21 cards

Mom asked me to play cards with her and Floyd last night.  I haven’t done that in ages.  “Sure,” I said.  I put on some music, and Floyd dealt the cards.

The object of the game is to get rid of a stack of 21 cards by playing them, each person in turn, on stacks from A to Q in the middle of the table.  Sometimes we move one, two, or more cards during our turns, but most times we just take turns around the table and accomplish nothing – take a card to start, try to play, and finally discard a card.

We went around and around for 20 minutes without much action.  Mom & Floyd played several cards from their stack of 21.  Mine stood still.  I couldn’t move any.  I pointed this out to them.  “You haven’t moved any?”  “Not yet,” I replied.

I think Floyd took pity on me and played two As on the table.  My turn came around, and I used my first card.  Then another.  Then two As came up.  I used them to start two new stacks and built on them – A, 2, 3 … up to Q.  I kept playing.  Six or seven stacks were started on the table.  The cards just kept lining up, and I played them.

Why make an ongoing letter entry on this?  Not only did I win the game when M&F were miles ahead of me, but this is the first time in my life I used up the entire stack of 21 cards in one hand.

spiders in the keyboard

It was apparently cleaning day at work today.  T moved some desks and debris out of the office as it was a slow work flow day.  I got into the kick of it later as well and finally tackled my computer keyboard, which was covered in … whatever the stuff is that collects on keyboards and the bottoms of computer mice.  I tipped it up-side-down and gave it a few good whacks.  What came out was surprising – not just the volume of grot but something else – a spider!  I nudged it with my finger, and, sure enough, it was alive!  All this time I’ve been using a keyboard with spiders in it.

server hardware upgrade – SSD

It seems my server is getting old.  It typically runs Windows 7 64-bit with a non-raid cloned (redundant) OS disc, 1.5TB storage disc (pics, videos, teaching material, etc.), and 3TB redundant backup of everything.  Just tonight I switched over to a Solid State Drive (SSD) for the OS.  Can you notice any speed difference?  Hope so.  Been eating up HDDs the past year – 3 in total.  So hopefully this will help.

broke my G-string

Just to be clear, I’m talking about the G-string, string number 3, on my guitar.  I was tuning it and adding a bit of lubricant to the nut of the guitar when so it didn’t make a popping sound and glided smoothly, when

POP!

the string broke.  Oh, so sad.  I rummaged around in my “household” box of stuff to find a replacement string.  No such luck.  I had several other strings but not the one that was needed.  Luckily there was a music shop downtown.  Unluckily, it was in Park Place Mall, and it was Boxing Day.  Ughhh – crowds.  I park at the far end of the parking lot and hiked in with my guitar.  $15 later, I had a new package of strings.

But … I discovered that any similar string will do.  I used a spare B-string (#2 string), and it works fine!  In fact, it tunes better now than it ever has.

In the process, I learned (apparently I have learned to read within the past 7 years) that I have a George Washburn.  Good name, I think.  Except that this was a $150 Costco guitar.  Just the same, it’s a whole lot better than my previous W30,000 (about $30) guitar bought overseas.

Anybody want an unopened package of guitar strings?

Surface Pro 4 replacement parts

I had to replace the pen on my Surface Pro 4.  I lost it.  Don’t ask me where.  Somewhere between here and the college, I suspect.  I’m a boo-foo.  $120 for a pen.  Wow.

Then came the power supply.  It packed it in somewhere in Manitoba.  The only way to charge it was with the car charger.  Luckily, the machine works on 12VDC, not some weird number like 18 volts or 21 like one of my old laptops.  Why not make 12 volts a standards?  Oh, wait, it already is.  Then why not use that standard?  I tried ordering a new one from a computer shop.  No go.  Online only – that is, if I didn’t want to pay double.  Finally, long after returning from Manitoba, it came.

Then … the machine quit.  Well, it didn’t really quit.  The keyboard (Type Cover, they call it) stopped working.  Several hours over several days chatting and talking with Microsoft later (once actually being transferred between and chatting with seven different people), they found out several things were physically damaged on it, making the type cover and USB useless.

So, the long and the short of it is, everything but the keyboard is actually replaced.  <sigh>  What a world we live in.

To combat the idea of disposable electronics and dwindling world resources, I made a cover out of jeans.  I can see that I am winning the war against waste.  Yay.  …  Yes, that was tongue-in-cheek. 

goodbye Firefox, or on Edge

I’ve given up on something I’ve used for … a long time.

Firefox.

I have my replacement Surface Pro 4 tablet and am setting it up the way I want it.  I installed Firefox ver. 64.x.  It stole half an hour yesterday and 45 minutes of this morning’s time out of my life to figure out why Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab was not working.  I went through the web trying things like nVidia / GForce, antivirus, and other software that this tablet does not have.  I finally found a blog somewhere that said I needed to go back to an older version of Firefox to get this feature back.

Well why the hell did they change it in the first place?

Good bye, Firefox.  Last straw.  I’m on Edge now.

NGM Bible hunters

I got an email today from National Geographic.  They have a series called Bible Hunters.  Some investigative journalism on the history of the Bible, I guess, which is all well and good.  It’s a pretty well-known set of texts (if not accurately known).

But I was also watching a YouTube video produced by National Geographic called The Bible’s Buried Secrets National Geographic Documentary HD.  I very rarely see such bias ‘journalism’ from reputable names like yours.  My comments:

This video begins interesting but not too much later gives a poor impression. At 12:00, the video loses ground (no pun intended). Genesis chapter 8 states the rains lasted 40 days & nights. It says the water subsided, not the rains, after 150 days. These are two different concepts. One sentence states it rain, and one states the waters started receding. As well, it clearly states that first a raven was sent out and then, later, a dove. Why is this contradictory? It seems to me that it isn’t. I thought this documentary would rely on ‘documents’ (“documentary”?), but so far it doesn’t hold water (again, no pun intended). It’s like someone saying, “I ate eggs for breakfast and pasta for lunch,” and someone else saying, “Well which is it – which did you eat – eggs or pasta?”

So forgive me, NGM; although I have thoroughly enjoyed your magazines, have a collection of them in paper and electronic form, and have a library of your videos, your journalism shows your true colours.

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