The Heat is HERE! Or is it?

 Posted by at 11:02  rants
Feb 232015
 

This summer thing keeps coming up, year in and year out.  I guess it can’t be avoided in climes this far above the equator, so I either have to move to Alaska, or deal with summer.  Here in Utah, we live in a desert.  Sure it has been irrigated and settled to have trees and reduce the appearance of a desert, it is still technically a desert.  That means in the summer, temperatures are routinely in the upper 90’s or low 100’s.

Kolob Finger Canyons, Zion National Park.

Kolob Finger Canyons, Zion National Park. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Usually that is not bad, it is as they say a dry heat.  Humidity is usually around 20%.  This late spring, early summer the temperatures have been all over the place.  One day it hit 95, the next barely made 74.  It was upper 80’s for 6 days and today as I write this at noon, it is just over 70.

 

I am confused really.  Usually it gets hot here and stays that way instead of jumping all over the thermometer.  I don’t know what to make of this.  Maybe it is global warming….well probably not.  What do you guys think about summer.  is it a good thing or a bad thing?  Hot or not?  What is your choice?  Personally I like it cooler.  And I am not going back to Florida anytime soon.

 

Comments are open below.

 

-Justin

 

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Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Feb 232015
 

Editors Note:  Today’s post comes to us from the lovely Heather Craik all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland.  She is quite the prolific writer and apparently a good ranter as well.  Stop by her site at shadesofadream.com and show her some appreciation via traffic and comments! Now: onto the rant!


Have you ever been in one of those situations where, after being off ill for a week, you return and instantly get blind-sided?

Further, let’s say you have a meeting the day you get back where you have to present your ideas on something.  Heck, let’s pretend you’ve even had the idea worked out for weeks in advance.

Here’s the funny thing about being ill and not having anything to do for a week; you start to wonder if that idea you have is really such a good idea after all.  Can you complete it on time?  Is it too ambitious?  Wouldn’t it be better if you just scaled it back a bit and polished more?

In a moment of un-cootishness I decided to bow to the little voice

Bad move.  It seems to encourage people to think you’re not putting enough effort in.  You know, and to compare you to people you’d normally far surpass unfavourably.

However, my rant today isn’t about my not being prepared fully (its my own fault for switching designs at the last minute), or even about being off ill for a week.  Nor is it about incorrect-  well, actually it IS about incorrect assumptions.  Just not from tutor/boss/person you’re presenting too that should really know better.

Communication

See the thing that really showed me up was the fact that everyone else had something to present on the screen, while I was still assuming that we were all going to use sketches.  Normally I’d have gone ahead and made the jump to computer anyway, but with the situation being what it was I didn’t have the time.  En fin.

However.

If anyone else in class had been off ill I would have contacted them to keep them in the loop at least once, usually the day before they’re due back.  It’s only courtesy after all, and no one likes to be caught with their pants down in public (unless that’s your thing of course).  In fact, if we want to get really technical I spoke to every one of them in the time I was away; no mention of any changes of plan.

I really don’t like being made to look bad.

Ill or not I could have made the time to get something mocked up, had I been aware of the need.  It takes less than five minutes (actually, less than one if you do it right) to pass on a piece of pertinent information.  Sometimes it’ll even save them 10 minutes of uncharacteristic ridicule.  Imagine that.

Oh, and the part I really hate in all this?

I had to grin and bear it like a champ.  Two reasons; my ‘excuse’ would have been that I didn’t get the time needed because I was ill and had no access to the resources (which, as it happens, is true), and the person doing the talking has the power to fail me.  At any point someone else could have said something to diffuse the situation.

Taking one for the team, bitch style.  Thanks guys.

Thanks again for the post Heather.  If you are reading this share it with the world via linked in, stumble upon, digg, facebook or Twitter!  The comment section is open and waiting for you…

Feb 232015
 

Well…last week the show DIDN’T go on. Someone hit a tree down the road an hour before showtime, and my internet went down with the tree…so this is two weeks at once.

Enjoy…and when you travel…leave your Les Paul and antique Steinway at home.

[powerpress]

Bob@HayleStorm Interactive

Bob comes to us with a skeptical attitude and a full cup of Cantankerousness. He also writes about homesteading and yurts over at JuicyMaters.com and rants about politics at Common-Sense-Conversation.com Most of the time, though, you'll find him at HayleStorm.net, cranking out great websites for clients OR writing tutorials teaching them to build their own sites.

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Feb 232015
 
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, top slice ...

Image via Wikipedia

Can you believe it?

Every day this country goes father downhill. These days there is no end to stories about how American’s can’t cope with the pressures of modern life. For an old Coot its hard to understand. It’s not like the good old days. So many of these things used to be taken for granted. Kids didn’t need safety equipment to go bicycle riding. Parents could be trusted to ride in a car and hold a baby at the same time. Kids used to ride in the front seat of a car – WITHOUT SEATBELTS and without risk of death from the life-threatening air bags. It’s hard to believe that we have lost so much judgment that the government will arrest us and threaten to take away our children if we even think about acting like a responsible parent from my childhood would act. I’m talking about the 50’s here.

When I look around, it’s hard to see that much as changed. Parents these days look responsible. They stand up. They walk and talk. There isn’t any obvious sign that they are inferior to my parents but you can’t argue with the government any more. And the government tells us that parents these days can’t be trusted to safely raise their children without serious help. Hillary was right. These days it takes a village of bureaucrats to raise a child.

