Fogbow

Foggy wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 4:58 pm I am now the proud owner of zero dislocated shoulders, so yay.

He still wants me to hold off on fizzikal therapy for four weeks. He gave me some isometric exercises to do.

I had to pay ol' Wifehorn $5, and it was good.

Congrats, boss! Although $5? I only do gentleman bets with family/close friends ($1 -- remember the movie Trading Places?). The bragging rights to the winner are worth more than the cash.

So Dancing with Barbells in the short-term is outa the picture. That works. Follow the advice of your doctor (no, not nurse maid wife and those cats who cater to you) and you will be fine.

Yay! For no dislocated shoulders!



p.s. no doing maracas though!!

Foggy wrote: ↑Wed Aug 16, 2023 4:58 pm I am now the proud owner of zero dislocated shoulders, so yay.

Yes, and today we drive Numbah Two Son back to Wilmington.

Yay for the good news!! :

And I hope we can presume you are not doing the actual driving for Numbah Two son’s return!

No, no driving for at least another week. Poor ol' Wifehorn has had to do all the driving all summer. That's going to end next week.

Feeling very good today, just got back from a trip to the big box store. I think maybe the nightmare is coming to an end. Mañana I'm heading to the swimming club.

I might suggest you avoid the fly, and the backstroke.

Oh yeah, if I'm lucky I might be able to do the crawl. And that's before I get in the water.



I plan to walk down the steps, holding the rail - I never do that, I jump in the deep end.

I plan to walk around the pool and maybe do a little kicking on my back. I'm not going near the deep end, but the main part of the pool is 5 feet max depth. Just so I can say I did, and get moving in the right direction. As they keep telling me in all my post-op literature ...

I already did a rant about how I get to drive a car for the first time in 61 days.

OMG, that's gonna be great.

And the first place I'm gonna go is my swim club, yay. Haven't swam yet this summer, haven't driven a car, haven't been to the beach.

Like I said, if'n I didn't read everything here, I'd really like to enjoy an idyllic, lovely, romantic few days of my life feeling sorry for myself, is that too much to ask? After the summer I've had, all the dislocated shoulders, all the surgeries, all the nightmare?

Apparently so, because others here are suffering more than I am, which is bad. I wouldn't want anyone suffering more than I am, except Donald Trump. He can suffer forever, who cares?

Anyway ... driving ... swim club ... OMG ...

Tomorrow's gonna be GREAT.

Or maybe I'll stub mah big toe and spend the day inventing new cuss words.

Or maybe I'll wash my hair.





Ya never know.




On the bright side, I have a better day than Donald Trump, even the days when I'm sick as hell and I hork my guts out and ... and worse. As bad as it gets, I am not indicted on 91 felonies, and - amazing enough, considering my widely criminal experience - I have never been arrested on any charge whatsoever, and I never spent a night behind bars.

Which is amazing to me, even if y'all don't care.

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

And too also, mañana I can take a shower all by myself, just like a real boy!

First time in 61 days.

It's been fun, letting ol' Wifehorn get involved.

But the time has come

The straw hat chronicles:

I like hats and especially this one:

.
.
That's the Stetson Sawmill. I bought one in 2019 and finally replaced it with another one, it arrived yesterday. And I was shocked how much I had abused the old one and changed its shape. I almost thought it was the wrong hat.

But then I realized, I bought it four years ago, and it's a straw hat, and do you remember the story about the first little piggy, the one who built his home out of straw?

Bingo. Straw doesn't last forever.



So I ordered a hat made of bricks. People think I don't know my childhood parables, but I do.

And I gotta be real careful with this one

Nobody had a song about a brick hat. This is the closest I could find. Just do a word substitution in your mind as the Commodores sing. Thank you.

HAY OUR NEW CAR DOESN'T HAVE A CD PLAYER

And it was originally bought as a rental car, so I can't install any of the software until Toyota fixes it.

But it prolly has a USB port that you can insert a messge stick into as aux input to the audio instead. Just 'rip' your CDs to the message stick and go! You can carry 100's of CDs on every trip.

A car that new should / may have CarPlay and/or The Android equivalent (Can't remember name) either one will handle music from your phone and navigation maps.

Foggy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2023 8:24 am The straw hat chronicles:

I like hats and especially this one:

.

sawmill.jpg

.
That's the Stetson Sawmill. I bought one in 2019 and finally replaced it with another one, it arrived yesterday. And I was shocked how much I had abused the old one and changed its shape. I almost thought it was the wrong hat.

But then I realized, I bought it four years ago, and it's a straw hat, and do you remember the story about the first little piggy, the one who built his home out of straw?

Bingo. Straw doesn't last forever.



So I ordered a hat made of bricks. People think I don't know my childhood parables, but I do.

And I gotta be real careful with this one

Yep gotta be careful with straw hats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot

Earthlings are so weird, so dangerous, so crazy.



