Adaptive Curmudgeon

A few weeks before Christmas I had a bad week with computers. I was a walking EMP pulse. Everything electronic that I use daily was in orbital decay. I was not a happy camper.

I decided the best solution was to drink beer and whine. Halfway through my beer fueled grievance process, a technically adept friend showed up. The poor guy had to listen to several minutes of my rants before I got the point.

Curmudgeon: “Every OS in the vicinity is toast. My laptop only works half the time, my Kindle’s ‘app memory’ is overloaded, and my truck’s software keeps throwing false errors.”

Friend: “Your truck is suffering software glitches?”

Curmudgeon: “It’s a Dodge.”

Friend: Full of sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

Curmudgeon: “Let’s get drunk.”

Friend: “At least you can sort out the Kindle. Why not do a reset to factory settings?”

Curmudgeon: “I’ve done ‘resets’ and ‘recovers’ like that and usually thing go from suck to blow.”

Friend: “Well this is an Android so…”

Curmudgeon: “I’m like ‘I just jammed in the damn distribution media’ and the computer’s all like ‘data error on disk 5 of 9… I’m turning into a brick now’. This one time I had an HP computer…”

Friend: “This is a cloud based system…”

Curmudgeon: “Don’t get me started about the friggin cloud! Those son’s a bitches have been trying to turn my home PC into a ‘dumb terminal’ since forever. They call it cloud and everyone thinks ‘Google apps’ is like this brilliant new idea. I need to ‘phone home’ to word process a page of text and that’s an improvement? Good grief they have damn near shoved ‘dumb terminal’ up our asses and it’s all because they call it cloud. Those swine! And another thing; give everyone a NSA tracking device and the people rejoice because it plays ‘Angry birds’…”

Friend: “Um… how many beers have you had?”

Curmudgeon: Popping another beer, “I dunno’ some integer that’s not prime. Who’s counting? I bought this stuff called ‘Burning Skye’, it was on sale.”

Friend: Rooting through the box to come up with the last bottle. “Scottish Ale? May I?”

Curmudgeon: Taking a huge swig of beer, “Of course, check out the graphic design on the box, looks like someone read too much Tolkien.”

Friend: Sipping the beer, “Ugh… this isn’t very good.”

Curmudgeon: “Tastes like piss! Don’t say I didn’t warn ya!”

Friend: “But you didn’t…”

Curmudgeon: “Watch out dude, this beer is called ‘Burning Skye’ but it tastes like ‘Burning Ass’.”

Friend: “Your timing leaves a little to be…”

Curmudgeon: “Goddamn dumb terminals! I ought to blast the thing with a 20 gauge! Resets never work.”

Friend: Sighing “I think you’re not getting the cloud thing. There’s nothing on the Kindle that’s not on the cloud right?”

Curmudgeon: “Damn straight! I downloaded everything but Amazon still has the list of books I’ve bought. I’m screwed! When the zombie apocalypse happens I won’t have any books to read. I’ll have to wipe my ass with electronics. I should have never given up on paper…”

Friend: “Trust me on this.”

Curmudgeon: “Cthultu is pissed.”

Friend: “Who?”

Curmudgeon: “Oh… you’ll know when the time comes…”

Eventually the dismal Burning Skye did it’s work. I was ready to forget my misgivings with “hard resets”. I set out to do the deed.

Stay tuned…

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I were having lunch at a coffee shop in a nearby small town.

“Hey”, says I, “let’s go check out that new hydroponics shop that just opened up.”

Indeed there just happens to be a small hydroponics and indoor gardening shop in this town. Living in the middle of nowhere this is somewhat unexpected. I, being a nerd, am fascinated with all technology at all time. Imagine growing strawberries during the freezing ass end of winter!

“What’s the matter?” Mrs. Curmudgeon laughed, “need to raise some dope?”

I was shocked, shocked I say! I’m no fool, I’m well aware that the plant light economy is probably driven by stoners raising crops of the whacktacular herb. But it seems to me that the same technology that can grow dope can grow anything.

