Occupation of Independence

  People have quite a bit of consumer electronics lying around in their house.  How many remote controls do they have?  I'll bet it isn't their favorite gadget.  For one thing you can never find the damn thing when you need it. I used to think that the remote control was just to save the couch potato from having to walk three steps.  But actually remote controls eliminated the need to build all those buttons into the side of the TV or other electrical appliance.   And then, when the button failed, you would have had to throw the TV out. Now that I have eliminated my Blu-Ray player and monitor screen by ripping my DVDs onto the computer,  I looked over at the remote control of the Blu-Ray player and felt delighted that I could get rid of it! I fantasized a slow and solemn ritual of execution for my last remaining remote control -- something like the public hangings in old movie westerns.  But that would just have been litter.   Free at last, free at last!

  I am entitled to a rant: I did my taxes as 5:00 am.  Afterwards I celebrated by driving to town and getting an especially good breakfast burrito at a gas station.  These days eating at the gas station is as close as many of us get to 'fine dining.' How hard those women work to make the best and most affordable food in town.  They must be Mexican  señoras .  Perhaps their children will be assimilated into the American mainstream instead of doing hard work in a tire shop.  They will go to college and aspire to a white collar career as some kind of cubicle rat, say, at Intuit (TurboTax) in San Diego.  Imagine what a step-up that will be!  What an easy busy model tax-software-companies have.  Their customers are afraid of the IRS so they lock onto a tax software product as an insurance product.  Every year they can take advantage of the customers' fear to upsell them to the 'Premium' package, or whatever word gets used.  I didn't owe any taxes this year.  But in r

The art of living outside the rat race is mostly about getting up in the morning and finding something to be interested in, without the 'System' keeping you endlessly and uselessly busy.  And that is the focus of this blog.  I don't like to get down 'into the weeds' of microscopic 'how to' details. Nevertheless I should have used the word 'rip' to describe the process of transcribing data from a DVD disk to the computer's hard drive (or extended memory such as cloud, flash drives, or SSD.)   In doing so, a camper/traveler eliminates a box of disks, inevitable scratches, and cheapie plastic DVD player parts.  The resulting media data on your computer can be played on the computer itself or transferred to your phone for easier playback in bed on those long winter nights. This experience was interesting to me because it was a chance to reflect how many times this type of transition has happened.  No, Reader, I can't quite remember the original c

Well, I've finally finished a big project: digitizing a box-full of Blu-Ray disks.  A couple weeks ago my picture and sound-maker died. (aka, monitor, TV screen)  It took the signal from a Blu Ray player.   Typically I used these less for entertainment than for a sleeping pill at night, or for the last hour of the evening when my eyes don't feel like reading.  It was quite a shock to learn how badly I had gotten out-of-date.  The kid at Best Buy told me, "Nobody sells DVD players anymore!"  Just imagine what the kid was thinking!  His Yuma customers were so old and, like , out-of-it.  He would be so stoked if he had, like, younger customers, bro. Well, nobody seems to sell small monitors (with speakers) that are compatible with Dolby Digital sound coming from most Blu Ray players, either.   Everything is supposed to be "streamed" these days, and paid for with a monthly fee, tied to your credit card.  That makes it easy for the bastards to renew your subscr