is curated by the scientists involved in battling it and there is no political input.
Unlike every other section of it, you actually have to be an approved editor to post or edit in this section. Deride it if you like but at least this is a consistent source, without regard to what your college professor said about it or how much the media doesn't like it.
Check it out (If you want, no pressure)---> Misinformation about COVID-19 - I was looking around yesterday and found out that an Apple watch is over $500. A used one is right up there in the stratosphere too. Are we really paying this kind of money for phones and watches at a big enough clip that it makes sense to keep upgrading them into a market that doesn't seem to have a top-end? I am not an early adopter and have never been but this seems ludicrous to me.
- Here is something nobody saw coming. In NYC and other places that have been plagued by rats in recent years, the closing of restaurants has had a deleterious side effect. Starving rats have become desperate and downright dangerous in their quest to find enough food to stay alive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now warning that “some jurisdictions have reported an increase in rodent activity as rodents search for new sources of food.” In this case, an increase in rodent activity doesn’t mean that they are starting GoFundMe pages or ordering food online. It means that rats and mice are going where no rodents have gone before and even exhibiting “unusual or aggressive” behavior.
Tip your waiter please and oh, remember to feed the rat. - Several companies are thinking this new normal is going to include a lot of work from home and some may do it permanently, at least that's the trend being seen as businesses come back online after a couple of months of shutdown. Both Twitter and Facebook have announced long term plans to allow as much as 50% of their workforce to remain work from home employees forever. Square, Shopify, and Box all have plans to follow this trend in some fashion. A lot of industries have seen cost reductions without any loss in productivity so the trend will continue to be examined and clarified as long as corporate egos are kept in check.
- Yay! Finally some good news from the world of science. It's about time. Scientists who study the human genome say they may have discovered a "skinny gene". You know the type of person who has it, that woman or man who can eat all they want, never go to the gym and never gain weight? I'm not going to be Mr. Science dude and post the overly complicated details, however, if, on the very slight chance you may be interested, you can read about this discovery and the story that describes it here --> The Skinny Gene story
Well, and that's usually a deep subject, have a great day and stay out of traffic,
Aloha,
BigMike
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