Computer Careers Book
Saturday, January 28, 2012
On aqua puss
When I started out playing in a band back in the 1960s (it would be called a garage band except we never practiced in a garage, just in a few basements), it was the dawn of being about to use electrified equipment. There were actual electric guitars, not just an accoustic guitar with a pickup installed, as in the 1950s. That decade saw a huge advance in the technology, from primitive amplifiers to huge Marshall amps and the wah-wah pedal. Of course the technology is still advancing. Now you can get hold of the aqua puss which can really improve the sound of the music you make on stage. No telling what sounds Jimi Hendrix would have been able to get out of that if he were still alive.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
On contemporary fabric at fabriconthenet.net
I have to speculate on Dan Brown switching from thrillers that involved basically science, with Deception Point and Digital Fortress, and the current ones which involve science too, but also art history and religion. I think it was the religious or sacrireglious aspect of The DaVinci Code which made it such a breakout bestseller. Angels and Demons involved the same guy, and religion as well, and the Vatican, but its appeal was more limited until The DaVinci Code. You can learn about contemporary fabric at FabricOnTheNet.net. The science behind The Lost Symbol was pseudoscience. At least in Angels and Demons it was real science. He started with that, but seems to be discovering religion and fake science sells more books.
Friday, December 30, 2011
On Diagnostic Sonographer jobs
So I recently finished A Tailor of Panama by John Le Carre, and I'm sorry I did bother to read it, though I've read other books by him, though I somehow don't get The Spy Who Came in From the Cold though I think I've read it several times. It's supposed to be a satire, but to me just exaggerated things too much. It's about how a con man penetrated British Intelligence and goes to Panama to find a conspiracy, and finds another con man turned tailor who makes up the conspiracy his boss wants. He's a good man who is crushed by the drive of Osnard's determination, and how it encourages another attack on Panama at the end. There are no Diagnostic Medical Sonographer Jobs in the book. The beginning has some interesting material on what it must be like to be a tailor to the elites of Panama, a small tropical developing country.
Friday, December 23, 2011
On jansport
You Tube continues to surprise me with what's available. Yesterday I watched an episode of the old Steve Allen TV show, which featured a 22 year old Frank Zappa "playing" the bicycle as a musical instrument. It was kind of fun, though in the end disappointing as well. I expected him to plink and plunk some kind of tune, simple but recognizable, from the bicycle. However, turns out he had Allen's TV band playing weird stuff while a tape of weird stuff played, and he had a bicycle make screeching noise while Allen did the same on another one, so it was a complete, random, avant guarde experimental musical piece. So in the end it wasn't entertaining to me. It just reveals Zappa was experimenting with music and sound even before he grew his hair long and let his beard grow, before jansport and the Mothers came along.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
On Skidster
So I've been able to put all the plays and poems of Shakespeare, including plays he may or may not have written, and Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling, not to mention all the Baum Oz books, individual works by Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgsdon, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and maybe more I've forgotten. There are some collections of 18th century horror novels I should get as well, now that I think of it. My greed for books has kicked in again. The good thing is that, unlike the rest of my life, they're now taking up only hard drive space on my Kindle, not physical space on shelves and in boxes I have to haul around with me whenever I live somewhere new, and then mostly stay there because I don't have time to dig them out and read them. It used to take a skidsteer and hours of back breaking work to move all my boxes of books.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
best laptop computer
Last night I broke down and watched one of the Filipino movies one of my nieces bought for me. I'd been putting it off, because I really want to watch them only to study Tagalog, and they don't say they have English subtitles, but last night I wasn't concentrating on my work, so I decided I'd still get some knowledge of Tagalog just from hearing it. Turns out the movie does have English subtitles. Unfortunately, just as I didn't see a menu option to turn them on, I didn't see one to turn them off. Maybe I will if I look better, knowing that the subtitles are there. My plan was to watch it several times without subtitles, try to figure out what was going on, then watch it with subtitles, then go back to without subtitles, and switch back and forth until I could really understand it. Maybe I don't have the best laptop computers, because the picture was stretched too far to the horizontal making all the characters look as though they'd been bred for a 2 gee planet.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
On easy guitar songs
One thing that Without Remorse reminded me of is how sympathetic Clancy is to America's biggest Cold War enemy -- the Soviet Union. Not sympathetic in the sense of being a communist or being soft on communism or the USSR, but sympathetic in understanding how many people caught in that system were just people, with worthwhile values and honor. The Soviet in this novel is portrayed as genuinely concerned with the defense of the rodina, the Russian homeland. He was forced to flee Moscow as a child and suffered many hardships. However, he has no sympathy or understanding of the Vietnamese. And his portrayal of urban Mafia and gangsters in the US is questionable. Pimps do often beat their prostitutes, but few are anything like the one in this book. A must read for anyone who thinks the 60s were just about easy guitar songs.
On doument imaging software
I recently finished the Tom Clancy book Without Remorse, and consider it one of his better ones. It is part of the Jack Ryan "universe," but doesn't have Ryan in it at all, unless you count a brief scene of him as a teenager with his father. In fact, his father has a significant role, as he's a police detective in Baltimore when John Kelly begins a campaign against local drug lord and pimp. One thread is left hanging at the end, which I wonder if it was ever completed. But under the name of John Clark Kelly becomes an important regular in the Jack Ryan series. I have to wonder if either of them ever realized what Ryan's father did. The books are long, and I don't keep track of the details from book to book, because I let a long time go by between reading them, because they're so long I want to read other authors. You don't need document imaging software to understand this novel.
