09:30 – Ubuntu 12.04 is hateful. The Atom system in Barbara’s office is now running Kubuntu 12.04. Very slowly. Extremely slowly. As in, when I click on the icon at the lower left corner to bring up the main menu it may take 15 seconds or more for the menu to appear. I’m not sure what I did to cause this, but I think it’s my fault. I could swear that the performance was snappy before I started playing around with the installation. The only thing I remember doing that should have affected performance was turning off the screen effects, ironically in an attempt to minimize the load on this minimal system. Right after I did that, the system started acting like molasses in January. So I toggled the effects back on. Still slow. I rebooted and verified that the effects were still enabled. Still slow. Meanwhile, Barbara would like to be able to check her mail, post to her blog, and so on. I may end up punting and connecting her original system back up.
One thing’s for sure. The display in the den is wonky. Today I’ll order a new display, along with a new mouse and keyboard.
11:57 – I decided on a tactical withdrawal, AKA an advance to the rear. I’m currently in the process of blowing away the Kubuntu installation on the Atom system now in Barbara’s office and replacing it with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Mainly, I just want to see how it runs. Once it’s installed, I’ll disconnect everything and reconnect Barbara’s old hex-core system, which is still sitting under her desk. That gets her email and web and everything else she’s used to. Then I’ll set that Atom system aside for the time being.
I have a new display, keyboard, and mouse on order from Costco, which’ll probably show up late this week. Meanwhile, the DVD writer in my office system no longer writes discs. The most accessible replacement drive is in the Atom system that’s currently in the den, so I’ll pull that drive and install it in my office system for now. At that point, Barbara will have what she needs, and I’ll have what I need, for now.
As of this morning, our inventory of ready-to-ship biology kits was at zero. I found an order for one in my email first thing this morning, so I boxed up the six that were almost ready to go and shipped the one that had been ordered, leaving me with five in stock for now. Based on recent order history, those five biology kits may be anything from a one- or two-day supply to maybe a week’s worth. That’s uncomfortably little, so as soon as I get the computer stuff done I’ll get started on making up another batch of 30 biology kits.
I did learn something about PayPal from that biology kit order, which came in late yesterday evening. Every six months or so, we’re forced to increase the price of our kits because our wholesalers increase their prices. To give people a chance to order at the old price, I’d updated the main biology kit page a couple weeks ago to announce that the kit price would increase from $170 to $185 as of 1 October (or $210 to $225 for kits shipped to Canada).
So, yesterday evening I logged on to my PayPal account and updates the relevant buttons. When I did that, PayPal generated new button code, which I copied/pasted into the HTML of the biology kit main page. I intended to publish that page first thing this morning, putting the new prices into effect. But the kit order that came in yesterday evening was charged at the new price, so obviously that button code in the HTML page doesn’t control the price. I emailed the customer, apologized for charging $185 instead of $170, and refunded her the $15 difference.
Hi Bob,
Over on Distrowatch, Linux Mint is the current Hot Thing, but I haven’t tried it in years. It appears there is a KDE version now.
I have Mepis on the Kids’ machines, but it’s based on Debian Stale….er, Stable. Epidemic looks interesting, and it’s KDE based…
http://distrowatch.com/epidemic
Cheers,
Rod Schaffter
PS I use OpenSuSE on my machines, but I know your feelings about Novell… 😉
Everyone seems to be complaining about slow machines lately, and I even experienced it on the system at the radio project’s main studio weekend before last. It was once a fairly snappy machine, but is now slow as molasses, often taking seconds to execute something that was formerly instantaneous. Are the Earth’s magnetic fields failing? or some vast timed slowdown of all processors? I started having significant problems early in the year, and nothing I have done has fixed it. Son has experienced significant slowness on his Lenovo laptop running Linux. Daughter in-law bought a new computer because of it on hers. Only one thing left to experiment with on my computer, and that is to swap out the hard drive.
Is that “everyone” really everyone, or just LINUX users? Our three Windows machines are not having problems at all – one ATOM netbook on XP, and a notebook and a desktop on W7.
“Are the Earth’s magnetic fields failing? ”
Global warming increases the viscosity of CO2 overrich air slowing down hard drives?
