In the last installment of ThermionicEmissions, we learned about one of my Days From Hell, which happened before 10am. An entire week of Serious Agitation, jammed into a few hours. Anyone who has been reading knows this could not go on unappended.
After the bank allowed the mortgage company to take double payments from the account, the account crashed. I had to get up early on a Saturday, which is somewhat like waking someone at 3am for work, and go there. Perhaps because of this, one cannot park there. There is a line to turn off the main street, forming a line to park. The parking lot is overflowing, causing people to park on a side street. Even the side street had run out of parking space. In the lobby, I joined fifteen others in line. I was literally standing by the door, holding it open. In case I got bored, there was a small sitting area where some lady was loudly holding a conversation on her cell phone for all to hear. I swear some of these people were raised by wild animals, although even wild animals don't make this kind of noise in the open.
You have to do some sort of amazing dance of the slips to deposit a check and get money back, so I needed help. While getting help, the cashier noted my account was a mess (really?) and said I wouldn't get much back.
EXCUSE ME?
She was really helpful, though, suggesting I use mobile banking, which would work better in this instance. That was really nice.
Since we were past closing hours, each teller was required to escort the customer out and lock the door, leaving one teller available for customers. I felt bad for the rest of the customers, plus I wouldn't get to hear the Loud Lady finish her conversation.
Will he or won't he?
Once home, my beloved started asking me questions faster and faster and more demanding and why didn't I.... Well, if you would've come with me, like I asked, maybe you'd know.
But it has to get deposited. Justifiable homicide, of which I did not take advantage.
I went to their website after locating the URL.
BE VERY CAREFUL HERE. There are sites set up to spoof or fool the user into giving up their banking information. If the URL to your bank is bobsbank.org, there will probably be a bobsbank.com. Websites are set up by monkeys, who are frequently drunk, leading to sites that vary from Bad to Unusable. This particular site wanted to stress that online sevices would be down from 11pm that night to 6am for maintenance.
The site flatly refused to work on Firefox, so I tried a different browser, which was more cooperative. Nowhere in the menus was Mobile Banking. And why should it be - it's only a service the bank offers. Eventually I found it in the Help section. It took me offsite to Google Play, to get the app. I do not use Google, having removed my account because I don't like their information collection and spying. I gave up. The wife tried. It took her ten minutes to find the app. When two arguably intelligent alleged adults cannot find what they're looking for, there might be a design flaw. Perhaps while drunk, the monkeys dropped their crayons.
Moments later the app was installed. And it flatly refused to work because the network was down for maintenance. Yes, at 11am, the system that was to be going down at 11pm was down. I cannot possibly make this stuff up - it just happens. Wife was most impressed, first by shitty design, second because she had checks coming out.
Do me a favor, please. Leave a comment if you have days like these every few weeks. I truly want to believe this is wrong and does not happen to Normal People like it does to us.
Subsequently the app worked. You put in your name and password, then take a picture of the front and back of the check. The money is then available for use or use at your local bank machine. Note: although you take pictures, they do not go to your picture directory, so if you want proof, take separate pictures or the app will delete them.
This is all extremely handy and I don't trust it. Unfortunately I had no choice in the matter. Interestingly, the stories I read about hacking and theft all occur not at the phone level, but at the bank or business level. Use this info, as well as your own research, to make your decision.
- When police put handcuffs on someone, they say it's for their protection as well as the person's. As well as the person's? How is the person protected by having handcuffs? What are they being protected from - police shooting people that aren't in handcuffs?
Know what's weird? Aside from me?
For us Americans to see stuff we never see. Ever see a black woman with a Scottish accent? An Asian doctor with an Australian accent? A Philadelphian whose accent doesn't make you want to gouge your own eardrums out?
- Diet Coke's new ad campaign seems to resolve around making a decision to have a Diet Coke, which will give you the magical power to do anything you want, even as an 80 year old man in a nursing home.
