Category Archives: Communication

The Ask Old Jules Blog

Posted on January 29, 2012 by | 11 comments

Jeanne’s migrating the Ask Old Jules feature from Facebook to a blog to be linked to this one.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Facebook thing, here’s what it’s all about.

Several years ago I used to amuse myself between doing other things by answering questions on a Question/Answer site.  Over the years I somehow managed to build up 13,000 answers to every sort of question imaginable, many of which were inappropriate or off-the-wall enough to forever have them banning me from the site.

I’d send them an apology promising never to do it again, they’d restore my membership, and in no time at all some pencil-necked stuffed-up questioner would report me again and get me banned.  But while all this was going on, Jeanne was religiously copying and pasting the stuff, saving it for her own incomprehensible reasons.

When this blog came to being and nobody was reading it Jeanne decided to use some of the more inane Q/As in her files on Facebook to point people towards the blog.  But a lot of the Q/As were too long to post on Facebook, so eventually the choice was to drop them entirely, or to continue them on a blog.

She’s been working like an illegal alien or some foreigner setting it up, putting some of her art work as headers, generally creating a pleasant blog site.  Her thought is that people reading it might wish to participate by asking questions there.  I welcome any avenue providing me more opportunities along the lifelong journey of discovery to discover what I think.  Especially in an environment where I’m less likely to be banned than was the case in that other Q/A thing.

So beginning February 1st the Ask Old Jules blog will be up and running.  A link will show up in the blogroll. All the old archives from the whatchacallit, Facebook one, will also be stored there if you want to have a look-see to get an idea what she was doing.

Old Jules

Note from Jeanne: Posts here on So Far From Heaven will continue as usual when Old Jules and WordPress are cooperating with each other.
At this time posts are scheduled on Ask Old Jules for Wednesdays and Sundays. That might change depending on participation.  Comments are  welcome as usual, but if you ask a question, it might be used (without your name) as a new blog entry with an answer.
Shorter Ask Old Jules entries will still show up on Facebook from time to time.
And here’s some Leonard Cohen that I’m fond of, even if he’s not singing:

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Communication, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Internet, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blogging to Keep Off Boogie Street

Posted on January 28, 2012 by | 24 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I’m a bit out of sorts this morning.  That pic above was taken for the post about hats worn backward, but if I paused and had a look in the mirror it think it would be me again, minus the backward High Roller.  Hats You Can’t Wear Sideways or Backwards

The protracted computer fiasco put me fairly far behind on one of my projects, which I went a hundred miles an hour for a lot of hours yesterday playing catchup without getting there.  But I think doing it must have worn my mind down along the edges and frayed my thinking processes enough to have me wondering if I’m not getting old.

If I had a vehicle and enough slack in the budget I think I’d probably forget everything for a day and just go for a road trip for a day.  Try out my Texas Thumb and Finger Signs and let the projects, the chickens, and the cats fend for themselves long enough to get a recharge on my batteries.

But that’s not going to happen, and the project’s going fairly well once I reconstructed where my head was when I got distracted by computers.  The roosters are singing up Old Sol and I hear cats hissing at one another on the front porch, so all I have to do is wait until my head clears, kick start myself into motion.

I’ve been fighting off urges to write long written works lately, which I’m not going to do, and one of the ways I avoid doing it and push the urges back involves typing words on this blog.  Pressure release valve, more or less.

I appreciate the role you readers play in the process.  If you weren’t here I think I mightn’t write the blog, and find me sneaking up on myself writing a book instead.  A pure disaster.

Thanks, all of you, for coming by occasionally.

Gracias,

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 2012, Communication, Country Life

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Penis Enlargement Software from Norton Symantic

Posted on January 24, 2012 by | 11 comments

Got an email I haven’t opened, presumably from Norton Symantic noting I haven’t plugged the modem into the E Dell Machine to test the 79 mb downloaded driver.

At least I assume it’s from Norton Symantic, though the whatchallit ‘from’ says it’s from Best-Penis and the subject line says, Max-Gentleman Enlargement Pills.  But I’m not fooled.  Norton Symantic was popping screens up on me all manner of ways yesterday creeping in with things intended to interrupt my focus and goals for eventually getting this E Dell Machine online.

Norton most likely suspects a degree of trepidation on my part and is poking sharp sticks in my eye suggesting I need to grow a set of whatchallits and go ahead and test it.  After which they’ll sell me some penis enlargement software to make it work, which they figure at the moment it ain’t going to do.

Bastards.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in Communication, Senior Citizens, Solitude, The Lone Psychiatrist

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Computer Saga Proposed Denouement

Posted on January 24, 2012 by | 14 comments

Good morning readers and thanks for coming by for a read.

Hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be strutting like a peacock, wearing my Texas Hatters Manny Gammidge High Roller tilted at a jaunty angle, certain I’m a smarty-pants extraordinaire.  At least that’s how I’m planning the final chapter of this monumental butt show.

But it’s 7:56 pm Monday evening, and I’m 43 % done on a 79 mb download of a modem driver.  Six hours 29 minutes from now the box says, I’ll know whether this is going to work.  Except I’ll be in bed six hours and 29 minutes from now, unless I pick that as one of the times I get up to pee.

But here’s the rundown on the plot thus far. 

Ed’s comment reminded me I had a weirdly shaped and sized hard drive I’d yanked out of an old Vista E Machine I bought new at WalMart a few years ago and it died after about six months and $150 spent in repair shops.

So I pulled open the Dell and voil’aismimo!  The drive looked more-or-less the same as the one from the E Machine, aside from some extra parts.  I worked an hour-or-so getting the extra parts off the Dell drive and onto the E Machine one, installed it, reassembled everything, clenched my teeth really hard and squeezed my eyes shut and I turned that commie pig on.

She booted spang up, showed me a screen I hadn’t seen since the E Machine died.  But, the fly in the ointment was that the modem still didn’t get recognized.  I ran through a flurry of downloading alleged drivers from sites all over the web, putting them on a CD, loading in the E Dell Machine and having them snubbed like clerks in camera stores used to snub a person brought in a Brownie Hawkeye for a roll of film.

Meanwhile Norton Symantic was slipping me mickeys behind the scenes, popping screens up at me threatening to keep me company if I kept downloading from non-regular free driver places.

Which I’ll keep short by saying, led me to Dell and my current act of genius downloading 79 mb on a dialup with 12/2 Romax wrapped in electrical tape between me and the power pole. 

So, tomorrow morning when you read this you’ll be seeing words of a man with a modem working on an E Dell Machine running Vista, is the way I want to end this chapter.  Wearing a 1972 vintage Manny Gammidge Texas Hatters High Roller.  A man commanding respect, admiration and quite possibly veneration.  A man you want to be like.  Same as before all this crap happened.

That’s the proposal for the chapter.  Assuming the editors don’t think that 79 mb download wasn’t a high enough price for our guy to pay to get a damned modem working.

I’m going to schedule this tonight before I go to bed to post at 6:00 am.   Just to make sure it goes to work before the editors finish breakfast.

Old Jules

6:46 am edit:  Seems prudent to get other things done before I unplug the modem here and plug it into the other machine to test the driver.  The world needs coffee before it begins the kind of foolishness this day might be destined to bring.  It isn’t that I’m reluctant to step boldly into the future.  It’s just a minor fit of hesitation on my part to contemplate the Odyssey Homer never had to deal with.  Putting a computer on my shoulder and walking inland until someone asks me what it is might be the next step, dragging the Toyota 4-Runner along behind until someone asks me what that is, too, seems a lousy day to anticipate.

12:23 pm edit:

Done Deal

14 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Communication, Country Life, Current Issues, Education, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Thrift Stores, White Trash Repairs

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Priorities Floating in a Syrup of Reality

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming for a read.

Sometimes I surprise myself with how stupid I am.  Every time I get thinking I’ve plumbed the depths of human folly something comes along to prove there’s another layer down there for me to probe.  One of the ways it all manifests itself in my life has to do with sorting out priorities and shifting things around to accommodate critical paths.  When enough pressure builds behind a particular critical path stricture my focus is drawn there and I begin some new stupidity energy release intended to allow the dammed up whateverness to pass through.

At the moment the focus is computers.  The one I’m typing on is an old XP machine I bought at a garage sale a year-or-so ago for a strictly online machine for browsing and downloading data.  But gradually for the sake of speed and convenience I sneaked around and allowed myself to do other things with it project-wise.  Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Now this machine is trying to take a hike into oblivion.  It wants to join the other two computer carcasses stacked over on the futon that once did what it does.  I bought an old XP in a thrift store for $50 to replace this one when I knew this one was going to retire, but a lot of files and settings in the one in front of me now need to be transferred to the next one.  One of those is the modem driver that allows that machine to use the external modem this one uses to go online.  It won’t recognize the modem, absolutely refuses to acknowledge there’s a modem connected to it.

Everyone tells me there’s nothing to transferring this stuff.  I’ve got a cable especially made with a CD to allow this comp to talk to that one and transfer what’s needed.  Both machines are reluctantly willing to admit they’re capable of doing it, each proclaims it’s ready and more than willing to do it.  But then, each points the finger of blame at the other, claiming the other one has something faulty causing it to drag its heels.  Neither will acknowledge a connection is live between them, thought the light on the cable says there is.