Regarding and earlier comment of mine attributing and interest in Heartland due to Bob’s comments and the Emmy awards. I was confused, the Emmy awards were for Homeland, a program series on Showtime, for which I choose not to pay.
How much memory is in the Atom? Unless it’s over about 3.5 gb, there is no advantage to the 64 bit Windows over the 32 bit version.
My parents have an Atom powered tablet which was pretty slow on Win7 but runs very well on Win8. The only time I would say Win8 runs well is on a touch screen tablet.
Both Atom systems are maxed out at 4 GB.
I second MEPIS. Been using it for about six years, and it has always been stable and reasonably fast compared to other distros. For my money (yeah, I know it’s free, but we all should contribute somethiing,) MEPIS is the best distro I have run for any length of time.
I have never been able to make any of the Debian Sid based distros work for me because the software is too cutting edge. I WANT boring and stable, and that’s why I moved over from Windows. Windows was wonderful for me, mostly a “business” user, but the constant changes drove me nuts. I wish I could have stayed with Windows 2000: stable and fast.
I know you don”t like Suse, so I won’t mention it, except to say it had the best KDE 4 desktop implementation when that was new. But, MEPIS is conservative and consistent, even with its late adoption of KDE 4. I have always liked KDE over Gnome, and the included apps have a little to do with that, even though I know I could customize my own distro with any apps from almost anywhere.
A couple of years ago, I thought I would try pure Debian, since I liked MEPIS’s use of those repos. What a mistake! Let’s just say it didn’t serve me very well, especially because of its nonproprietary basis. Thought I would never say that.
Oh, and I have run the current version of MEPIS on a single core Atom-based file server (I’m CHEAP,) two dual core desktop Atoms, and an old 1.6 GHz Celeron notebook. All are snappy, especially the video, which is almost as good as on much more powerful machines. All of these have their max of 2 GB of RAM and ordinary rotating hard disks. The system monitor shows only occasional use of the swap space, even while editing still pictures. To be fair, some of these computers run Windows XP pretty well, but not as well as MEPIS.
The only distro I have liked better is PCLinuxOS, but I couldn’t stand its rolling releases, which were almost as bad as the constant Windows maintenance. About a year ago, PCLOS blew up on an update and remained unstable. I blew it away and never looked back. Some loyalty, eh?
One last digression. Bob, I have most of your books, and have been building computers for some years. I know hardware much better than software, and can thank you, your books, and Scott Mueller’s books. Everyone should have these books, and some Google-fu!
That’s son and daughter in-law on Linux; me and the radio project on WinXP SP3. But even friends are mentioning they are having troubles with their computers and Android phones running more sluggishly than normal. Weird. I do not accept Windows updates and have not since about 2004. I installed XP SP3 in 2009, and have not applied an update since then.
Back to 12.04, here is a typical post from the Rivendell forum, outlining the problems people experience: “Has anyone been successful at installing the ASI HPI drivers on Ubuntu 12.04?” (ASI is a professional high-end soundcard.) 12.04 is a headache for many people, even though it has been through one update cycle already.
If your iso of 12.04 is from months back, you should download the new one “12.04.1_LTS”. Although they claim that updating a system after install is the same as downloading the maintenance revision, I can attest it is most definitely not! I suspect that applying updates does not update the kernel, whereas the new iso does.
Ben Bernancke spoke in Indianapolis today, and his news was not good.
http://www.ibj.com/bernanke-economy-growing-too-slowly-to-put-people-back-to-work/PARAMS/article/37009
He predicts the economy will not grow at a rate great enough to put the currently unemployed back to work, while also providing jobs for younger people just entering the workforce. It is pretty clear from his previous actions and today’s comments that he intends to keep weakening the dollar.
Big mistake, IMO.
Well, of course the economy won’t grow enough to put the unemployed back to work or provide jobs for young people. Very high unemployment rates aren’t going away, ever. And if you count government employees as unemployed, which you should, things look even worse.
I’ve been going on about this for a couple of decades now. We’re past the industrial revolution and into the robotics revolution. Most people are stunned to learn that US manufacturing output has been growing every year for the last 30 years or more, while manufacturing employment has been decreasing every year. Manufacturing stuff simply doesn’t require many people any more. This phenomenon has even started to hit professionals like attorneys and physicians.
