Category Archives: Planned Obsolescence

Saturday, Snow, Then Rain, Then Snow Again ? — From “Latest News from Aerendel”

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Copied & Pasted from “Latest News from Aerendel” :

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Saturday, February 20th, 2016, —ƒƒ— +2˚C / +36˚F & raining at the moment in Atlantic Canada @ 1:11 pm  —ƒƒ— Kathy Krafchick’s Birthday ( & Patty Heart’s too) —ƒƒ—

light dusting of snow on trees and stone wall

– Um, I took this photo about an hour ago. It was still snowing then, but lightly. –

— “Yooks Yike another weird weather day in Atlantic Canada” It began with a light snow falling, the Weather Network expects we might get a centimeter – and then they expect rain ( they were right on that ) And then they expect the rain to turn back to snow –  I don’t think they wanted to guess how much snow we might get on the second round of white stuff, but they thought we might get “≅ 10 mm.” [ almost 10 millimeters ] of rain – But they only expected the temperature to reach 0˚C / 32˚F and we’ve already gone past/above and beyond that.

Crow in a tree against a grey (snowing) sky.

Two Crows were scolding me – When I picked up the camera and aimed at them, one flew away. If you can see the crow in this photo we’re both lucky. Yeah, I think I got him – Upper third & Right third of the photograph. I know what I was looking for.

— Yeah, Crow is one of my ‘totem animals’ – but I’m not about to call myself “Jim Crow”, or ‘Jim Mountain Lion” or Owl or Wolf or Turtle or Swan or Skunk – There’s a Dog in the mix too, and I think Possum shows up to protect my inner child by deflecting threats away – You can read all about that in “Medicine Cards” – don’t google it – go to smartpage dot com and protect your privacy –

Dusting of snow on a stone wall.

And This is the part of the stone wall that caught enough of this morning’s dusting to look interesting, at least to me.

— And while I was uploading photos from the camera’s SD card I realized I hadn’t uploaded the couple of photos I took during our latest visit to the north side’s Pizza Delight, ether on Maple Street or St Mary’s (street or road?)

Cathi in our Pizza Delight restaurant.

I might have mentioned this before, Cathi had some modeling experience as a teen-ager And she looks like a slightly different person in almost every photograph I’ve seen of her. I egged her on to pose for this one, Don’t know whether she’s putting on a modeling face of thinking I’ve lost my mind again for asking her to tip her head forward and look up at me. Almost every model I’ve ever talked to wished that professional photographers were a lot more human than they pretend to be.