Anyway,

keith wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 8:56 pm But it prolly has a USB port that you can insert a messge stick into as aux input to the audio instead. Just 'rip' your CDs to the message stick and go! You can carry 100's of CDs on every trip.

I have a couple 256 gigabyte USB thumb drives (my first PC had a 125 megabytes hard drive). I'm pretty sure one will hold all my music.

So I guess here's the plan - I search the computer for all the mp3s in my music folder and copy them to the thumb drive. But I have a LOT of music. How do you sort and search and find what you want to play, if there are no folders or anything?

Or can you have folders on the thumb drive?

I just use my phone or the iPad, with either a streaming service or saved tunes.

My car was a year or two earlier for Android Auto so I'm a bit sad. It works but not as well (and Google Maps is better than the on board Nav).

Yeah, the backing up camera is a TON better than the old one. I could actually use it without worry. And there are a ridiculous number of computers in the woodwork. Didn't have room for a driver's door cup holder, because of the clutter.

But I found out how to disable the bad thing I wrote about in the Driving thread.

Foggy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 27, 2023 2:50 pm Earthlings are so weird, so dangerous, so crazy.



Anyway,

keith wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 8:56 pm But it prolly has a USB port that you can insert a messge stick into as aux input to the audio instead. Just 'rip' your CDs to the message stick and go! You can carry 100's of CDs on every trip.

I have a couple 256 gigabyte USB thumb drives (my first PC had a 125 megabytes hard drive). I'm pretty sure one will hold all my music.

So I guess here's the plan - I search the computer for all the mp3s in my music folder and copy them to the thumb drive. But I have a LOT of music. How do you sort and search and find what you want to play, if there are no folders or anything?

Or can you have folders on the thumb drive?

Ah, I now you enter into the realm of one of my pet peeves. The short answer is read the owner's manual to find out but if its like mine you have to go a lot of trouble to organize it. The shorter answer is it a right royal pain in the ass.

My car is a 2013 (geeze how did it that old already) Honda Civic. The audio system doesn't know about folders as an organizing concept - it just descends through them looking for music. It knows mp3 and a couple other formats. It doesn’t know NTFS or any other modern disc format, so you formatting big USBs can be tricky if you dont pay attention.

It knows how to find metadata. It knows how to find artist name, album title, track title. It can sort on track title. Thats all. If you tell it to play from the top, the top is the first track written to the device. If you add a Beatles album to your device, it goes to the bottom, after ZZ top.

The system can list albums or tracks for you to select. If you are in album mode, you select an album and it will list the tracks in that album for selection. If in track mode it will list all tracks in alpha order. You cannot list by artist or anything else.

I wrote a program to build my car USB sticks in a predictabe order and write a report telling me where they are. I just rebuilt my cars message sticks last night. I've got 60gig on the 'general pop' and 18gig on 'Jazz/Blues/Classical.

Here' what I do:
Prerequisites -
1) music library with metadata in good shape artist, album title, track title. Library folders should be organized by ...\artist\album\
2) a music catalog program that can dump selected catalog entries to an XML file. I use "collectorz.com music collector" (MuC). I am not sure if Discogs can dump an XML file or not or how you would select which one to dump.
3) my program which knows how to parse the MuC XML file and copy the entire artist folder to the USB.

Method:
1) ensure the USB has no music on it. Formatting to FAT32 is fast, but deleting is fine.
2) fire up MuC, select the albums you want to put on the USB. Hint, MuC can link music files to entries, has various ways to categorise genre, location, or whatever. Eg, select all albums in location CD jazz or LP jazz that are not various artist.
3) export the selections to XML (oh yeah, track names should not have foreign alphabet characters in it - my program will choke).
4) fire up my 'musicstick' program, tell it where the XML file is, tell it where the output should go, and tell it to do its thing. 'Bad' characters in the XML will choke at the XML loading stage. These will be reported by a crash, so you need to find them and fix them.
5) if you are putting, say, 400 albums on a USB 2 message stick, go make yourself a cup of covfefe or go to bed and leave to overnight.
6) print the report and keep in the car. Recommend printing in booklet.

You can do all that, right?

No, I can't.

But I might learn something new. Lemme read the manual. I'm still in the stuff about how the car uses cameras and radar to avoid collisions. I think it will punish me for tailgating, but I never tailgate anyone ever, so I'll probably never find out.

There's a whole separate manual, not the main, 664-page main owner's manual, but a 323 page thing called NAVIGATION AND MULTIMEDIA SYSTEM OWNER'S MANUAL.

And I'll get there.

If you can put music on your phone you can probably play it on android play (most new cars support apple or android play).

I have my music from itunes on my phone, and I also listen spotify via apple play in my Honda Ridgeline and my MachE (I’m told android play works the same way).