As I’ve said repeatedly, we’re quickly heading for a time when literally only 1% of the population will be gainfully employed, if that many. Just as farm productivity allowed farm employment to fall from almost everyone working on farms to maybe 2% working on farms, factories are going the same way. Mining is already there. The days when a large percentage of adults could be usefully employed are long gone, and they’re not coming back.
We’re seeing the future now, with government redistributing the output from the tiny productive minority to the drones, which make up more and more of the population every year. The real question is how much longer John Galt and his colleagues will tolerate that.
I’ve had this discussion many times over the years with Jerry Pournelle, who fears the decline of the middle class. I’ve told him he might as well get over it, because the middle class was an artifact of the industrial revolution, and that’s over. We’ll gradually return to the natural state of things, which is to have a wealthy tiny minority and about 99.9% of people poor. The trick is to understand that “poor” is being redefined by the phenomenon itself. “Poor” in that coming society will be richer in terms of standard of living than the wealthiest have enjoyed in earlier societies. That’s because until now wealth has been implicitly defined by human labor input, which is now becoming increasingly immaterial.
And even China and other third world countries are going to face that phenomenon, as they basically skip the industrial revolution (or have a very short part in it).
China has made it this far because they offered cheap labor. Now, China’s cost advantage is down to something around 7% to 10%, and that doesn’t count shipping cost or time, patent infringement, constant QC problems, and so on. More companies are probably in-sourcing now than are going to out-sourcing. Again, as I’ve said repeatedly, China is in big, big trouble. Probably as much as the eurozone, and definitely much, much more than the English-speaking countries.
I once tried changing an Ubuntu system to Kubuntu by installing kubuntu-desktop, and the result was miserable. It wasn’t that it was slow, but the menus got horribly cluttered with all the programs from both versions. Still, in general, changing from one desktop environment to another is not a common thing to do, so one can expect it not to be well debugged. I ended up just reinstalling.
Of the various distributions, Fedora seems to be the one with the most technical horsepower behind it. They have an Xfce spin, which is what I installed for a relative who wants things to Just Work; he’s pretty content with it. The downsides of Fedora are (1) SELinux, which can cause various things to stop working in weird ways (but seldom does, and fortunately can be turned off), and (2) its default setup puts the hard disk under the control of LVM (“Logical Volume Manager”), which makes life more difficult when one has to do something low-level like fixing the boot process. That too is easy to turn off, but only before the fact; once your hard disk is partitioned with LVM, a fresh re-install is probably the easiest way to undo it.
Myself, I run Gentoo, but it’s not something that Just Works. I don’t even know how to set up a modern desktop environment in it. (It can be done, and is what most people do; I’ve just never been interested.)
Norman, thanks for the heads-up on Fedora. I have always wondered about it.
I am always looking for a modern Linux that can replace and go beyond Windows, but with great reliability and freedom. MEPIS is the closest, but not quite there. I have considered paying for one of the commercial distros, but have no assurance that would be any better.
I am more interested in a distro that can support modern audio CODECs and be good for still photo and home video editing. Haven’t found that either. A friend has suggested AV Linux, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Most of my other needs are business oriented, and MEPIS does that fine. I am curious about your experience with Gentoo, but doubt it would meet my needs. I will have to look it up.
I’m not worried about unemployment, or a tiny productive elite having to subsidise an allegedly non-productive proletariat. The system will adjust, as it always has, if only we let it. It’s in no one’s interest to have an unemployed mass with nothing to do. “The devil makes work for idle hands.” The system will adjust. Employment will be spread amongst more people and the elite won’t have to work such long hours.
Chuck and Cowboy wrote:
‘“Are the Earth’s magnetic fields failing? ”
Global warming increases the viscosity of CO2 overrich air slowing down hard drives?’
Yes! The earth’s magnetic field is failing! We’re all dooooomed. Read all about it in the creationist monograph Origin and Destiny of the Earth’s Magnetic Field by Thomas G Barnes, late professor of physics at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Since the field has been decaying for less than 10,000 years it’s going to run out real soon. That’s why hard disks are slowing down, monitors aren’t working and Linux has gone to the dogs.