So I have a dying machine here I can’t get any of the downloaded or installed programs off of into the other machine, which is bad enough, but worse is the fact the replacement machine doesn’t even have the brainpower to recognize the phoneline modem.  So it’s not figuring on having to go online.

Meanwhile, the offline machine I use for actual heavy-lifting is off the table and residing over with the two carcasses because the power cord, the keyboard, the mouse and screen it uses are being used by the XP intended for the next online one.

A lot of the day yesterday was spent trying to get these two XPs to shake hands and talk to one another.  But today, I think this ‘new’ XP is going into the pile of carcasses where the heavy lifter is now, and the heavy lifter’s going back to work doing what it needs to be doing.

Wasted a lot of time getting there, and more time telling about it.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Communication, Human Behavior, Internet

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sculpting Realistic ‘We’ From the Ideal Universe

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | 16 comments

Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.

“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”

Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions.  Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick.  I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.

“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here?  You and me?  You and all the cats?”  He glared at me.  “You, the cats and the chickens?”

I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this.  I felt a tirade in the making.  “Just you cats and me.  The chickens can’t be part of it.”

“Well, that’s a relief, anyway.  But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.”  He gestured with his nose toward the porch.  “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

I thought about it a moment.  “That makes sense.  It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”

  His frustration was obvious.  “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are.  For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me.  And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”

This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything.  “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’.  When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’.  But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving?  Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”

He waited while I considered it.   “I suppose I don’t.”

“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”

The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking.  Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life. 

When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined.  The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy. 

“Do you have proof of residence?”

“There’s my driver’s license.”

“That’s not enough.  I need a utility bill or tax return.”

“I didn’t bring that.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy.  And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.

Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure.  In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries.  When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with.  In Washington, D.C.  In Austin, Texas. 

And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.

“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve.  Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do.  No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”

Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.

Old Jules

“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while.  But the skunk-instincts and  chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in.  The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.”  Josephus Minimus

 

16 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Communication, Current Issues, Liars, Politics, Poultry, Relationships, Survival

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Price of Solitude

Posted on January 14, 2012 by | 23 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by this morning.

I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning.  Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life.  The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream.  But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff.  I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.

The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.

Busybusybusy.  It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was.  From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them.  I thought they’d passed out of my life. 

I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up.  Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.

Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back.  Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description.  It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.

Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again.  But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream.  I never cared much for him anyway.

Old Jules

23 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Astronomy, Communication, Human Behavior, Solitude

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Tanglefoot of Expecting the Unexpected

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 20 comments

You couldn’t make this up.

Yesterday several blogs I subscribed to began with identical words:

A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” prosecuted as terrorists, perhaps because nothing could more terrifying than exposing where our so-called food comes from and how it is manufactured.”

I didn’t disbelieve it initially, but it seemed a bit sloppy, though not outside the realms of the possible.  What bothered me about it was the fact nothing was mentioned about who made the FOIA request, why, and the precise wording of the contents of the FBI document. 

So I plugged the sentence, A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” into the dogpile dot com search engine.  http://tinyurl.com/7y6cokz

My thought was that it wouldn’t require much search to find an initial post with the core information.  Instead, as of early evening yesterday, there were 20 pages of posts repeating the one I’d recieved.  Earliest I found was December 23, then more a couple of days later, gradually building up to a landslide yesterday.  Blogs all over the web re-posting the same piece of writing, some with variations or addenda of their own.

Not one expressing the slightest doubt the story was true.  Not one questioning where the original claim originated.   Today there’ll be more as the panic spreads, I’m thinking.

The problem is the powers running this country opened a door to a new avenue of the believable.  Indefinite detention Act voids US Constitution, Get a Job! Internment/Resettlement Specialist, US Army, Sunday morning thoughts December 18, 2011, and  The Long Watch referred to the activities of the US Congress a few days back, along with the way some people were responding to it. 

But once that desire to be able to lock US Citizens up without any due process based on being suspected of terrorism was enshrined in Congressional activity, all bets were off.  Suddenly it makes all kinds of sense for the folks charged with law enforcement and pesky people doing all manner of legal things they’d like to lock them up for to want to squeeze them into the meaning of the word terrorist.   They know that, and you and I know they know that.

So out of nowhere comes a claim the FBI’s already doing it.  How much disbelief does the discerning reader need to suspend to accept it as gospel without the acquired skepticism of experience with the huge mass of BS on the web?

Heck.  Maybe it’s even true.  The only evidence it isn’t true is the fact there isn’t a grain of evidence it is.

Expecting the unexpected has some inherent pitfalls.  One being that we see what we expect to see.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Liars, Politics

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

Posted on December 30, 2011 by | 20 comments

A few years ago my friend Rich asked me if I’d be interested in talking with an older guy in his late 70s who was experimenting with hydrogen generators for retrofitting onto his vehicle.   I wasn’t looking into hydrogen generating, but I’m a curious sort of fellow.  I didn’t require any persuading.  I just told Rich to give Bryce my phone number.  About a week later he called me.

