Category: Various

Just some interesting video I found today…

Are you kidding snow gods? I have my snow tires off, street treads on, reservations made for laying back in comfort down in southern Arizona over Spring Break, and you do this? I should just call in sick, or stuck, or something tomorrow.

The truth is, I’ve never done any of those things over the decade I’ve been employed by TRPTA, so I guess I’ll just slip and slide to work tomorrow :-)

I have hardware issues going on with my main computer. She’s been a great old powerhouse tower for many years now but is showing her age by just powering down without notice. Some part is failing internally so I’m firing off this post quickly to let my millions of followers know that I may be resorting to other options. Please stay tuned…

Update: I made a few tweaks and things seem to be alright now…

The subject of what’s my truth came up tonight as talk radio rolled across the sound waves of my internet connected Echo. It is perhaps the most powerful question we can ask ourselves as political discourse divides our country, and I have to base my perception of truth on the life that surrounds me.

• Our local schools are straining physically and financially from illegal residency.
• I recently had a very disappointing experience at our local hospital, they suck.
• People do not respect a bus pulled up sideways in a parking lot with lights flashing. For the second day in a row, I’ve had to honk and glare down a driver trying to come around my vehicle as kids are flowing out in both directions.
• I need to retire and move to southern Arizona. I really can’t take much more of this pretentious contentious god’s country.
• Nobody gets my code, I give up…
• I am loved by my woman, my son, and my cat.
• The memories of my past are my enemy, goodby memories…

I dug into the food storage container behind the drivers seat of my truck today looking for a snack, when I saw this. I guess it’s time to dump all of the edible stuff in that container, which I use for my travels. It’s apparent that fluctuating temperatures over time aren’t good for oil based crap like mayonnaise!

I’ll keep all of the eating utensils but the food needs to go. I tried one bite of some old crackers and spit it out. There’s also some dried tuna in there, bye bye…

I was zooming around the Mohave desert tonight, near Death Valley Lake, and I spotted this thing. There were a few of them scattered out over a hundred miles or so but this was the most interesting. You can see it for yourself here.

Here’s another:

I gave Steph the gift of crawling under the house to replace the well-water filter and I’m cooking up my ribs. Who says that grumpy old bus driver Jim is not romantic?

We finally made it out of the valley today and drove the 45 miles to the new Super Walmart in Rexburg. I like it, spacious, lots of reasonably priced stuff, and they have groceries. We stored our first shop in the truck and then went back to buy our food.

I got really pissed off at our local ripoff grocery outlet (Broulims) yesterday. Lots of people checking out, two lines, and I was stuck in the one with the fat mexican cow with attitude checker, and an old guy writing a check. I left my Chinese food rice, with juice, on the rolling thing and walked out.

I had a list of things I wanted at Walmart and got most of them. The coolest thing was an amplified speaker that I have now velcroed to the back of my scanner. The sound is so clear it’s like I’m inside the sheriff’s vehicle while he plays his music and scolds his deputies. I swear I just heard him fart while he was talking!

I just took an online Harassment training course, remotely. My boss Amanda was kind enough to create an online space where I was able to login to the meeting as it happened down in Idaho Falls, see the charts and hear the video, and basically be there.

It worked well, as a tech guy I was impressed, very cool!

(and I didn’t have to drive to IF tonight!…)

I wrote my first computer program in 1969, in Fortran as I recall. It was long before the PC arrived on the scene and the current environment in 1971 was the evolution of the IBM 360 to the System 3 and RPG II.

That was my world back in the seventies, a hot shot programmer making big bucks because very few people knew how to code it, and the ones that did, like me, got all of IBM’s business.

When the IBM PC came out, I bought one of the first ones from a ComputerLand store in Oakland, CA and switched gears from corporate computing to personal. Several businesses and multiple products evolved from that transition and it was an amazing run through the eighties.

In the nineties, I dropped out and moved to the Seattle area to be Riley’s dad and along the way became a bus driver and transportation supervisor.

Twelve years ago Steph and I moved here and I’ve been driving the local bus since and I have continued to be a coder through the entire process.

Perhaps this helps explain me somewhat…

btw, try out my latest code!

Or just enjoy the light ripples on the deck tonight, from our family room:

I almost dropped my prescription shades into a large pot of white bean soup at Broulims the other day when they came apart on their own and fell off my face. I took them to my eye guys and they said they were unfixable, so today I got an eye exam and ordered new shades.

It’s been four years since the last exam and my prescription has changed, for the better! The eye doctor seemed pleasantly puzzled that my vision has improved. Even the little pre-glaucoma spots he had seen previously were better, not worse. I recall that one of the side effects of a cayenne pepper regime is improved vision. How about that!