I soldiered on. “You know that trashed out spare bathroom we’ve got? I was thinking of tearing into it and maybe doing a hydroponic setup. The bathtub is toast right? Maybe I can pull it and substitute some sort of water circulation deal.”

“Yeah, so you can get baked Chong!”

“No dammit. I’m totally serious here. It’s like a zillion degrees below zero out. Wouldn’t fresh… I dunno’ fresh strawberries maybe… wouldn’t that be bitchin’ cool? Plus I don’t want to fiddle with that old leaking showerhead. It could be a silver living to a crappy spare room. Rebuilding a bathroom sucks.”

“Tell it to the cops stoner. You’re gonna’ have black helicopters overhead and teams of bored DEA agents following you around all day long.”

I was getting frustrated. “No I’m not! It’s the same damn technology that…” I realized Mrs. Curmudgeon was toying with my head. “…oh I see. You’re messin’ with me.”

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Alas, I was already on one of those mental trips that takes hold of people who think too much.

“Remember science fiction in the ’70’s? Every space station showed a garden. It was like hydroponics was the wave of the future.”

“Or soylent green…”

“And then those jackoffs in Star Trek came up with the replicator and now it’s all unicorn power.”

“Tea! Earl Grey! Hot!”

“Exactly…”

“With pot in it.”

“Dammit. I’m thinking ‘outside the box’ here. Imagine a little ‘salad farm’.” I gestured toward the snow outside. “When it’s -30 degrees and dark out, and there’s nothing fresher than a can of beans, think of a fresh cherry tomato.”

“Mmm… that’s a good point.”

Ah ha! I’d won an argument! Write this date down for posterity! It can happen.

“But,” Mrs. Curmudgeon came back for the kill, “you just know you’re going to go into the store and it’ll be all pot all the time.”

Sigh… she was right. “I suppose you’re right. I’m thinking strawberries and tomatoes but it’s going to be Acapulco Gold.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“And I’m going to be asking about pH and they’ll be writing scripts for glaucoma!” I was laughing too.

“He he he.”

“And they’ll have Bob Marley on the stereo!” We were both laughing. “Beanbags in the corner!

By now my nerdy idea of checking out the hydroponics store for winter salads was totally upended into a big Cheech and Chong joke.

“But hell,” I grabbed my keys, “I’m going to go anyway.”

Mrs. Curmudgeon agreed.

I continued. “…But if I see dreadlocks we’re friggin’ outta’ there!”

I paid the waitress and grabbed my jacket. A deep voice behind me cleared it’s throat.

“Ahem!”

“Uh yeah?”

“We’re closed right now for lunch.”

It was a middle aged fellow. The sort of guy that would look absolutely at home at the wheel of a minivan. No sign of counterculture at all.

“Come again?”

“It’s my store. I shut it down for lunch.”

I turned beet red. “So you probably heard…”

“Bob Marley? Really?”

“That’s what I was saying!” I defended myself.

“I know, heard it all. No strawberries though.”

“Sure that’s fine. I was just ya’ know thinking of stuff that could grow…”

“Beans, lettuce, cucumbers, got a nice bunch of peppers coming up too.”

“Yeah! Food!”

“Precisely. No bean bags. But I’ve locked up for now.”

I was still fatally embarrassed. “Maybe some other time I’ll check it out.”

“Please do. You’ll love it. Especially if you’re in a space station.”

I turned red again.

I made my best attempt at a graceful exit and shuffled out before more stupidity got pinned on me.

Mrs. Curmudgeon laughed all the way home.

I finished painting the ceiling without spilling one damn drop on the Mrs.’s precious bathroom fixtures and tile floor! I dodged a bullet while slipping a noose and whistling past a graveyard. (It’s a triple metaphor accomplishment!)

I’ve never before painted a ceiling when the room contents below were not scheduled for subsequent paint. This doesn’t mean I’m a stranger to painting. It means I plan ahead. (Alas planning didn’t work out this time.)

Painting gives one time to think. It all comes down to utility, quality, and freedom. Here, in no particular order, are some Curmudgeonly tips on home improvements with the brush.