I would like to take the time to thank Ray for telling us all about the issues he had gone through in arranging for his Aunt’s care. (And of course to thank Bob for telling us about putting his mother in a nursing home.) My mother is no longer able to care for herself, and I am convinced she now needs to be in a nursing home, and my mother doesn’t believe this. Reading Ray’s and Bob’s descriptions of their experiences has been helpful.
The good news is my mom is currently in the hospital, so a few things can happen without her objecting to them.
I’m sorry to hear that. These things are never easy.
Dave, you are close enough to Franklin that you should put the Methodist retirement home on your list to check. Yet another friend recently told me his parents moved there after his dad had a heart attack. They passed a few years ago, but were very happy there for many years.
I guess some people like to clean and cook, but I have never understood the reluctance of people to give up those chores. My cousin’s parents moved voluntarily and entirely on their own to a retirement place where they have a small condo, but can get meals in the dining room, if desired—which they do more and more,—have housekeeping done by the facility, and can be upgraded to daily checks by nurses or even round-the-clock care, if necessary.
If I could afford it, I would have live-in housekeepers and cooks, like the idle rich in England used to have. I loved dorm life in school, because all I had to do was show up at the dining hall and never even think about food. I was free to pursue what needed to get done, without ever worrying about food or house cleaning (although my son tells me cleaning and changing bed linens by dorm staff is no longer included in dorm life at my uni). I will truly be off my rocker if the time comes when I refuse to move into such a deal.
I’m also looking to upgrade my desktop Linux.
I was happy enough with Xubuntu, but the version I am running keeps complaining that it’s out of support now. I also discovered that it doesn’t, by default, support something as simple as playing back a USB webcam recording. The whole video/codec this-is-supported-only-if-you-spend-40-hours-of-research thing was old five years ago, it’s inexcusable today.
I had Mint, and liked it enough to set it up as a server with all my media on it. Then one day it couldn’t find the hard drive. Apparently there is an address of some sort, analogous to a MAC address, and it got corrupted. I’ve never had that happen with any other OS, not even Windows, so I can’t feel comfortable recommending it to anyone. I fixed it, then blew Mint away and never went back.
MEPIS sounds interesting. I might give that a try.
Ed, Ubuntu is my fault. I installed a copy on my wife’s laptop based on
RBT’s shining recommendation. It Just Worked — worked much better than
the WinXP which came with the laptop in terms of finding printers and
such — so I paid for the supported version. About fifteen minutes
later, the Ubuntu company announced they were going out of business,
getting out of the Linux business, and not supporting installations any
more.
Thanks, Chuck, I’ll put it on the list, although it is about 30 minutes away. Although it’s a fairly easy 30 minute drive, since most of it is on one road. I’m debating between someplace close to where mom is now, and someplace close to where my wife and I live. My inclination is to go with a local place that’s less than 10 minutes away, and is close to the Smallville Public Library. It’s also about 10 minutes away from the best cafeteria in the state of Indiana. Ironically, it’s part of the same chain of nursing homes that my mom put my grandmother in three decades ago.
If the hospital can effectively treat my mom’s health problems, she could stay at home with frequent visits from a home health care service if I have a chance to sneak in and clean the place while she’s in the hospital.
Chuck, I am beginning to wonder if we will be going back to the society here in the USA where everyone had people living with them for just room and board. Right now with the minimum wage laws, one cannot pay people just room and board. At least that is my understanding of the federal minimum wage laws which are overly complex.
With Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work? Never happen. Far too many tax eaters who will demand permits, inspections and bribes, I mean fees to be paid before allowing such “privileges”.
Hard to predict, I think. Labor was not worth as much back when my parents were growing up, and it seemed half the city had borders, in addition to many rooming houses. Before we get that poor again, I think we both will be long gone.
However, my kids have lived in situations with multiple roommates long after college—and still do. Most of the people I knew, were able to find affordable apartments or small houses with even low-paying jobs after university. It will be a real shift if people start living together again, and there will be lots more vacant houses than there are now (3 within 6 houses of me, and about 10 in a 2 square block area). I see brand-new houses out on the county roads sitting empty with “For Sale” signs, just like my dad told me about during the Depression. Only difference is that the doors are not swinging open in the wind now, as they were then.
