Crocs; The total Demise of Dignity in the USA

Fig.1 History of Croc's stock price

The numbers are hard to read in this chart (sorry). The stock opened at about $10 per share, then climbed steadily to $90 as the Croc-sensation took over the country. Then, as people realized how ridiculous they looked walking around in neon rubber clogs, the stock dropped to it's current share of price of about $1.50. I am so happy that the morons that started this craze have lost all their money. Well, many of them at least, I am sure several folks cashed out at $90 a share and headed for the beach, just like a good responsible business people do.

It escapes me how anyone can enjoy wearing such an offensive thing on their body, essentially a sweaty, dirty piece of rubber. I can't imagine a worse environment for human skin. Now on children, these foul things look marginally acceptable because they are neon and "cute", but on adults? Folks, you don't look cute and you don't look hip. You just look stupid and unattractive. Personally, i would rather wear shoes made of barbed wire than Crocs.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in Austin, slaps ("flip flops") rule. People, espcially hippies and girls aged 10 to 30, wear them 24 hours a day. What I find most amusing is to see girls out at night who have spent hours on their hair and make up and are wearing a stunning black dress, waddling around in slaps. Oh! but they are sooooo cuuute!!! look at the little diamonds on the black rubber thing! Girls; your attempt to be cute has just undone all that you just did to look nice. I once saw a group of high school kids that were on their way to the prom. The guys were all in tuxedos and looked fantastic. The girls were all waddling along in slaps. I felt bad for the guys, but at their age, they were just happy to be near a real breathing female.

I just don't get it; you spend an hour painting your toenails, and then walk around all night downtown on filthy streets so when you get home your fee are all dusty and dirty and stink like beer gutters that you have had to step through at every corner.

When I was a kid, we called these things "thongs" and only wore them to the beach.

The new hip shoe for girls is the "Ugg". It's a boot made in australia and is about a thousand times better looking than a slap.

These are uber sexy and I think the same as Princess Leigh wore in the 2nd Star Wars when there were on that frozen planet. Luke wandered off and got lost, so Han Solo had to go find him. By the time Han found Luke he was frozen and nearly dead. Han cut his Banta wide open with a light saber and stuffed Luke up in the Banta's guts and all to keep him warm. It looked disgusting but it worked. Rumor is that Han said that if Luke died he had dibs on the light saber.

Eating Extremes with brief commentary on Wrestling

Here are two of my favorite eating experiences ever:

1. Four BBQ sandwiches and a Barq's root beer from "Hi Ho BarBQue" in Hammond louisiana. Total price : $9.50

2. Some sort of vegetarian dish served at the Prague Castle in Prague, Czech Republic. Total price: $400.00

Now frankly, this disturbs me. Hi Ho sandwiches are so good that I only stop at 4 because any more than that and my arteries start snapping shut and I pass out. On a quick aside, let me say that my brother robert once ate ELEVEN "chili buns", which is a hamburger bun with hot dog chili in it. He had a contest with my friend Randall on who could eat the most chilibuns. Now, you might think this is a rather disgusting type of activity to do in public, but when you are at live "Professional Wrestling" in Loranger Louisiana, this type of contest is well received.

They got five each and quickly inhaled those, returning for another five. Randall started slowing after his 8th, and finally threw in the towel, leaving one on the plate. Robert ate all 10 of his and after declaring victory, went ahead and ate Randall's leftover, for a grand total of eleven. It's easy to see why I idolized my brother back then (I still do). Oh, I think that night the main event was "The Spoiler" vs. "Bruiser Bob Sweetan", who was the reigning Brass Knucks Champion.

But lets get back to the subject of the blog:

Let me quickly snuff out any notions you might have that I am some sort of secret agent type wandering the world wearing tuxedo suits and eating in castles. In stark contrast, I work for a couple of very good friends of mine who do conferencing in Europe. I help set up stage equipment like podiums and projector screens and laser pointers. And sometimes I have to tape things down to the stage. One benefit of doing slave labor in Europe is that I sometimes get to tag along to the formal dinner. Being allowed to tag along is a major gift from my friends because they know there is a high risk of me doing something to embarrass them in front of high order people. They are indeed good friends.

