07:43 – Barbara stopped at her parents’ apartment after work yesterday and laid down the law to both of them about their behavior. Let’s hope it sunk in. We didn’t get any phone calls overnight, so perhaps it did. Barbara’s taking her dad to the doctor today for a follow-up visit, and will check on things over there.
Inventory on all our science kits is perilously low, so I’ll spend today building more subassemblies and a few more kits.
Sounds like they need a nurse or somebody to check on Dutch’s condition a couple times a week, so he does not deteriorate to a hospital case where everybody has to scramble.
One thing we have experienced here with my elderly aunt and uncle (my mom’s sister and her husband) is that they deteriorated quite a bit pretty quickly after moving into assisted living. At home, they had to get out every single day. Now they only have to walk 50 yards to the dining room, and the lack of exercise is taking a toll. My uncle can no longer walk without a walker, when previously he was doing fine on his own and only used a cane when there were steps to negotiate. Now, he does not even go to the bathroom without the walker.
A third-party home-health nurse visits once a week, which is often enough. The retirement facility itself employs a physical therapist and an occupational therapist, both of whom see Dutch regularly. They’re also keeping an eye on Sankie.
Barbara said her dad is doing very well, much better than expected. When she stopped to see them yesterday afternoon, she said her dad walked down to the dining room and back. He’s able to get out of his chair and up from the toilet. Right now, the main problem is Barbara’s mom pestering her dad. The root of the problem is that she’s afraid Dutch is going to die suddenly, which is probably what’s going to happen, and she wants to do everything she can to prevent that. She just won’t admit to herself that there’s absolutely nothing she can do. So she pesters him.
Ah, that is good somebody is checking on them. I have no answers; we just keep taking it day-by-day here. Both of my parents passed rather suddenly—there was no significant decline, just a sudden death one day.
Wish I had something helpful for Sankie’s situation. We knew my wife was terminal for many months before she passed, and all of us were forced to accept in some way that it was coming. Although they offered chemo, there is no known effective treatment for what she had, thus she refused the chemo. One day she was with us; the next she was gone.
AM radio stations are going “dark” and being dismantled all across the US, as it becomes impossible to make money from them; many lack a strong signal that covers the listening area evenly. I know of 6 that were dismantled in the last few months and the Tiny Town AM station (where I was on-air as a teenager) nearly succumbed a few months ago, and is being held together only by the weekend high school sports coverage; otherwise, the station is a loss.
One of the most famous stations in the country was torn down around the first of the year. WKNR/AM1310 Dearborn (Detroit) was among the first fulltime rock and roll stations in the country (but not THE first as some claim—WLS/Chicago and WABC/NYC were both rock stations before WKNR flipped to that format in Oct. 1963), and was the station in Detroit that broke all the Berry Gordy/Motown records which became so popular in the mid to late ‘60’s. The station was family-owned in its heyday from the early ‘60’s to the mid ‘70’s. Known as “Keener 13”, even though it was only 5kw and had a poor signal at night which did not cover all of Detroit, it had a lock on the Detroit market until multiple station owner RKO turned its 50kw CKLW across the river in Windsor into a competitor. RKO was forced to divest CKLW to Canadian ownership along the way, but meanwhile, WKNR gave up the battle in Apr. 1972.
Since then, WKNR has gone through multiple ownerships, call letter and format changes. It was finally given to a multi-cultural minority outfit. However the 6 tower array necessary to broadcast the signal stood on increasingly valuable property that will soon be developed into a commercial business park, including a new mall. The land became more valuable than the station, so thus, the station is now history. It is wiped from the FCC database as an allocation, so talk about the station coming back is unrealistic; such a thing would be a ‘start from scratch’ affair—as if the station had never existed.
Here’s a video of the last 2 of the 6 towers being felled about a week ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gskUrvJKT4
BTW, Canada has been systematically shutting down all of its AM stations throughout the country. That is something the US should have done decades ago. AM technology is the pits for quality and is very interference-prone, and that band should have been replaced with something technically superior ages ago.
I agree, AM broadcast radio should have disappeared by 1970 or thereabouts. And FM broadcast radio should be long gone by now as well. That spectrum could be better used otherwise.
I don’t think I know anyone who actually listens to broadcast radio. They run it in some restaurants, but that’s about it. Everyone has CD and/or MP3 players in their cars, if not satellite radio. A couple weeks ago, Paul and Mary were out of town and I was picking up their paper/mail for them. I decided to fire up the FM radio in my truck and tuned to Rock 92, which years ago routinely ran 92-minute R&R segments with no commercials or commentary, followed by a couple minutes of commercials. Now, they play one track followed by two or three minutes of commercials followed by a couple of blathering idiots talking about nothing worth hearing about.
Of course, they also need to get rid of broadcast TV. That spectrum is also better used elsewhere.
The only people who listen to broadcast radio are commuters. And me. I still listen to it in the car, when I’m alone.
We may be closing AM stations, but KTown has two NEW FM stations since 2003.