— Yay? I should quit while I’m ahead –,

~~~~~ Jim

Weekending-

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Sunday, July 19, 2015 -( 16˚C / 61˚F @ 10:45 pm in the dark and damp here in Atlantic Canada )-

Messy office.

This ‘Office’ is technically transitioning from ‘completely freaking messed up’ to ‘I just might be able to find something I’m looking for in here’.

Yes, we had a weekend. Of course it rained, but- We got things done, and moved forward into a more optimistic state of mind, no matter how many idiotic bits of political lies and rule bending b.s. the current administration is bombarding us with constant commercials on just about every station in Canada, and maybe especially New Brunswick and a couple other target areas. If it wasn’t for the fact that they are so obviously lying and trying their damnedest to get away with immoral bull [ chips ] by playing their propaganda clips before the election has actually been scheduled – which is unethical, immoral, not quite fattening, but should be illegal, and will probably help convince the majority of Canadians who are not brain dead to vote the morons out of office that much more quickly… I might be able to shudder and shrug my way through it. But the evil sonuvaguns are trying to convince vulnerable people that if any of the other parties get to form the next government they will steal the candy out of their babies’ mouths, take away their pensions, and, in general, peel the skin from their bodies as painfully as possible, and set their private parts on fire. The politix of fear are alive and well and Canada.

Pallets, lumber & garbage can cover.

Pallets (& plywood) R us. I got a little bit done, pulling nails out of interesting pieces of lumber that used to hold three decent pallet together to form shelves for plant sales at a nearby chain type hardware and lumber store. They do have Home Despots up here, but this is a more local franchise. The thing on the far left is something I built out of plywood and 2x2s to discourage the local racoons from messing with our garbage. That’s my white hat reflected in the window.

We got out and about on Saturday afternoon after a pleasant brunch. & After grabbing a couple necessities (like food?) at the nearby supermarket, we stopped off at a ubiquitous hardware chain store and stumble upon a couple goodies, like stain for our projects on sale. 🙂 And we were checked out by one of the most friendly and pleasant young cashiers we’ve ever encountered there.

And then I convinced Cathi to check out the free pallets one company leaves out in the hopes that they won’t have to pay somebody to haul them away or whatever business they’d have if nobody came along and took advantage of the free pallets.

What we found there this time was three surprisingly good pallets and one smaller pallet with split pieces but a couple good two by fours. So Cathi said she was happy we checked. We also found the last of the season’s small potted herbs for sale for $.24 each. I think we got two small plastic square things of lemon balm and a couple other intriguing plants, one was peppermint? some kind of mint and the other had tiny light purple flowers.

This morning Cathi went around and planted the herbs along with the ivy she brought home a couple days ago-

Ivy surrounded by grass, climbing a fence.

You probably can’t tell with a casual glance, but there is some newly transplanted ivy in the center of this photo. I told Cathi I’d like to see some ivy and she found some in the bargain/closeout section of one of the stores she frequents. We had nine little pots of English Ivy, which I hope really likes the climate here, and when we set them on the outside porch they thrived, sort of said, ‘thank you’ and now there are something like 4 plants around Jassper’s fence and a couple more in not so easy to spot places. But Yum- They should enjoy the rain we’re supposed to get in the next several days.

And, beyond my usual feeling like I’ve lost my mind, we did okay. – It had rained overnight, and it’s supposed to rain every day for the next four days? At Least?

— As long as you don’t dwell on the fact that, for a promised interview with a local Author I was trying to get an old mac computer to work with the old free version of ProTools and when I struck out with the best computer I still have here for that option I tried to wake up an older G3 (“cute”) MacBook and which, for all its 640 megs of RAM started up and charged the nearly dead battery really well, but when I tried to restart using Mac OS 9.2.2 the hard drive with that operating system had a coronary and played dead. I tried another external Hard Drive with a similar Operating System, but it was even worse. — When I took the worse HD into the office here and connected it to another Mac, that other Mac saw it long enough to know it was there, but when I tried to ‘verify’ and then repair the danged thing, it disappeared and said it was beyond help, but I should back up what I could and then it wouldn’t mount the danged thing and reformat it. But if it ain’t mounted ya can’t back anything up- bluddy idjits- so I tried repairing it again a couple times with the disk utility and it finally gave up trying to tell me it was too far gone (or too old, or too riddled with planned obsolescence???) to fix- well, surprise surprise, it fixed it enough so it would mount. I then tried backing up files. First the routines thought it might take an hour, then a couple hours, then 16 hours. So I went to bed & when I woke up and checked it, it looked like it had been backing up nicely for several hours and then hit a bad file with a name that was about two miles long and full of heiroglyphics- and the only thing it had actually backed up was a stupid icon. grrrr. So I spent most of today manually backing things up one file at a time.

All the time I was gnashing my teeth and backing up stupid files etc. Cathi got up quietly and went outside and transplanted things, thinking it would be raining later.

Garden gnome hiding in ferns.

I wanted to upload a photo of Cathi on her Gazelle, but I need to straighten it out so I’ll upload the photo of a gnome hiding in the ferns by our stone wall.

— And there a very interesting story at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-greedy-companies-making-products-that-break that says France has a law against planned obsolescence. 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

Friday the 13th is a Monday this week.

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Monday, July 13th, 2015 -( 21˚C / 70˚F — Sunny & Pleasant @ 10:45 am in Atlantic Canada )-

odd things on a blue background.

It took me forever to scan this stuff into the form you see here. After installing the software that came with the scanner the scanner refused to work with the computer it worked with fine before we found the disk and installed it. So I scanned it to another Mac, and the pictures kept trying to tip to one side or another and the other little things kept moving. Finally I just said the ‘heck’ with it an kept the last scan.

Yeah, it’s been a tough morning. I woke up aching all over, put the garbage and recycling out, had problems with the scanner after installing the software it came with on a computer that it worked fine with before I installed its software. Fed Jassper, fed Moe, fed me- Sighed a couple times-

I think my graphics/workhorse computer should be officially pronounced dead. It craps out without doing anything now. Planned obsolescence? May those who plan such schnarr things suffer from everything they ever need in the future falling apart when they need it the most. And if those morons manage to re-incarnate in the past, may the same curse follow them there?  Okay, now that I’ve voiced my ire, I can probably forgive them. I don’t think you’d want to be Bill Gates at the Pearly Gates if St. Peter called me over to consult on whether you could go to Heaven, or be condemned to the other place. I’d have to think long and hard about that one.

— Sigh–,

Cathi’s back to work. I ache all over. It’s a Monday.  and yes, to quote Pogo “Friday the 13th is a Monday this month.”