Ok, sorry, but I have to back up and tell you that the reason The Spoiler is my favorite wrestler is because he has this totally deadly move called "The Sleeper" that he can put on you and 10 seconds later, you are out cold, and 1 2 3, OUT! After this happens the referee usually has to argue a while with The Spoiler to get him to wake his opponent back up. He always does though, because otherwise the other guy would die and there would be lawsuits and stuff like that, and even The Spoiler can't take on an entire courtroom of bailiffs with weapons.

So on the night that we were allowed to dine in the Prague Castle, Wendy made the crucial mistake of letting Dwight and I sit together. Well, before you know it, we are full of Czech beer and discussing that instead of the nights entertainment being "A collection of rare violin pieces performed on famous Czech violins", we would rather have a showing of "Rocky V". Fortunately for the audience, the food came and we lost interest in manipulating the entertainment schedule. Dinner was served to a few hundred lucky people in the castle by an army of waitstaff. I have no idea what I ate but it was the finest arrangement of pie dough, vegetables and sauce I have ever tasted. I went and personally thanked the chef for this incredible meal.

So what is the real "value" of a meal? Can it be measured in currency? My mom says that anything tastes good if it has enough fat, salt, and garlic in it. Hard to argue with that. Many fast food joints are now really pouring on the bacon in their burgers for one reason; when you walk in you smell bacon frying and that is pretty much like the most evil thing there is. Nobody can turn down bacon.

And I final note that Robert just reminded me of. He used to take me, Randall, and the rest of us to wrestling every Saturday night in his Ford cargo van. It had no seats in the back so we rode in aluminum lawn chairs, the old kind with the webbing. If he stopped to fast we all slid toward the front. Those were the good old days before minivans came along with their 5 point hookup harness in every possible location that could be sat in. I'll bet there are twenty harnesses in every stupid minivan.

Oh, and I forgot about the other main move of The Spoiler; the "Claw". Few men live to tell the tale of this most vicious weapon.

extreme eating Update:  I just remembered that one time our neighbor's dog Lady, a huge black lab, ate TEN sandwiches.  Matt got home from fishing and had all these sandwiches left over so he started throwing them to Lady one at a time.  Lady was so big we called her the "kodiak bear"

This is my last time to diss Bill Gates, and a brief history of small computers

Note to reader: I mention several dates in this post, and they are not exact so don't give me crap about it. It does not really matter, the content is what is important. It's like in History class in school; The test will have a question like "What date was bill #223 brought to the floor in Congress? The answer would be something like "November 23, 1887". Does the exact day really make a difference? What decade should be good enough.

So onward...
I've been dissing Bill Gates since 1983ish when Microsoft started down the road of creating worthless crap. But many years ago Bill and Melinda Gates created a charitable foundation to help folks around the world. Last year they gave out over 2 billion dollars. Now, a big incentive for many people to give money to charity is a tax write off, but I think we are all guilty of that. The whole point is to encourage people to give money to help people, animals, and the earth (what's left of it). I do believe that Gates is sincere in his motives in his foundation, I really do.

So in that light, I want to give my last diss to cleanse my soul of this rant.

And quite sadly, the one very bad decision Gates made when he left to start the foundation was the appointment of Steve Balmer to the top; a fat, bald, retarded moron that has the skills of a cordless drill.

Back in 1981ish, Gates et. al. wrote a simple little OS (operating system) called DOS. There were no PCs out there, so anything would look good. Lore has it that Gates wrote a BASIC compiler in a weekend, propelling him to "Boy King" status. BASIC is a stupid little language that is very limited. In stark contrast, Shawn Fanning wrote the Napster program in a weekend (honest). You didn't see Shawn running around scouring fame whereever he could get it.