- Allowing yourself a Diet Coke is not a brave, tasteful decision. It tastes like toilet, with a bad aftertaste. Allowing yourself a real Coke is a better idea. Allowing yourself ice cream or a pound of fudge is a brave, tasteful decision. I don't know an awful lot about advertising, but this doesn't seem like an effective one. Unless people are that stupid, which is a distinct possibility.
With my typing getting worse by the day, I wanted to recommend the Ctrl-Z key combination, which puts things back the way they were before you inadvertently deleted an entire paragraph or inserted four spaces in different spots randomly. This works in most word processors, as well as several other wordy programs.
- I forget what they're called.. I call them snap off knives. They're segmented boxcutters but when the blade gets dull, you snap it off and there's another sharp one under it. In any case, you better not get caught with one in England because it's lethal and offensive. And you better not have a hammer with it - those are breaking and entering tools. England is a weird place. I guess I shouldn't talk - Americans believe planes were brought down with boxcutters.
Father of the internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee says regulation of the web might be needed. "Social network have too much power... and their profit motive means they won't act for the good of all."
One certainly can't argue with that.
Berners-Lee suggests assembling the brightest and best to tackle the web's future.
Talk of regulation makes me bristle. Who creates the rules? Who enforces them? how?
Internet History and Origins
Twenty years ago, F-Secure, the antivirus company, ran a
BBS (bulletin board system), which was the easiest way to contact them. This was (hushed silence) before the web. Surprisingly enough, I ran a BBS too.
How did this work? Your computer was equipped with a modem, which used your phone line to make a call to the BBS. The issue here is that, like regular old phone calls, you could incur long distance charges; these were prohibitive if you wanted to call F-Secure, waaaay overseas. People would locate BBSes in their local exchange and have their computer call. They could do file transfer and/or
'talk to' their friends via a text system akin to putting notes on a big board, hence bulletin board system. These ran anywhere from single line to many line systems. Eventually they connected to the 'internet', which at that time was Usenet Newsgroups. There were thousands of special interest groups, from knitting to politics to left-handed guitar players. Due to the initial design of the internet, a good percentage of usenet users were at universities. As we all know, college students know everything, so there was a fair bit of antisocial behavior (lest you think that bad manners were invented recently, on social media). Everything was done in text mode. Yes, text mode. No fancy backgrounds or, heaven help us,
emojis.
Since I discovered BBSes, I always managed to have a second phone line so could I could call out to them, and eventually run one myself. I started with a 286 computer that, through donations, I upgraded to a stunning 1M of RAM. It gets better: I got a special price on a 28.8k modem... I was in the high speed lane! Met a lot of really nice people, including socializing with them. The good old days.
- The demographics for this blog are such that most readers do not have infants or toddlers. Of course like most of this blog, I'm making it up. I do want to make you aware that there's a SmartDiaper. It will alert you when the child pees. It will also alert Google, or at least the manufacturer.
- How did our parents ever live without this? Good lord - they had to check manually and be aware of the baby.
- It's only a matter of time until the robot changes the baby's draper, removing the need for much contact at all with the future ankle biter.
Inclusiveness and the Violence of Being White
A British company is selling gender-neutral Mother's Day cards to make the day more 'transgender inclusive'.
No.
Even if you're not brimming with enthusiasm for the cards, you'll no doubt be thrilled that there are new mannequins with such wonderful real-life features as full-figured (fat), stretch marks, freckles, and vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose pigmentation. Planned for 2019: chicken pox, bruises from spousal abuse, and second degree burns from a house fire that's suspected to have been set by the spouse.
Nordstroms has ordered sizes 12+16 and will mix them with the "standard" 2s, 4s, and 8s. They still refuse to carry size 10, although no one knows why.
There is actually a Kim Kardashian mannequin, which was bound to happen, but no one is currently producing a Roseanne. The mannequin companies have been making larger sizes for a while, but the stores are not buying them. With this new inclusion, stores are buying them.