~~~~~ Jim

Found some more old photos

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Friday, July 3rd, 2015 -( 14˚C / 57˚F @ 11:59 pm Atlantic time – in the dark here while we’re using “Startup Repair” to see if the windows 7 machine might still have some life ahead of it.)- Nora K.’s and Matt Kantrowitz’s Birthday today. 🙂 🙂

— Not all of these photos are in perfect shape, but wow, we had some beautiful cousins and friends-

Wallet sized photos

Our cousins, April, on the left and Jamie on the right. Jamie signed her photo with “6th grade” in 1984. There is a bit of dust on the photos that wouldn’t go away.

 

people and dogs posing in the shade.

Nora K. – I think in her back yard in Putney, in September of 1984 – Me on the right with Harley (who became ‘Charles’ when he grew up.) – more or less on my lap, he never was much for sitting still anywhere, and I don’t know if I ever knew the dogs’ names or who they might have belonged to. This photo is a bit fuzzy because of the weird finish.

Normal woman with tall, hairy guy.

Nancy A. – Cousin Lori’s friend, who I never knew all that well, but I rememer her birthday is July 16th? I look like a refugee from a rock band like Three Dog Night. This was some time in the 1980’s.

Two young women with annoying shadows.

Cindy G. and Denise M. (Now Lavery) – Two young women from the post office we used to work at in the 1980’s- in very bad lighting.

Nice looking young woman.

My friend, Lyn, in the late 1970’s, in Rutland, Vermont. The photo was in a plastic sheet for years and that might be what caused the strange lights or whatever that are dancing in front of her here. Looks like a special effect- fairy dust being sprinkled on her or something.

Me in my Navy uniform, around the time I graduated from boot camp.

And, me – from a nightmare I once had that I volunteered to serve my country and was subjected to the demonic company of ‘superiors’ who had been thoroughly warped by the insidious mindset of the military industrial complex. I survived, I think. This might have been a photo taken by a shipmate on a destroyer tender.

— It took me over 5 hours and an incredible amount of grief to get these photos scanned and then loaded into this blog from this computer. The computer played dead, and just before I buried it or chucked it into the nearest river, it said, ‘hey wait a minute, try running a ‘Startup Repair’ program.’ That may have worked. Meanwhile I scanned the photos into a G5 Mac because I was expecting to talk to my sister and mother using Skype and the Yummy MacBook was waiting for them to come on line. Which they never did. And the only other available computer that could do the job was the G5.

— But WordPress no longer likes G5’s because Apple, which, before they made deals with the devil- and/or Bill Gates and company – had been real good about making sure that all the latest and greatest software etc. would run on older Macs. But then the devil, Bill Gates, and the ‘Breedy Gastards’ of this world went out of their way to make sure a whole lot of planned obsolescence was built into anything worth having so people who should be relaxing and enjoying their lives have to be slaves to the demonic economic system we’ve been living under lately- oh never mind- So after I got an older version of “Mail” to work on the G5, then had to restart it because the danged thing would not allow me to ‘compose’ any email- and then I had to add another account because it couldn’t send anything from the original email account I set up with that app. And then, when I got the email message I sent to a gmail account that I can use on this stupid Windows 7 machine, six images came with six ghosts of themselves and I had to download 5 of those images twice because the ghosts insisted I wanted broken graphics for this = should have been really easy = project here. And the sixth image- I had to download three times to get it right.  Grumble, grumble, grumble – But anyway – Here we are. It’s almost six o-freakin clock on Nora K.’s birthday (I forgot her new last name- shame on me. But her husband’s name is Jim and he plays a guitar. Or at least did when I met him.