Utility:

• If your house looks like shit, paint it.
• It won’t hurt. You can’t “trash” the place by adding fresh paint.
• If your walls suck, after paint they will still suck but it won’t annoy you as much.
• Fresh paint won’t fix the foundation, plumbing, wiring, or insulation, but it’ll make you happier with the dump you can afford. Studies (which I just made up) show that 98% of new home sales are to losers who get infatuated with a new home’s shiny paintjob and countertops. Here’s a hint; fresh paint in the $300,000 house you’re looking at doesn’t mean it lacks the same deficiencies as your current hovel. Quite likely it was slapped together by six illegals who were hired by a developer that went strategically bankrupt after the sale and the whole thing is constructed out of mouldy cardboard and debt. If you can paint your old house to avoid buying a different house do it!
• Killz2 is good stuff.
• Primer is your friend. If not a primer, then consider two coats.
• Once you’ve prepped and taped and done the first coat, the second one goes fast.
• Nobody has ever regretted a second coat of paint on a wall.
• Painting is labor intensive. Get good paint.
• Painting takes time. However, it’s a lot easier than tearing out walls and re-shingling the roof so be happy you’re only painting.
• Decent brushes are worth it. Wash them you lazy bastard. Foam brushes are bad juju.
• You can cut corners when taping or putting down dropcloths. You can also punch yourself in the balls.
• Some teenagers are helpful. Others are aggressively useless. If you’ve got the latter, kick their ass out or you’ll never get done.
• Many adults are just as useless as teenagers.
• If you have a cat, its sole goal in life is to dip its paws in wet paint and run around on the carpet. Either lock the cat out or shoot it.
• While you’re working, folks might show up and make negative comments about the quality of the job. If they are h the job take heed of their comments. If they aren’t, shove your paintbrush up their nose.
• There is no reason whatsoever that you can’t paint while drinking beer.
• Paint day is the best day for men who like to wear tattered clothes. Enjoy!
• Croks are embarrassing as footwear but they’re great for jobs involving wet paint and/or lots of blood. You shouldn’t encounter both wet paint and blood in the same project.

Quality:

• There are two types of paint jobs. One type of paint job is done by people who live in a house and deliberately wish to enjoy or preserve it. The other type of paint job is done by landlords or someone who desperately wants to sell a house (and usually run from it).
  • There’s is no overlap between the two.
  • If the walls look looks like a bunch of monkeys on crack and Jackson Pollock jointly did something unnatural with a can of paint; you live in a rental.
• You can paint damn near anything with brushes and rollers. Paint sprayers are cool (I have one) but they’re best used outside on big projects (like a barn). Unless you’re painting sixteen rental units per week at “lowest bidder quality” a sprayer is counter productive.
• It is almost impossible to make a home look worse by slapping on a coat of paint. Landlords who hire illegals at rock bottom prices to slap the cheapest paint in Christendom on wafer thin drywall manage this feat.

Freedom:

I did my time with white walls. Damn near every wall in every house I lived in for many years was painted white and eventually I’d had enough! It’s your house. You live there. The only reason to paint a wall white is to make it as bland, uninteresting, and soul killingly dull as possible; as if some schmuck out there is going to have a seizure if the walls are tan and that’ll cause the asset price of the real estate to implode. Fuck that!