I predict that, as with all the new inclusion, this will fail miserably. There's a reason that the stores didn't order plus size mannequins: no one wanted to look at them. As the husband of a former plus size woman, I couldn't help but notice that just about all of the clothes looked like Bozo the Clown. This was a design error. The plus size clothes on the plus size mannequins looked like something out of a department store nightmare. Pick up an actual paper circular for a store and look for plus size clothes. If you can find any, the sight of them makes you want to back away quickly. My wife agrees 100%. They just don't look right. So don't be surprised when people don't want to see plus size mannequins again.
From inclusion, we go to exclusion: SAARTJ restaurant in Louisiana will charge white people an additional $18 (suggested) per meal to highlight the local pay gap, with the surplus going to black diners (some of whom offered to pay the overage). The only question remaining is whether the white folk will have to use the Cracker Entrance in the back.
The University of Minnesota, Alaska Campus, has invited a professor dedicated to "dismantling whiteness" to speak on how whiteness is an "
existential threat" to the US. She discusses the ubiquity and violence of whiteness in her lecture, which is geared toward administrators, but students are allowed to attend. In other words, she wants to empower colleges to "decenter whiteness".
Don't know about you, but I'm proud to be an existential threat. Unfortunately, no matter how large a threat I am, she will continue to get paid for speaking. Interesting to note that white
women are also a threat. We toxic white people should really give the country to non-toxic folks.
It's the right thing to do.
Dr. Lisa Anderson-Levy: neither I, nor any of my readers, have to work hard to put forth the case that
you are the existential threat to the US, with your race-baiting. We need to come together; you want to keep us separated.
Can't we get back to normal college topics, like toxic masculinity?
- The head of the FBI said, in a ridiculous demonstration of his knowledge of IT, that he doesn't know what a back door is. The FBI does not want back doors, it just wants to be able to access your data, if you're a Bad Guy, and with proper legal authorization.
- In response, the NSA said, "Yeah, us too!" and laughed hysterically, as they slurped up every bit (and byte) of your data, sans legal paperwork.
A recent
study argues that there's no such thing as a "straight" man or woman. It claims we operate on a spectrum.
Errr...this comes as quite a shock to the wife. And to me, for that matter. Even assuming this is true, if I don't find men attractive, wouldn't that qualify me as 100% straight? Does the fact that I take my wife shoe shopping move me further along the spectrum toward kissing someone
else with facial hair?
Measurements were taken of pupil dilation, which is a sign of sexual arousal.
Or the room getting suddenly dark. Women's eyes dilated for straight porn, as well as lesbian porn. Men's eyes dilated for straight porn and a guy masturbating. Perhaps dilation also means PLEASE GET THAT AWAY FROM ME.
By the way, lubrication, erections, hard nipples, and looking flush are also signs of arousal.
My favorite bit is that the idea of bisexuality as the norm is becoming more accepted when it comes to women, but men are still struggling with it because of, WAIT FOR IT... the Patriarchy!
Stupid patriarchy.
- CaliBurger recently celebrated its newest employee, Flippy. Flippy, the $60,000 (plus $12,000 maintenance yearly) automated burger flipper would replace those superfluous people who always screw up your order. Unfortunately Flippy didn't last one day. It seems the superfluous humans did it again: Flippy was so efficient that the they couldn't keep up with it. The people were necessary to add toppings and run the registers.
- The only sensible route here is to pay for Flippy's cousins, Toppy and Cashy.
Within months, Amazon and others will start using drones for delivery. Amazon has stated that it will not deliver to certain areas, like southern states, to avoid having their drones shot down by overly protective neighbors. Detroit is also off the list, because Amazon wants their drones to return. San Francisco has already lodged a protest because it's worried about emissions from the all-electric vehicles. There is no word from New Jersey, which is either not answering its phones or forgot to pay its phone bill.
Much more interesting, as well as much easier to pass muster, would be to use those vacuum sucking transport hamster tubes they use in banks. People will simply stand there and watch it for hours. Should this happen, the Kardashians will be canceled.