While Gates started selling his "crapware", Apple was working on a totally new concept for a computer, the Lisa (and Macintosh). Before I go on, let me inform you that the reason that PCs became dominate and not the Mac is because Apple got greedy and charged a small fortune for their computer. Pcs with DOS on the other hand, were cheap. Also, because the Mac leaned much more toward the right brain creative side, people saw it as being "not business enough".
Before long, Gates was making a fortune, but still churning out shit even though he had enough money to really make a top notch OS. Each new release of DOS was just like the previous except had more crap piled on top, thus making it slower and cumbersome.

During development of the Lisa and Macintosh, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozenak visited Xerox to look at a new concept they developed for a computer interface. The Steves were stunned when they saw it. The computer had this little block with a cord coming out the back that looked like a "mouse". The screen was graphical looking and had buttons and stuff on it, and you moved the mouse and a pointer moved around and you could click on buttons and things. Sound familiar? You bet, Xerox were the ones that developed this interface back in the 60s believe it or not. See pictures below of this amazing computer, developed years and years before the Mac and Windows

Well, Jobs was a real asshole back then and so he went back to apple and had the team replicate exactly what he saw at Xerox. He stole the concept lock stock and barrell from Xerox.
Then of course Gates saw the Mac and immediately stole the idea and created that wonderful piece of filth called "Windows". Apple of course sued Gates but Gates was too wealthy to be taken down at this point, leaving microsoft free to continue polluting the world with bad code.

Gates and Microsoft then started down a road of total domination of the computer market regardless of who they hurt in the process. They were quoted as saying "We will not be happy until Windows is running on every desktop in America". Well, they basically got their wish as corporations had no real choice but to use PCs running Windows, as Unix was not refined enough at this point to be easily deployed, and the Macintosh was focused on creativity, not the misery of business.

Gates had 50 billion dollars in the bank but was unable to write an operating system worth a dollar. Each new release of Windows was worse than the last; slow, bloated, buggy, and so on.

Gates had the entire country held hostage and would not spend the money to make Windows worth using. He didn't have to, there were no real alternatives.

If you are old like me, you might remember in the early days using DOS that there were a couple of files, "config.sys" and "boot.ini" on the hard drive that were used to configure and start it up. Get this; 25 years later, Vista SILL NEEDS THESE FILES. Yes, every release of windows including Vista is built on top of DOS. The programmers at Microsoft could just never figure out how to write something new.

Anything "creative" that Gates every tried to market was a total failure. Take the Zune for example; microsoft thought they could take on the iPod. The zune is a worthless piece of crap and currently has about 1% market share. Many years ago they also tried this new desktop interface that looked like a room in a house where things in the room represented your files and such. It was called "Bob" and was an immediate and total failure on release. I don't think it ever made it out of Beta testing.

Everything they ever made was stolen from somebody elses's idea (Windows, Zune, Bob, etc.)

But look what's happened; Apple totally dominates the news as far as the computing/ music world goes. Microsoft is still making a fortune, but nobody really cares anymore.

The White House has a totally rad computer system

Check out this picture.  It's a medieval era computer system used by the staff in the White House.  Now, Ex-president appointee (he was not elected) Bozo the Clown actually made a good decision (unknown to him) by maintaining these computers instead of upgrading to new Windows boxes.  Windows is unquestionably the worst piece of software ever written, and got worse with each new release.  Vista was such a piece of trash that MicroMoron is pushing Windows 7 because nobody is using Vista, a sea of unnecessary "improvements".  DOS on the other hand was small and relatively stable.  From what I understand, various lists and documents were being maintained on these decade old boxes all the way up to the end of the 8 year dark ages.  Obama came in and was stunned hen he saw this situation.

Why 20 year olds wonder why they can't get a job

I made a trip to Office Max to have a couple of photos made from picture files on my thumb drive.
Here is the conversation I had with the 20 year old girl at the counter.