My wife and I resisted. 

We tried to do the right thing by our kids. I did get a helmet for the younger one just to shut up my nosy neighbor but I never made him wear it. He had his share of bumps- he broke a leg learning to slide into second base and a got a concussion from high school football but he never had anything more than skinned knees from riding his bicycle. The other one surfed. I wonder when the government will insist on helmets for surfing. I am sure that somebody is working on it.

Anyway my kids risked life and limb in our household because of my wife’s and my carefree parenting style. They grew up to tell the tale just like my brothers and I survived our helmet less and seatbeltless childhood. Perhaps the trauma they suffered explains why they are still unmarried and childless but it’s hard to know.

But there is more!

Anyway, each day we seem to discover more inadequacies of modern day parents. Just today, I learned that some eager PhD student in Texas has discovered that parents can’t even manage to pack a lunch for their kids. According to his rigorous study of packed lunches at a nearby preschool, those parent can’t even manage to pack a safe lunch for their kids. It seems that they were all at an unsafe temperature- whatever that means.

I remember sack lunches.

My mom packed lunches for us from time to time. Usually there was a sandwich- either peanut butter and jelly or bologna, an apple, a bag of chips and either a candy bar or some cookies. I never remember getting scalded or frozen eating one of them and those are the only unsafe temperature options I can think of. Mostly those lunches were ice cold if they had been in the ice box overnight or room temperature. The worst case was having the candy bar melt which was messy but not unsafe. I just can’t figure out what this PhD student knows that a parent doesn’t about feeding their kid a sack lunch What I do know is that generations of Americans thrived on sack lunches before this rigorous study discovered the peril in sack lunches with a pretty high survival rate.

Are we doomed?

What this new generation of parents is doing wrong is hard for me to know. Maybe it’s the result of the failing education system or maybe somewhere along the line, the tradition of American parenting self-sufficiency was broken- possibly in the 60’s when black became white and the other way around. All I know is that America seems to be doomed. Nobody seems capable of independent action and responsibility any more and this rigorous study of sack lunches just confirms the fact. The way things are going the only way to fix the problem is to just get those inadequate parents out of the way. Dumb as parents seem to be these days, they might not even notice.

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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RCA Software Sucks!

 Posted by at 11:01  Down with, rants
Feb 232015
 

Santa got my daughter an MP3 player for Christmas.  No not an Ipod, those are overpriced pieces of nothing that I need, but that is another rant.  The one she got was an RCA.  Probably not the best but there are loads of worse ones out there.

She has been using it for a while now and having no problems.  We have been using Windows Explorer to drag and drop songs on the thing and it has worked just fine.  The other day she came to me looking for a song that they had heard at school to put on her machine.

For someone working on a bachelor degree in technology online this kind of task might have been fun.

After some balking about how she wasn’t getting her room cleaned and I wasn’t getting the house cleaned I relented and googled the song.  It was a remix of a popular song that was now a pro-reading thing.  I like reading.  I like the fact that she likes to read.  A song about reading seemed like a good thing.

Come to find out, this song only exists on You Tube.  Here it is.

Not too bad, so I save the video to my computer.  Should be able to put it right on her player because it has video.  Oh no….It couldn’t possibly be that easy.  Turns out there is a proprietary video type for RCA and its parent company Audiosucks Audiovox.  So I look up how to convert this video.  There is a program that comes hard wired into the player called RCA Easy Rip that gives you the capability. If you have a version that will work.

I didn’t.  More google.  Download new program that will work with Vista.  Install.  Crash system.  reboot.  Install.  Seems to work but won’t convert video with sound.  video only.  What a Piece of Crap!  We gave up for the moment on the video.  Now there was some other songs she wanted on her player.

I had the program up so I decided to use it.  The &$#^ing piece of worthless crap ate 99% system clock resources!  I couldn’t do anything while it was loading like 8 songs on her player.  I couldn’t even stop it becasue it says it will damage the player.  Tell you what, I uninstalled that little mother as soon as it released the hostage system resources.

And then I rebooted because my system was slow.  When it started up again, there was another program that was piggybacked onto the EasyRip!  This one automatically locks up your computer on startup looking for updates to the software or the firmware of the player.  It was a catch 22 for a while because this thing was taking all of the system resources again and not letting things like the internet connection get through so it couldn’t update to save it because it was taking up the resources needed to access.

I finally got that uninstalled and everything nearly back to normal now.  All I have to say is, Come on RCA you are a big name that has been around for a long time.  You of all people should realize that a flashy app is worthless if it takes you back to the days of linear computing where everything is loaded one bit at a time and it takes freaking forever.  Multi-tasking has been around for a while.

Maybe you could find a nice 3rd party application that would solve everyones problems once and for all.  Or, heaven forbid, make the thing open source so the hackers can have a go at it and make it useful.  The idea isn’t bad nor is the interface on the surface.  Get even one level deeper and you may as well be at the bottom of a dark outhouse with a penlight.  And not one of those bright LED lights either, something that may run 3 candlepower with a full battery and lots of prayer.

Bottom line, Get a SanDisk product.  I have had 4 of their players and had no problems.  One day I will afford an Ipod, or get my Dad’s hand me down. Whatever.

That is All.

Justin

Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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