On the Linux front, there are distros for media and graphics that have all the right stuff built in. I think in Ubuntu, one is called something like “Studio”. Some others are Studio64, Dream Studio, and Puredyne. And somebody on the Rivendell forum pointed to one by Marco Ghirlanda, called “ArtistX”. All Ubuntu.
I am of the opinion that multimedia work has to be done on a computer dedicated to that. Mixing multimedia on a computer built primarily for home email and web browsing, will be troublesome and slow.
I can tell you that from my research, the places that can afford competent tech staff, run CentOS or Red Hat. SuSE has been completely abandoned by those in my field (both developers and users), due to the fear of proprietary issues with the recent sale of SuSE. Those with no experienced tech help, struggle along with Ubuntu. Lots of people are having trouble moving from 10.04 to 12.04, though—and it is not just the Unity desktop.
We’re already seeing the impoverishment of America. The couple across the street now has all but one of their adult children back living with them, and these are children in their late 30’s through their 40’s one of whom moved back here from Arizona. Having adults in what should be their prime earning years living with their parents has become almost the norm nowadays. Most adults used to be financially robust enough to survive a job loss or a divorce, but that’s no longer true for many.
And it’s a lot worse among recent college graduates, most of whom find themselves working at Starbucks or McDonalds, if they’re lucky enough to have a job at all. This is not merely a downturn. This is the new normal. For the first time in living memory, kids cannot expect to do even as well as their parents did, let alone better. Expect this problem to get worse over the next several years.
The distinctive aspect of Gentoo is that it does not distribute binaries; instead it compiles all the software from source on your local machine. Yes, that takes hours. And occasionally something fails to compile. And configuration is mostly done by editing configuration files in a text editor. All this is fine if you’re a programmer, and actually want to know how the system works, but otherwise it’s just a hassle.
I have never understood the reluctance of people to give up those chores
I think it is the loss of independence. Having to have someone do all these things for you that you used to do yourself, and are no longer able because of issues beyond your control, is giving up control. Almost admitting defeat. That sudden realization that you are getting old and now are a burden on others.
If you give up such tasks by choice it is a lot different than being forced to give up the tasks by someone else. Someone else has made a significant decision that markedly affects your life and way of living.
My aunt was livid, wrote some really nasty letters, complained to any agency that would listen. More than once I had to explain my actions to agencies that had no dog in the hunt why I did what I did. Good thing her doctor in Port Townsend had excellent records otherwise I may have been brought up on elderly abuse charges. Of course these moments of clarity did not last long with my aunt.
You have to make decisions that you know are in the person’s best interest. You cannot let emotion get involved as that will possible force an incorrect decision. Prepare to be hit by the person you are committing, spit on, pinched, hair pulled, angry outbursts and a lot of screaming. Ignore it. Tough to do but you have to ignore it.
Have only ONE family member making the decisions. You don’t need a committee deciding the issues. The deciding person can take advice, but should not be under any obligation to follow such advice. Best is to just not ask for advice and deal with anyone’s displeasure after the fact.
I know with dementia the person, as in the mind, will eventually leave the person and they are no longer who they were. They will become strangers and family will become strangers to them. Many times having “strangers” visit is upsetting to the patient. Limit visits in that case. There is nothing wrong with that as it is in the best interest of the patient.
I only visited my aunt about once every two months during her last 5 years. She did not know me. She knew my wife until about the last year. Us visiting was just causing problems.
We also moved some of my aunt’s items from her house into assisted living and later into the nursing home. Did it help? I don’t know. In assisted living it reminded her of a home she no longer had. In the nursing home it did nothing but consume space on the walls. Also provided things for others to steal. Would I do that again. No. Was not worth the $1100.00 to have the stuff delivered from Port Townsend to Oak Ridge TN. I should have purchased used furniture for her room in assisted living (the nursing home provided only a bed).
I had a lot of hatred for my aunt because of the childhood physical/sexual/mental abuse. My wife was the calming factor for some of that. But I also had a sense of responsibility to make sure her money was spent on her and not taken/stolen by others. Trust me, the leaches in the family arrived when my uncle died as there was significant money involved. I was adamant they were not going to get a dime.
My first thought was to put her adrift in a row boat in the middle of Discovery Bay. My wife did not like that idea. In retrospect that may have actually been better than her final days. At least she would have had dignity and died in the location that she truly loved and was her home. As it was she just died slowly over several hours (no discomfort) and basically died alone as she knew no one or anything.