"Hi, can you help me print some photos?"
(she mumbles something to me at 400 words per second)
"what?"
"Come over here by this computer."
She loaded up the files from my thumb drive and we selected the first which is a circuit board layout that has only 3 colors, red, green, and yellow.
"Can you give me the prices for like, an 8x10 and 11x14?"
"which one?"
"oh, well, the 11x14 then."
"Ninety cents."
"Wow, that's cheap, what kind of paper is that on"
"Regular paper"
"How much does it cost on photo paper?"
"Which size?"
"Umm, the 11x14."
"Well, you have to then buy the paper extra."
"So how much?"
"A dollar twenty nine."
"Ok, give me one of those."
"11 by 14 on photo paper?"
"yes"
"Is the file sized for 11x14?"
"Well, I don't know, I only know it in pixels, but it should scale I think."
(she opens the file and looks at the size)
"It is 27 by 15"
"So can you resize it?"
"I can't print it on an 11x14."
"What size can you print it on?"
"11 by 17"
"Ok, that's fine"
(she yells to the back) JOHNNY, LOAD UP SOME THREE THREE SEVEN NINE FOUR PAPER IN PRINTER A FOUR!!!
(she then goes through about 10 dialog boxes setting everything up, then heads to the back to get it)
She returns and immediately I see an problem; the colors are cyan, magenta and yellow instead of red, green, and yellow.

"Hmm, it looks like the file did not convert correctly, the colors are opposite."

Now, I happen to have knowledge of how colors work because I work in image processing for a living, and it is clear that something screwed up and the printer used the wrong color setup.

"What do you mean?" she says with a blank stare
"Well, instead of using RGB space, the printer used Cyan Magenta Yellow space."
"Oh, well those are the only colors on this printer."
She meant that there are only three ink cartridges and they are cyan magenta and yellow.
Of course any color can be made from these three colors.

I paid the girl and walked out.

The bad news about going back in time.

The bad news is; you can’t. Now at this moment, you are thinking “phil, you are a product of the Louisiana school system and are an idiot. How could you possibly have even a shred of knowledge about something as complex as time travel?”. Good point. The secret to being smart is simple; Have smart FRIENDS. Getting text message answers from your brilliant friends under the table will make you the brain of the dinner party. People will be floored by your amazing knowledge and you will probably walk out the door with the most attractive girl/dude at the party. But let’s get back to time travel. Here is some information from my friend Dave who is a razor sharp physicist, and an all around good guy who unfortunately suffers from lactose intolerance. In this exchange of information, Dave is trying to explain the universe and time travel to me.

dave,
I am dissatisfied with your answer about what is on the other side
of the universe. Personally, I think it is another universe, opposite of
ours, where Rocky loses and Apollo Creed wins.

Phil,


The current big bang thinking is that the universe started potentially
as a quantum fluctuation of a multi-dimensional (I've heard 10, 11, 26,
etc. - blame the string theorists) vacuum. A massive (that is,
mass-energy of the whole universe!) particle popped into existence and
then decayed rather violently into everything we see today. If the
universe is open, gravitationally speaking (and it probably is), then
there is nothing on the 'outside' of the universe except 11 or so
dimensions of nothing. (Of course, in physics nothing is not quite what
you think it is. A lot of somethings are allowed to exist in a nothing
as long as they don't exist for too long or get observed.) If the U is
closed, then that means the fluctuation that started it all was so large
in mass-energy that it caused the local space-time to become so curved
that it became a closed, self-contained geometry. That means there is
no way to ever find out what is on the 'outside' of the universe, since
we are on the 'inside' of a curved metric. Think of it like this - you
are on a boat. You can't fly, you can't swim. You can't look up, you
can't look down. How would you describe what things are like above or
below the surface? We're just like ants on a balloon that's being
inflated, according to Hubble et al.
Dave.

... And more, here is my reply and further info from dave...

Dave, i'm having trouble visualizing a 10 dimensional vacuum that you 
describe on the other side of the universe. also, how does a "massive 
particle" just "pop into existence"?
what made it decide to pop? where did it come from?
i bet even the string guys can't answer this one!! hahahaha!!!!
also, do you have knowledge about time travel? can you only go 
backwards?