- Twitter is actively censoring the Drudge Report. When Drudge tweets, Twitter, which usually spoilers tweets, makes the tweet unavailable. Speaking as a Twitter user, the place is turning into a left wing hellhole. As someone who isn't left (or right) and hates censorship, this is morally reprehensible. Once again, it's their game and their customers are free to go elsewhere. I suggest GAB.AI, where I signed up, which is dedicated to free speech. They don't even censor nazis.
Lil Wayne, a rapper, found a unique way to endear himself to his audience the other night in Australia.
“We’re I’m from, I think you all know that’s the states, we don’t throw s**t on stage because all my n*****s got pistols and they don’t know who to shoot at,”
Hey Wayne....
do they really call you Sally?... perhaps you should let Security deal with the throwers of s**t.
This way you can continue inflicting you art upon your fans.
- Are you one of the throngs of people who use Paypal? The new GDPR (EU) legislation shows us the 600+ companies with which Paypal shares your information. There's even a handy dandy graphic visualization.
Are you a triggered Never Trump voter looking for love?
NeverTrump.dating has your back. You can find the right (sorry, left) partner for you and not have to worry about them having voted for the president. You can share your delusions and hopefully, love. For a substantial discount, you can be matched with a Green or a Libertarian.
Anything but Trump.
- Live Nation sent me an email titled "Concerts Announced Just for You". Their algorithms are seriously f-d up and produce some hilarious results, like JayZ and Beyonce. Yes, all classic rock and instrumental guitar enthusiasts will storm the gates for JayZ. The only hope we have for data privacy is that the info shared will be so incorrect as to be hilarious.
Let's Go Guitar Pedal Shopping
People who are not musicians are excused from reading this, however there will be a brief quiz at the end of the blog.
It's been bloody forever since I've bought myself anything more than a few strings. Guitars are still out of the question because of my exorbitant tastes.
Because I was intrigued by Eric Johnson's opener's use of a looper, I decided that might be fun. There are a ton of them, with names like Muku, Getaria, Ditto, Hotone, WALLY, Muzizy, Nux, Mooer, Talent (comes with it?), Road Rage (batters your other pedals), and of course, the Faustus Regurgitator. The Regurgitator probably recharges the lawn scarifier that I just saw on tv.
As with any advertised piece of electronics, the description is sometimes arrived at through translation, resulting in "Chinglish" or "Japenglish" like so:
- Pure analog Whole circuit delay, clear, plump and smooth New Delay effect
- This is the delay pedal with the name of YELLOW FALL
- Comes with Manuel. Manuel from Fawlty Towers? Manuel labor?
- Boutique guitar switcher - turns one guitar into another so you don't have to take one off and pick up another
- Boss EC-2 allows you to record up to 16 minutes - this is helpful when you're onstage and have to defecate. You hit PLAY and run backstage for some relief: excretory or perhaps oral.
Since this is the 2000s, one doesn't simply purchase pedals, one auditions them on YouTube. You don't even have to go to the guitar store, which is good, because most of them suck. This concept is Pretty Damn Cool, as you can get a demo of absolutely anything, including amplifiers than cost more than several cars. You'll never have one, but at least you can tell people you know what they sound like.
You will see all kinds of people demoing all sorts of gear.
One dude shows only the pedals and talks over the video. You see only a python-ish boot, turning the pedals off and on. He has a ton of videos. I think his name is GearMan. The quality of his boot speaks volumes about his method of analysis. He might be the guy who makes a point of using a curly cord. No one knows why.
GearMan has spawned countless imitators. I had to draw the line at one guy who threw out the boot idea and went with socks. You simply can't demo pedals in socks. Everybody knows that.
Once you come up with a decision via YouTube, you head off to Ebay and Reverb to see what's available used and new. You can also discover pedals you hadn't thought of and need to check out too.
What did I do?