I suspect there is one thing worse than admitting that you can no longer take care of yourself and need help. That is to have a child you raised who once was completely dependent on you tell you that you can no longer take care of yourself and are completely dependent on them.
Also the decline in capablities can be gradual and creep up on you if you aren’t looking.
I agree completely. The nicest thing you can do if you aren’t the one family member, is to tell the one that you completely and unequivocally support their decisions.
You will get no disagreement from me on any of those points Mr. B.
I suspect there is one thing worse than admitting that you can no longer take care of yourself and need help. That is to have a child you raised who once was completely dependent on you tell you that you can no longer take care of yourself and are completely dependent on them.
Actually, *I* found it tough to come to grips with the fact that my parents had cared so well for me and continued to look out 100% for their own interests through most of my life, that it was a good bit of a shock when the point was finally reached that I had to care for them instead of the other way around. I understood it, but after 55 years of connecting with them, in a state of their never faltering in their own independence and often continuing to look after mine—suddenly the tables were turned. My mom’s sister looked after her after my dad passed, and my aunt wanted to do that. Before the deadline we had established of moving my mom out of Tiny House, my mom passed one overnight. So I was relieved of having to go through her moving to assisted living. Dementia set in pretty quickly after my dad passed, and I think a move to assisted living is better accomplished before that point, when reasoning is still possible. My mom was going to resist all attempts to move her out of Tiny House, but she could not even cook for herself, after my dad passed. Fortunately, her sister accommodated all her meal needs, and they only lived 12 blocks from each other.
There is no question in my mind that *not* having a purpose in life (a job or equivalent) shortens one’s days on Earth. Over and over, I have seen decline start when people have no daily outline of work to do, or lack a set of goals to accomplish. It was that way with my folks. My dad gave up his lawyer’s ticket, closed his office, and they moved back to Tiny Town, and the disintegration began quickly. Within months my mom could no longer drive.
Regarding the impoverishment of America, I think it not only includes the rising generation, but the parents they are moving back in with. Even in Indy, folks I know my age are losing their jobs, or having to accept employment at half the rate they were making 10 years ago. The only reason they are surviving and can take the kids back, is that most own their own houses and cars by now, as they close in on retirement.
As to wages, both my kids—just out of uni—are now making an hourly wage not a whole lot higher than what I made back in the early ’70’s first starting out. According to CPI figures, the cost of living has risen 5.8 times since then. Talk about losing purchasing power.
There was a news special last night about Spain. They followed the story of three construction workers ranging in age from probably 30 to 50. Experienced, presumably competent, and – of course – out of work. There is just nothing for them to do in Spain, with 25% unemployment and few construction projects, they have no chance. Young people without experience? Is it possible to have a negative chance at getting a job?
It’s going to get ugly. The Euro-leaders are plastering on bandage after bandage, but they have got to know full well there is no chance of solving the problem. Maybe they can put it off until someone else is in office…
The fact that families are again living together, even with adult children, may not be a bad thing for society. Perhaps stronger family ties will provide an anchor in the coming storm. As long as the family members get along with each other, there are a lot advantages, not only financial, but in terms of mutual support (grandparents caring for grandchildren, etc).
I’ve had a bit of trouble with that too. My parents are both still living but they have been divorced for decades. My dad had a nasty bout of cancer 12 years ago. I’ve always been a couch potato, and my dad to that point had been very physically active. At the time I had a thyroid ailment that made me a 165 pound weakling. One day my dad refused to go to radiation treatment, and I realized that day that even in my weakened state, I was physically stronger than he was. That was indeed a shock.
I’ve been sporadically trying to get my mother to take better care of her house and her place, and she just can’t see the need. She says things like, “I have always been a messy housekeeper.” To some extent that is true, but my aunt used to come inside my mother’s house. She doesn’t any more.
Now when I go to my mother’s house, I feel like cleaning, and she won’t let me. Or should I say I’m tempted to fill a few trash bags every time I go there. This from a man who needs one of the signs that says “A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind” hanging on the wall above his desk.
Amen brother. One of the reasons I don’t let people inside my house is that it’s such a cluttered mess even I’m embarrassed.