— Can I scream now? Or should I just chill? Lemme try to chill, sit back and smile and think I may have plowed my way through trials and tribulations that were hurled at me by the forces of schnarr, designed to ruin my outlook on life, liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness – And I came out on top. Or should I sit down and count my fingers and toes to be sure I’m still more or less all here?

( Um, I needed to update this a couple times do to spelling errors and schnarr like that there- )

— ( Laughing to myself at 6:00 am )

~~~~~ Jim

Planned Obsolescent Schnarr –

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Friday, July 3rd, 2015 -( 22°C / 72°F @ 11:45 am under sunny skies on our side of the river here in Atlantic Canada )- -My friend, Greg’s daughter -Kyla-‘s birfday 🙂

Domino, looks like he was complaining about something or other- IN May of 2013

Domino, looks like he was complaining about something or other- In May of 2013

— Okay, let’s see. I can’t say this morning got off to a rough start because I’m still up since last night. The computer I rely on the most, the one I’m writing this on right now, is going blind on me- if I’m doing any graphic-heavy 3D stuff- the monitors suddenly go black and say “hey- we’re not connected to anything-” and since I got this computer specifically to work on completing my game world, and the game that’s supposed to happen inside that world- this is disconcerting. I better look up the spelling on that one, it doesn’t look right. Must be okay, the spell checker doesn’t like words with dashes attached to them, but ‘disconcerting’ passed their test.

— Planned obsolescence –  Do you think that anybody who ever thought it was a good idea to make sure stuff fell apart more sooner than later so they could sell more stuff should be drawn and quartered in public? I mean why wait until these mudder fuppers die and have to face their karma in their life reviews? For the same reason that judges are all going to be in big trouble when they have to explain themselves to the Man who told them “Judge not- that ye be judged-” It’s not my place to condemn ice holes for making everybody’s lives miserable? -Shrug- But every once in a while I want to be there when one of those ‘persons’ is in dire need of a quick ride to a hospital and the parts he so cleverly had his engineers make out of plastic instead of aluminum the way they had always been in the past- fall apart and the ice hole has to die alone in his vehicle because his clever designs worked so freakin well? I mean the height of this revenge type thinking would be, the poster child for planned obsolescence opens the door of his planned obsolete automobile, falls to the pavement and gasps for help and some homeless guy whose life he ruined comes over to him, blind drunk, opens his zipper and pees all over the slime ball while that evil ice hole gasps his last breaths and dies in an extreme state of fear. Grumble grumble grumble —

— But- on a lighter note – I did download over 750 photos (not all of them worth keeping) onto three different computers last night while dealing with computer catastrophes. The stupid ‘We know better than you do what you want to do’- routines inside one computer decided that I wanted all 757 photos to go get lost somewhere on a cloud, and told me my drop box was full. So I swore at that computer and told it to take those photos down from the flippin cloud and put them in a nice new file on my desktop. When it – obviously scared half to death – did what I told it to, I discovered a couple lost gems in that flippin cloud, that I never wanted anything to do with in the first place. No danged cloud has any business grabbing my stuff like that. And, oh yeah, the nearly lost gems on that should be lost cloud? – the above photo of Domino the Bengal Cat was one of them. Yum.

— And now I should belatedly get my posterior to bed. I’m going to skype with mom tonight, and she’s delighted to be able to see me and hear me when I do that. And now that I got my grumbling done, I won’t have to darken our conversation tonight with angry thoughts about ice holes who so freakin cleverly design things to fall apart a long time before they need to. – I won’t say, “May they rot in hell.” Because we’re already there, so how about, “May they open their eyes and realize they’ve created a living hell for themselves right here and now.” – Shrug. I often think I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, because I don’t collect enemies and sort them according to how rotten they are to their cores- But- Waking up in hell is a blessing that us truth-seeking ‘Angels-In-Training’ wish upon ourselves so we can continue our mission to manifest Heaven on Earth. & No, it’s not too late to keep trying to do that.

— Yay?

~~~~~ Jim (who tortures spelling checkers for fun, and has the poetic license to prove it can be done.)