Turned out Bryce had spent his career as chief mechanic for the Ford and General Motors Speed Teams, or Racing Teams, some such thing.  He was part of the group that put together the hydrogen powered vehicle that established a record for the highest speed ever recorded for an internal combustion engine driven automobile.

Using what he learned from all that, Bryce had created a series of hydrogen generators for his own vehicle, trying to maximize efficiency and deal with other shortcomings with the system.  He did it all from salvaged materials.  Heck of an interesting guy the first few times we talked.  I wish I’d taken notes and drawn sketches of what he told me.

At first during our acquaintance Bryce and I had conversations.  Two people brainstorming things he was doing, and I was doing.  But gradually the hydrogen generating conversational possibilities ran down.  Bryce was calling me every day or so, telling me all manner of things I didn’t want to hear, such as what the waitress in the cafe where he took coffee and meals said to him, what he said back, what she said back.  Or what other customers said to him and what he said back.  Or his brother.

Bryce would call, ask how I was, not wait for an answer, and talk non-stop for an hour, two hours.  I could put the phone down, go feed the chickens or make a cup of coffee and come back to the phone without him noticing.  Sometimes I’d tie a bandanna around my head attaching the phone to my ear and read a book waiting for him to wind down.

This went on for months.  I didn’t know what to do about it, except straight-on explaining to him that this wasn’t conversation and wasn’t a source of joy to me.  I mentioned it to Rich, and it turned out Bryce was doing the same thing to him.

Finally, as gently as I could manage, I interrupted one of his monologues and explained the problem, as I viewed it.  I told him I liked him, that I’d enjoy conversations with him, but that I didn’t want to hear the same stories over and over about people at the restaurant, his brother, etc.  That if we were going to continue having communications there’d need to be exchanges and some level of concern as to the amount of interest the other person had in hearing it.

Despite my attempt to soften the words, Bryce got his feelers hurt badly by this.  He never called again, which I preferred to the alternative of things continuing as they were.

Sometime a few months later Rich finally got his fill of it and tried the same tactic on Bryce, with the same result.  He was more reluctant to do it than I’d been, because he felt sorrier for Bryce than I was willing to allow myself to indulge.

Bryce came up in conversation between us a couple of days ago.  Turns out it’s been almost exactly a year since Rich has heard from him, and a few months more than that for me.  We wondered aloud how he was doing.

But neither of us is willing to bite the bullet and call him to find out, on pain of maybe starting the whole mess again.

I began this post figuring on saying some things about hydrogen generators but drifted off into Bryce and his problems.  Maybe some other time, the hydrogen generators.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Human Behavior, Relationships, Trucks

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Long Watch

Posted on December 27, 2011 by | 12 comments

 

Lot’s of high-powered rifle ammunition flying around the surrounding ranches this morning. But I don’t think it’s a government SWAT team come all the way out here to shoot my face off between breaths this fine morning.

In fact, I think it’s deer hunters out trying to squeeze in a last-minute set of antlers on an umpty-ump-point-buck to take home and put on the wall.

I only mention this because a few of you readers and a particular slice of the population of preparedness blogs I read are taking the “Come in and get me coppers!” approach to reflecting on what the US Congress has been doing lately.  There’s a high-anxiety factor leading people to say things on blogs suggesting they think if the government wants them it’s going to have a tough job on its hands getting them. 

Anyone who stops to think about this concept a moment ought to be able to figure out that’s not how it’s going to play out.  Even if they’re correct in thinking someone thinks they’re important enough to send in the cavalry to get them. 

No matter how good you guys who’ve been collecting a thousand different great knives and 200 each calibers of weaponry and ammunition anticipating what you believe is happening, if they want you, they’re going to get you.  If you’ve been shouting challenges at them from your blogs, they’ll most likely do it to your face between two breaths from a distance of a quarter-mile while you take an outdoor leak.

This isn’t the best moment in history to be talking about going to war with the US government.  Even in a whisper.  They’ve spent the last decade developing tactics, strategies, surveillance gear and weaponry intended to deal with people a lot uglier, smarter, sneakier and more highly motivated than any US citizen is likely to be.

I’m not saying what the US Congress did over the past couple of weeks won’t change a lot of things in ways you’ve come to see as your ‘rights’.  I believe it probably will.  I’m just saying you might be well advised to think things through more carefully than you’ve been doing.  You’re all dressed up to play checkers but the game has changed to chess.

Thinks I. 

Old Jules

 

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Country Life, Politics, Survival, The Lone Psychiatrist

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,