• There is a name for a house which has an interior that is painted entirely in shades of white. That name is “rental”.
  • If you own a house and live in it, please for the love of God, paint it any color but white.
  • “Eggshell”, “ivory”, and the like are all words that mean “white”.
• If you won’t paint your walls anything but white because you might sell it then get off your ass and sell the damn house already. Sell it to a human being who can move in and paint it a color that makes them happy.
• If you think the asset price of your house will plummet by 50% because of the shade of paint on a wall, it’s not even close to being truly worth your stated price and you know it.
• If you pick an ugly color it’s not the end of the world. You can change it any time you want. (Unlike that unfortunate tattoo you put on your ass.)
• Men, do not pick the color. Your wife has many opinions about color. They are ever changing and mutually exclusive and you’ll never understand it. Even if you can read her mind and pick the exact perfect wavelength, an hour after you put away the brushes she’ll have a change of heart and want “ecru”. As a man, you don’t know what “ecru” is. Let her pick the color.
• Men, drive your lady to the store and let her pick out any paint in any shade she wants. Don’t look at the price. Trust me on this, if she picks it out from a color chip and you drive to the store and get it, it’ll be wrong. You must drive her to the store and browse for hammers while she makes the selection.
• Women, don’t let your man pick out the color. He’ll go to Home Depot and get five gallons of “oops paint” for 75% off. It might be puke yellow, it might be brown, it might be pink. He’ll be perfectly happy. Men, when they say the don’t care about the color…. mean it.
• Whatever you do, don’t paint anything white… unless it’s a sailboat.

I’d like to come up with a post appropriate for today but Dave Barry, as always, has it well in hand. No need for me to worry about it when America’s low rent modern Mark Twain is on the case. Enjoy reading There’s Just No Explaining 2014 and a happy new year to you all.

“Home improvement” for me, right now, is largely not about making it better. It’s mostly about keeping the damn place standing. A holding action against entropy. That’s just how it is. (I assume this is a temporary situation. Sooner or later I’ll get my shit together and putter around the homestead at a leisurely pace indulging in the improvement instead of maintenance of the house. One can hope. Either that or I’ll retire and spend my days fishing… which seems like a good solution to a decrepit house.)

On the other hand, Mrs. Curmudgeon gets a vote too and ladies seem to be really attached to nice bathrooms. So I promised to repaint the bathroom ceiling. (It needed to be done.)

I’ve never painted a ceiling when the walls and stuff are already done. It seems like a bad idea; a fine opportunity to create a disaster. Isn’t there a Charlie Chaplin movie about this very idea?

It’s freaking me out. I’m painting like a single drop on the already nicely painted (several years ago) walls will cause a bomb to go off.

For me, it’s the paint version of the sword of Damocles. Wish me luck.

My “old” computer’s CPU when it was new:

Windows 7:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS

An unfortunate experience with Ubuntu 14.10*:

My old computer’s power as it aged**:

My new computer’s power:

Windows 8.1:

The new computer once you unhitch it from the unholy mess that is Windows 8.1:

My new computer with a fresh install of Linux Mint:

A.C.

* Never install an OS with “unicorn” in the name”. (Also your mileage may vary with non-LTS versions. I toyed with dark powers and so I had it coming.)

** Sterling engines are cool. I found this one here. I thought the image was apropos. My laptop still worked and it was “cool”.  But it was no longer an unremarkable generic reliable workhorse.

Yours truly has acquired a new “Christmas” laptop. This isn’t the perfect choice. The ideal solution would be to run my old laptop for fifty years, until such time as its repeatedly repaired and rebuilt chassis dissolves into rust just as the aliens and zombies swarm my compound on Mars and I deploy my EMP Pulse weapon that fries anything more advanced than a toaster; thus hailing the beginning of a new era where the highest technology is the moldboard plow. Unfortunately, I live in reality. I don’t have time for Quixotic challenges and lack a Martian outpost.

My old laptop, despite being only four years old, was exhibiting every trait of planned obsolescence. It was running exclusively on external drives, failing to boot with alarming regularity, and had a battery life of zero. It has been begging for a graceful retirement for three months. I granted it. This is the sane solution.

The timing is problematic. Normally I’d run from any purchase around Christmas. Some paint huffing yahoo is going to see that I spent money in December and use it to justify ever earlier Christmas commercialism. Sorry folks, when you see Christmas advertisements during the Superbowl, my new laptop contributed to it.

My idea was to replace the decrepit beast I’ve been using and tinker with its replacement over the Holiday. Ideally I’ll have the shiny new setup running in time for my 2015 New Year’s Resolution to “get my electronic shit together”. So far, no dice.

Like the early Fords which “come in any color you want so long as it’s black”, the laptops in my price range come with “Windows installed good and hard“. The Curmudgeonly side of my brain is cursing the insanity of it all. The Adaptive side chose to adapt by thinking of something better to do… which is anything.