There is no question in my mind that *not* having a purpose in life (a job or equivalent) shortens one’s days on Earth.
I will also reinforce that statement.
My grandfather operated a road grader all his life, owned his own machine and contracted out with companies. He was really good at his job and was never without work. Made a good living all his life.
After he retired his mind started to go south. But a couple of times a month someone that knew him would call him to have a parking lot graded or some other small project that lasted no more than a couple of days. The total cost to my grandfather was fuel, about 20 gallons of diesel in the late ’60s. There was no cost to the machine other than standard maintenance which mostly involved changing the oil.
When he went to these jobs he would return with his mind almost normal. His mental capability soared from his dementia state. But he would forget to bill the client. His wife would get made and chew him out. Remember he was only out about $20.00 for the day. In my opinion that was cheap therapy.
She forced him to sell his machine, basically for scrap. It was like ripping his heart out. He took a significant tumble mentally because he had nothing to occupy his days. He still had his workshop and would tinker in there which helped some.
Then the person that owned the property next to my grandfather sold the land. During the survey it was discovered that his shop was six inches over the property line due to an error in the original survey when my grandfather sold the property. The new owners demanded that his shop be relocated or torn down. He had the building removed and within two years he was dead.
We had begged the property owner to just lease the six inches to my grandfather until his property sold. They said no. This was in Norco California which is a city that encourages and allows horses. All the new owners used that property was to corral horses. The infringement was trivial and made no difference in their needs. They were being assholes.
So whenever we visited my grandparents we would bring along a couple of buckets of fermented apples or other fruit. This were left next to the fence on my grandfathers property but close enough for the horses to reach the fermented fruit. It was not uncommon to see their horse staggering around at the end of one of our visits. The property owner spent a few thousand on vet bills because they did not know why their horses were ailing.
They also used to ride their horses on the edge of hill behind my grandfathers house. That was his property. So we cut a big trench on the property so that their horses could no longer pass. The property owners bitched but we told them to pound sand as it was his property and we were well within our rights to block their access with a large ditch. If their horse stumbled in the ditch and broke a leg, tough. They were trespassing.
The property owner may have won the battle, but we won the war.
One of my mom’s neighbors started driving across her front lawn very
shortly after they bought the house. They had too many cars for the
driveway, so they parked one truck in front of their house, and it was
easier to drive across my mom’s yard and out her driveway than to back
up into their own driveway. My mom was annoyed, not only at the rudeness
but also at the damage to her yard.
A polite discussion with the neighbors not having accomplished anything
(and I wasn’t being sarcastic when I wrote “polite”; rumors to the
contrary, I do not kill or even threaten everyone who annoys me) I
sharpened half a dozen rebars and buried them in my mom’s front yard
with about six inches out and angled towards the neighbor’s house.
When both of their front tires were shredded in my mom’s yard, they were
mad…
Did they remain polite after that?
They weren’t conspicuously polite from the beginning. The “polite”
mentioned above referred to my side of the conversation. Nevertheless,
they were apparently quite peeved and yelled and either threatened to
call the city police or actually did, blah blah blah. My mom was
somewhat annoyed at me because she’s non-confrontational, but was more
annoyed at them for being jerks. And she deliberately did not tell me
about the confrontation until everything had settled down because she
knows I have a habit of killing and breaking people and she didn’t want
it happening in her back yard, as it were.
we would bring along a couple of buckets of fermented apples or other fruit. This were left next to the fence on my grandfathers property but close enough for the horses to reach the fermented fruit.
Reminds me of a suggest I saw for the TSA. Take along food products that you know they will confiscate, and think they may sneak into their personal bag to eat. Spice the food with laxatives, or perhaps chemically pure capsaicin. Dunno how often they do personally eat confiscated stuff, but it would be nice to see…
So how did the lawn mower avoid the sharpened rebars ?
Lawnmower wasn’t an issue. It was, IIRC, less than a day between the
stakes going in and the tires being shredded, with the stakes then being
removed (by my brother, who also usually takes care of the yardwork).
You’re lucky some neighborhood kid didn’t impale himself on your punji stakes. The screams would have been annoying, and it’s so hard nowadays to get rid of a body.
Yah, I think that was one of my mom’s concerns. The stake closest to the
sidewalk was six or eight feet away, though, so it wouldn’t be a simple
trip-n-fall, but deliberate trespassing.