My morning drink for the last few years is a small V8 mixed with one teaspoon each of:
• Cayenne pepper (the hottest I can buy)
• Turmeric root (from the curcuma longa plant)
• Hawthorn berry (ground up in the coffee grinder)
• Lecithen (organic)

Cayenne originated in Central and South America. It’s named after the capital city of the French Guiana, Cayenne. From seeds found on the floors of caves that were ancient human dwellings and from ancient fossil feces, scientists have found that people were eating cayenne peppers as early as 7000 B.C.

On another note, I heard a deputy being dispatched to the drive-through pharmacy at Broulims around noon today. The lady pharmacist (had to be our neighbor Carla) called to report a severely intoxicated man with a child of about four and two dogs at the window. She told him to pull over and park, and he complied. As the deputy responded he asked how she knew he was intoxicated and was told that he was slurring his words and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag!

The deputy found them and called over an ambulance to deal with a severely intoxicated individual. Dispatch was asked for priors and many came back, including the most recent, for DUI. He even had a breathalyzer restrictor on his truck, maybe he had the kid blow, how pathetic.

I’ve been writing code lately as a means of ignoring irritating seasonal illness. Last year, with my Cayenne Pepper regime, I managed to dodge everything, but now I’ve got the shit that’s going around the Valley.

Even the best health practices can’t ward off the flu/cold crap, but you can minimize it. The way I do it is by taking nothing! No pills, no pharmaceutical fluids, nothing but natural things. Like lemons, honey and brandy mixed into a big cup that knocks you on your ass to the point that you don’t care if you’re sick. Then you sit back and write code!

The code coming out of my old brain lately has been, well, if I may say so, pretty damn fine. It’s all state of the art stuff. I could be working for a cool start-up right now, with millions in my viewport, but I choose not to. Instead, I just take value from the fact that as the years have advanced into the future I have continued to play on the cutting edge.

I take pleasure from the creation but am saddened by the lack of observance. I passionately await a response from anyone who gets my code. To receive a sincere comment that states “wow, what great code, I love this app!” would justify my effort. Sadly, over the years, this has not occured, but for a few rare occurrences…

Still, I rock on, to my own internal special cayenne pepper heartbeat: ZypDown

I read an interesting piece today by a lady who as a college student watched a blind person approaching a low hanging tree branch and because she was with her friends and didn’t want to look foolish by jumping up and warning the person they were about to hit their head, let it happen.

As the collision occurred and the person went down, she said it changed her life. She failed to act that day for no reason other than a notion of peer acceptance.

What she learned was to never freeze, never falter, and never fail to do the right thing. I love this, especially since I have no friends to impress, and I embrace this philosophy completely. I also carry a vicious heavy head banger underneath the driver seat of my truck that I would not hesitate to use if I saw a man on woman assault taking place.

While we’re discussing ethics, I listened to a great drama going down here in the Valley today, on my scanner. Two male roommates get in an argument, perp steals 60 hydrocodones from the 911 rp, crashes in the snow, has warrants from back east, and is ultimately arrested for extradition. I could go into the explicit details but I suspect there are laws about discussing events you observe from law enforcement radio, in a public forum. I’ll check it out…

One of the most worn out phrases of human interaction is “How ya doin?” or simply “How are you?“. Come on folks, don’t you wish people would just stop saying this! How do you reply? One response I thought up, but have never had the gonads to apply was, “Well, I was fine but now that I’ve seen you, I’m really horny!” and I came up with a new one today, “It depends, do you know CPR?“.

The real questions are, why do I continue writing this blog, why do I continue writing code, Hank, why do you drink? Hank, why do you roll smoke? Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?

God, I don’t know. So many times I’ve considered blowing this thing up but it represents years of my life. The other day I couldn’t remember what the little gadgets were that I used to separate the ribs in my crockpot, so I searched on my blog. (here)

A seriously maintained blog, like mine, has value, and I will somehow continue through the fog of my doubt, to speak to you… Thank you for listening!

Around mid-December, I got a registered letter from a natural gas company in Oklahoma. They told me that my dad, who died in 1989, had some money sitting around that they wanted to get to his heir, and off their books.

Really? So we got in touch, I verified who I was, and they said they would cut me a check as soon as I returned the form contained in the registered letter. I was cool, I didn’t ask how much the amount was, but we’re talking natural gas royalties here!

I didn’t want to waste any time since Xmas was coming up so I went to my local Fed-Ex and overnighted the form directly to the agents desk at 1000 the next morning, and it cost me $44.71 to do it.

Meanwhile, as the year came to an end this last weekend, another registered letter arrived and visions of big money were dancing in my head. This morning I walked into the Driggs PO to get my check, took it out to my bus, and opened it.

The check amount was, wait for it…, $44.27. Which means that after the $44.71 to overnight the form, I ended up $.44 cents in the hole!

Sheesh :-)