So until such time as I get this high tech nightmare running a proper OS you won’t be hearing much from me. I can login to WordPress in Win 8.1 but by the time I’ve run the gauntlet of Microsoft’s BS I don’t feel like writing. See? Bill Gates hates my blog.

The blog may be on it’s own for a while. How long? It might be hours, it might be days, who knows? All I can say is that I got liquor for Christmas and sitting around the fire doing nothing is mighty attractive. Merry Christmas y’all.

A couple weeks I wrote about hoar frost. It’s been a pretty persistent condition the last few weeks. I wound up bringing in an ice covered tree into Curmudgeon Compound. I think it’s super pretty! Then again I’m going to wind up mopping the floor as the ice melts.

P.S. A few more tips came in. You know who you are. Thank you very much and Merry Christmas to you. For that matter, Merry Christmas to everyone. Posting might be light the next few days as I crack into some Christmas whiskey and forget about the world. If  something amusing happens like a fruitcake based zombie apocalypse I’ll post asap. If you don’t hear from me for a while then you’ll know the predicted attack of the sugar plum fairies has been cancelled and we’re safe another year.

This is the fifth year of a my Festivus Christmas tradition where we gather around the warm glow of the laptop and watch A Very Zombie Holiday.

For another week Foxinator’s pig remained alive and well and increasingly evil. My pigs, which couldn’t be moved without the trailer, played happily in the sun and behaved like angels. This proves that the universe is always in balance. When your life sucks, it probably just means someone else is having a great day.

One sunny day I’d planned a work trip with an early departure. It was 5 am and I was sipping my pre-trip morning coffee and thinking of reasons why I’d rather be fishing. Mrs. Curmudgeon’s phone chirped.

A text from the Foxinator: “READY?”

Mrs. Curmudgeon texted back: “YEP. LOCKED AND LOADED. BE THERE AT 5:45.”

I sipped my coffee and sat very still. Something was going to die and it was going to get messy. If there ever was an ideal time to be somewhere else this was it.

“Gee look at the time! I gotta’ go. See ya later.” I practically bolted for the door.

Outside at my truck, still clutching my first cup of coffee, I passed our pig pen.

Pig #1: “Morning Curmudgeon! Isn’t it a great day?

Pig #2: “Sure is. We love you dude!”

Pig #3: Sound asleep… “Zzzz….”

Curmudgeon: “Mornin’ guys, here’s a couple stale donuts I swiped on the way out.”

Pig #3: “Thanks man!”

Curmudgeon: (Glancing nervously back at the house.) “Look guys, you might want to hang low for a while. Just stay away from the gate eh?”

Pigs: “Whatever you say. Have a great trip.”

I got out of there.

—-

Fifty miles later I got a text from Mrs. Curmudgeon: “THE PIGS ARE ON THE TRAILER.”

I texted back (don’t give me shit about texting and driving… I live in one of the free states): “WAS IT GRUESOME?”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “NOPE. THEY JUST WALKED ON THE TRAILER.”

Curmudgeon: “SAY WHAT?”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “APPARENTLY THEY KNEW WE MEANT BUSINESS THIS TIME AND DECIDED TO BEHAVE ACCORDINGLY. MAYBE THE PISTOL WAS A CLUE?”

Curmudgeon: “WAS BILL PLEASED?”

Mrs. Curmudgeon: “HE WASN’T PISSED OFF, ONLY GRUFF. I THINK THAT COUNTS AS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED :)”

So the saga ends without a shot fired. I for one am relieved.

I call that a close call… for everybody; possibly even the evil pigs. Two angry, armed women, winching bloody carcasses on a trailer is one of those things best left to the mind of Steven King. Folks, any time you’re thinking your day sucks… Like maybe you’re reading this while at a cubicle and your boss just made you fill out the umpteenth form in triplicate, just remember that you’re not on the bad side of Foxinator and Mrs. Curmudgeon. See? Doesn’t everything suddenly feel better?