I can answer your question, actually, about what makes a massive
particle pop into existence. Answer: there is NO STOPPING IT! It's in
the equations, it happens randomly for no reason, and it cannot be
disallowed in current physics theories. I know, I just answered 'why?'
with 'why not?'. By the way, this is what irritated Einstein so much
about quantum mechanics, with the whole God and playing dice thing. Who
are we to tell God what can and cannot be done with the universe?
The only way I know to travel through time is the mundane way - forward,
one instant at a time at a rate of one second = one second in your rest
frame. Other frames moving relative to your rest frame may experience
different results. Direction is still forward, but 1 second in frame A
<> 1 second in frame B.

Simple huh?

Here’s the deal. The only way to change the time/space relationship is to move. The faster you move, the slower your relative “clock” moves IN RELATION TO THE CLOCK OF PEOPLE NOT MOVING. So lets take an impossible case of going the speed of light (183,000 miles per second. Not per hour, per second). If you did this for a while, I have no idea how long, but a pretty long time, and then went back to earth, you would be “younger’ than other people. You would not go back, you would still be at the present, but your clock would be behind. What this really means is that the people who were not moving have gone FORWARD in time compared to you. This is all explained by Einstein’s general relativity theorem, which is so far beyond me that it is laughable.

Oh by the way, why did I say going the speed of light is impossible? Because a side effect of going fast is that you become heavier. All the more reason to relax when you are on a diet to get the most out of that tofu salad.

As you start to approach the speed of light, you become so heavy that you cannot generate enough energy to continue moving forward, so your speed becomes constant at some value well below the speed of light. We’ll never be able to test this theory because our best rocket ships are pretty lame. It will take us a year to get to mars, which is not very far away (35 million miles at it’s closest point). At the speed of light, it would take 1.3 seconds when it is at it’s furthest point away from us (250 million miles). As you can see, we have a long way to go in rocket engine design. I propose we take this ridiculous 2 trillion dollar “bailout plan” and use it instead to create a kick-ass engine.

FLASH!!! Just in from my brother Robert:

I read some more of your blog - funny stuff. I didn't read the whole thing on time travel, but thought I'd correct a minor point (I know, I know, your math and dates are "approximate"). It takes a lot longer than 1.3 seconds to get to Mars at the speed of light. It's more like 4 minutes. Gregg Ledford, Stephen Pittman and I figured this out when we were in the 5th grade, CONVINCED that we were going to build a spaceship (nay, a Flying Saucer, just like the Jupiter II in Lost in Space!) and go there. I remember we told one of the girls in our class (who we'd promised a ride) that it was going to take us about 2 seconds to get to the moon, but Mars would be a bit longer, more like 4 minutes. We had already decided our ship would travel at the speed of light. We didn't know how - that was a trivial detail to be worked out later. I remember seeing some inflatable seat cushions in a catalog that looked a lot like the seat Dr. Smith stowed away in, and thinking "yeah, those would be perfect for the seats in our spaceship!"

the disgusting world of delivery pizza

"hey kids, lets save some time and money on dinner and order some pizza!"

Let's explore the myth of saving money.

You go online and see the price at austinpizza as "12.99".  Your mind is now telling you "I can have dinner for 12 dollars".  The whole "ninety nine" thing is a crime and would be banned if i were president.  It would be my 3rd act after 1)everyone gets a haircut and 2) all minivans are burned beyond recognition.  But i digress (i like that word).  The reality is:

$13  pizza

$1.50  tax

$2   delivery charge

$2  tip

$3  worthless shit you added on the order like cheese sticks.

$21.50   total

SO.... your 12 dollar meal just turned into 22 dollars.

AND, you will get at best, room temperature food because your driver is 16 years old, has a worthless unreliable car, and has 20 orders ahead of you.