And anyway, what would kids be doing walking along the sidewalk? Kids,
walking nowadays? That’s, like, so last century. Kids get rides
everywhere. It’s not safe for children to be out, away from under
Momma’s apron*. There are predators everywhere!
* And that expression no doubt reveals my true nature as an atavistic
misogynist, desperate to keep women tied to the stove and above all away
from the workplace.
RBT wrote:
“You’re lucky some neighborhood kid didn’t impale himself on your punji stakes. The screams would have been annoying, and it’s so hard nowadays to get rid of a body.”
Ain’t that the truth. Some jokers in South Australia thought it would be cool to murder some people, dissolve their bodies in barrels of acid, and store the barrels in a disused bank vault. They were discovered, but the bodies were more mummified than dissolved, so the perps were arrested, tried and put in jail for a stretch.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowtown_murders
(NOT for the squeamish…)
I guess these people didn’t have access to a good chemist. 🙂
Acid? Geez.
My sister taught high school for a year in 1971 in Snowtown, where she met her husband, who was a bank officer in the very building (then a branch of the Savings Bank of South Australia, now unoccupied) where the bodies were found. The town is trying to live down its reputation from this incident.
From the Wikipedia article:
“Examiners attempting to identify the remains found them mummified rather than dissolved, that being the apparent reason for storing the bodies in acid. The killers had chosen hydrochloric acid which mummified the remains.”
So, acid doesn’t dissolve bodies? Or just hydrochloric acid?
SteveF wrote:
“Yah, I think that was one of my mom’s concerns. The stake closest to the
sidewalk was six or eight feet away, though, so it wouldn’t be a simple
trip-n-fall, but deliberate trespassing.”
Might not matter. If you broke into my house and dripped over something and broke a bone you may well have a good legal case against me for compensation.
“And that expression no doubt reveals my true nature as an atavistic
misogynist, desperate to keep women tied to the stove and above all away
from the workplace.”
Think of the time and money we could save if only one person per family (preferably the male) was allowed to have paid employment. Less money spent on roads, car parks, buildings. Women would wake up in the morning and already be at their workplace, so there’d be less pollution and petrol use as they could walk 20 feet to the kitchen, instead of 20 km to a workplace. Wages would increase because there’d be less people competing for jobs.
*dripped. tripped.
“If you broke into my house and dripped over something and broke a bone you may well have a good legal case against me for compensation.”
And that is a sad, sad statement, because it is too true. Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) tale of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supposedly worked in the building trade when he first came to the US. According to the tale, he was working on a 10′ high security wall around some rich residence, and was attaching broken glass to the top of the wall. The idea being that anyone who cut themselves on it was clearly intent on trespassing or worse, and deserved it. This, of course, could not be tolerated in California – someone might hurt themselves – so he had to remove all of the glass.
We are currently suffering a rash of break-ins and robberies – up 40% in the past year. These are mostly from foreign groups from Eastern Europe paying short-but-sweet visits to Switzerland. What makes this crime wave special is the sheer cheek involved. You don’t break into a house at night, you do it in broad daylight. You don’t swipe an iPhone out of an unguarded bag – you take it out of someone’s hand while they’re using it.
Depends on the acid. If you happened to have a very large amount of concentrated sulfuric acid, that’d work. But if it were me, I’d put the body through a wood chipper.
Ahh, a wood chipper. Been watching the movie Fargo have we? A really great movie.
Nah, putting bodies through wood chippers has been a popular disposal method ever since wood chippers became available.
Pics or it didn’t happen!
http://youtu.be/8qWFhDvURLg
Well, at least the female cop approached the killer holding her pistol properly pointed downward instead of in what Cooper used to call the antiaircraft position, which is usually what one sees in movies and TV.
We used to practice snap-shooting from that starting point. After a little practice, it’s amazing how little time it can take to get the pistol up and get off an aimed shot. Maybe a tenth of a second, faster than most people’s reaction times. If I were a cop and encountered a suspect holding his pistol down like that, I’d immediately double-tap him and shout “drop it!”.
Alternatively, you could just use Tim the Toolman’s more-power disposer.
http://youtu.be/xmMPp_m2s10
How about a conviction?