I wanted a looper. The research started with online guitar communities and guitar buddies. The depth and breadth of knowledge here is awe-inspiring. Although all of it is opinion, after you get enough of them, you know how to move forward. Everybody seemed to concur on the Ditto looper as a great first basic looper, although there were stories about footswitch reliability.
So I went to YouTube and started watching and listening. Not only was this helpful - it started to open my vistas and potentially get expensive. This is absolutely nothing new to me, but funny just the same. In addition to basic loopers of all reasonable prices and sizes and capabilities, I discovered loopers that did Other Stuff<tm>. Drum machines, vocal uses, and the killer, Delays. Delays and loopers are very similar, as they both involve memory. Initially I was down to the
- JamMan: reasonably priced, has a drum machine. And quite an attractive shade of blue, which was important (if there was a tie).
- Electro Harmonix Canyon: great reviews, about 11 different delays, with all sorts of variations and useful settings.
- Flashback 2: like the Canyon, but can connect to a pc and export loops, plus a Toneprint input, where you can load presets from other users in an online community.
The JamMan came in a number of models and made a lot of sense with the drum machine. Some had bass too. While trying to loop, these would be very handy, so there's no way I could purchase it. Something about the units that had delay too made them more attractive because I could use them as delays in addition to looping.
The Canyon seemed to be a favorite everywhere in the online reviews attached to the demo videos and Ebay reviews. Luckily I found a video comparing the two. Most people seemed to think the Canyon was the winner by far, but my ears told me the Flashback 2 had better sounding output (Canyon was cloudy, with less clarity, but still pretty good). The Flashback also had external connectivity and Toneprint. Not that it mattered, but you can install the Toneprints by holding your cell phone up to the guitar and sending it.
Reverb seemed to have the highest prices, which was pretty odd. Ebay was cheaper by a minimum of $10-20. These pedals came pretty close in price, so it came down to preference. One telling item was that there were almost no used pedals. I'm not sure what it was telling, but it was. I found an open box/demo unit for $20 off the rest of them and bought it. I also got to see other brands and listen on YouTube. Even if I spent more, I don't think a better unit would have helped me more. The next step up involved more 'tracks', which I can live without (at this moment, heh heh).
Here's my complaint about the YouTube demo videos: python boots and socks aside, I'd prefer to listen to these pedals with as generic a setup as possible. Running your 1962 Strat into a Supro amp will not give me a reasonable idea what this pedal will sound like. How about a Strat, Tele, or Les Paul into a Deluxe Reverb or other more common amp? And while we're at it, running a demo pedal with another pedal you like (reverb?) isn't helpful. Nor is your idea of great-sounding distortion. Just make it simple and clean. Use equipment most people are likely to have. Your vintage Strat or custom-made PRS isn't realistic for us Normal Shlubs. One guy who is famous for reviews will not let go of his whammy bar at the end of every phrase. This is not going to help people with reviews, especially time-based effects. Please put the thing away, out of reach, so we can concentrate on the effect.
Don't count me as a curmudgeon (in this case anyway). I truly appreciate the time and effort these people took to give us this great info. Never let it be said that YouTube is completely useless. Just mostly useless, unless you want to see the latest gossip, songs from current, painful-sounding artists, and Macarena videos. I can scan the entire new video page and not find a single video I would watch. Plus YouTube/Google has decided to start censoring, cutting ad revenue, and banning content they don't like, which generally happens to be more right-leaning speech, like Twitter and Reddit, to some extent. With these four online giants actively censoring, this is no longer someone's conspiracy theory. While I don't subscribe to some of the right-leaning propaganda, I am thoroughly against censorship, lest they start censoring stuff I like. Being private entities, they don't owe us anything and free speech does not apply (only government/state entities may not abridge free speech).
So that's how I auditioned and bought a pedal. Being a serious musician that doesn't play outside his house, I have given up on cheap equipment. I want something that sounds good, is built well, and is likely to last as long as I use it and further. Yes, in some ways, I'm all grown up.