Now that we have the money thing out of the way, let's discuss quality.  My hero John Kelso once said "You can't chum for sharks with Papa John's".  In case you don't know what this means, "chum" is a bucket of fish guts that you throw out of a boat to attract sharks for killing or something i guess.  John is right.  Papa's pizza is worse than disgusting.  As is Gatti's, Little Caesar's, even austin pizza.  Have you ever seen the people that work in the back?  don't look because you'll never eat there again.

The alternative?   Chef Boy R Dee box pizza!!! Sweet!  at this point you are guffawing, but let me tell you something pendejo, this stuff rules.  it is exactly the same as 40 years ago.  the kit costs 3 dollars.  Three dollars.  Now, you add a can of mushrooms, a sliced tomato, jalapenos, whatever, and you have a hot, fresh pizza for about 5 dollars TOTAL.  Plus, you and your gang get to have some fun together in the kitchen.

Me and my shortie just busted up a cheeseburger chef pizza and it beats the poo out of anything delivered.  

that's all i have to say about this.

The Human Head - Roach Motel

We've all seen these people, they wander around in public with a cockroach in their ear.  This of course being a bluetooth cell phone "thing" that sits in your ear so you don't have to get your phone out of your pocket.  This behavior baffles me, so let's explore some possibilities.  There are only two real reasons I can think of that require the use of a cockroach: 1) You get so many calls a day that retrieving your phone from your pocket would lead to elbow damage, or 2), you are so important that you cannot afford to wait the 3 additional seconds necessary to get your phone out of your pocket.  Option 1.  It is very likely that 90% of the calls you get are not essential.  If you feel the need to answer every one of them, well, you might want to reconsider how you are spending the one life you get.  Option 2.  Let me say right now:  You are not as important as you think you are.  There are exceptions of course, like a prisoner on death row would need to know right away if the governor called with a stay of execution, and maybe the Pope is important enough, but the odds of the slopeheads wandering around the airport waiting for a flight to Cleveland probably do not qualify for the "very important" club.

The most likely real reason for this behavior is simple insecurity.  "look at me, i am important!".

In general, answering a phone is very dangerous.  Think about it, the person calling you knows who they are and why they are calling you.  You, on the other hand, do not know who is calling you and what they want.  You are at a serious disadvantage.  The caller has all the facts and is ready to chat or debate or whatever.  Being caught off guard is a bad place to be in a debate.

It's always best to let them leave a message, then call back when you are armed.

Before cell phones,  people had lots of time to themselves to escape the irritation of the world.  When you were at the airport waiting for a plane, you had an hour to yourself with no chance of anybody bothering you with useless chatter.  Now, people are so obsessed with being in touch that when their phone rings, they scramble at warp speed to grab their phone.  And the worst part of all, they will do it right in the middle of a face to face chat with a real person.

And to leave you with one of my favorite sayings  "Just because it rings does not mean you have to answer it".

Radar Servo Altimeters drive the girls crazy!

This is picture of my 'Servo Radar Altimeter". It is a 1972 model, and retailed for $13,000. I paid 50 dollars for it on ebay. It uses some bizarre power known as "26 volts AC, 400 HZ.", which is a real pain to create. Skinny found a schematic and we are working on this now, but it is being a pain in the butt. For a test, I connected it to my function generator set to 26 volts sine wave, and the darned thing worked! There are about 60 pins on the back, but you only need two to make it work as a regular ol' altimeter. It also has a Mode C encoder built in, good to 50,000 feet. A blind encoder alone costs around $800.
I'm thinking of a 40K flight, thus the exciting purchase of this 50K altimeter. stay tuned for exciting updates on the new Skinny-400Hz supply!!

New update:  I found a simple circuit that generates a standard square wave and then uses the 2nd stage of the op amp to convert to a sine wave.  It is amazing, with only like 4 components, the sine looks incredible.  So i have it built up for 400hz, and my friend Doug just pointed out a nice power op amp that should do the trick for cranking up the current sourcing capacity.