I am not clear on what exactly constitutes the “pestering” that is going on; is there a way of making her understand that the more she pesters him, the more stress it is likely causing for both of them, and thus probably accelerating one or the other’s demise? Again, some kind of med that acts as a sedative, just to take the edge off this. My mom hounded my dad when he was mostly out of it or well on the way and to escape he would walk out of the house in the middle of the night and disappear somewhere, leaving stove burners on, drawers opened up, etc. He took her to a hairdresser appointment once and then drove off; the police found him miles away parked by a pond and just looking at it. My brothers would find him driving around aimlessly, lost, in odd parts of town or completely off somewhere else. A lot of this was him getting outta the house and away from her. Of course now she pesters the hell out of my next-younger brother because for the past eleven years she’s been living above them in an in-law apartment, which he paid for and built. I suspect he regrets this move now.
Agreed on the broadcast radio and tee-vee; we found a couple of local FM stations that we listen to; the classic FM rock station tends to have commercials but they’re for local businesses. The Montreal station has very few commercials and they’re in French so I don’t care. And they play a nice varied selection of classical music and they did a great job over the Christmas season.
I still listen to FM radio extensively in my truck and in my office. And occasionally to Rush Limbaugh on AM radio at lunchtime.
All spectrum needs to move to the public wifi model. I use Clear wifi at the house for internet access. Works amazing well for 10M down / 1M up. However, all spectrum should be usable for public wifi. If you want to put up a repeater then go for it. If you want to sell internet access, go for it. 100% of the spectrum should be used for internet wifi. I advise packet encryption.
I forgot to mention that football and basketball games have moved to FM radio here in the Houston, Texas are in the last couple of years. The signal upgrade is amazing from AM radio. I have noted that Dallas is the same also.
I am wondering what Rush Limbaugh is going to do. He is the king of AM radio, five days a week from 11am to 2pm, CST. About 650??? stations, nation wide, with 20+ million listeners per week. He just signed a new 7??? year contract at $40 million/year reputedly. I think that Sean Hannity is over 300 stations also.
“Mr. Limbaugh’s compensation of $38 million a year, plus a signing bonus of about $100 million”:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121504302144124805.html
All of the talking shows (which are cheap to produce) are keeping AM radio alive here in the large markets like Houston and Dallas.
I think Limbaugh may be on an FM station in Indianapolis now. I don’t know because I work during the day, and have customers who may or may not appreciate his point of view. I agree with Rush more frequently than I disagree, and I’d certainly be a bit more subtle. At least I’d never make the mistake of calling a feminazi a slut.
Lordy, I remember Limburger doing his tee-vee show late-nights. I credit him with opening up whatever variations of conservative and libertarian thought to hordes, millions of people, who’d had zero experience of it previously with mass mainstream media. Not to be sacrilegious or blasphemous, WFB, Jr. was John the Baptist and Rush is Jesus.
The Atlantic Monthly, an egghead libtard fossil rag, had a piece recently online on debunking him simply via his own statements and claims. I read a bit of it and thought, WTF are they talking about? What he said was right on target! So clearly I am a fascist troglodyte, also. The Boston and NYC radio markets also have their red-meat commentators, which must just thrill the blue-stater types there. Of course they’re pretty much broadcasting to a small minority in those areas.
Talking about changing times, HMV has just entered administration.
I listen to the radio in the car and nowhere else. I’ll flip stations till I find something I like, and switch off if I don’t. I’m not even sure if I have a radio in the house.
On the bus to work sometimes the driver plays the radio loud enough to be heard all over the bus. If it’s music I like that’s good, if it’s news that’s okay, if it’s talkback I just have to grit my teeth.
Dave B wrote:
“At least I’d never make the mistake of calling a feminazi a slut.”
I’ve never understood why Americans overuse that word. To me it’s the worst possible insult you can level at a woman. If I did want to call a woman a slut I’d *mean* it, literally, and I’d get out of striking range first.
Ah, greg down there in Oz; “slut” in my experience is *not* ” the worst possible insult you can level at a woman.”
There’s another one that will send them into orbit immediately. Mos def get outta striking range if and when you use that one.
According to the trade magazines I read, Rush’s audience has peaked most everywhere and is declining—at about the same rate as listeners are leaving radio. I left Rush years ago. In the beginning, he was independent—even supporting Ross Perot at one point. However, he is nothing but a shill for the Republican party now, and has crossed the line of decency quite a few times on both radio and TV. My allegiance is now with Libertarian Bill Cunningham out of Cinci.
One of the problems with radio these days, in general, is that only one or two time slots are supporting the whole 24 hours. That is the case with Rush. His time slot is often the only profitable time period on many of his stations. We have a classic rock station in Indy that has become famous for being profitable (very profitable) only during their morning show by a couple of guys who must be thinking about retirement these days. The station’s audience numbers are abysmal outside of the morning show.
Broadcasting is its own worst enemy. They prove it by thinking commercials are their product and living by that mistake, believing people actually enjoy listening to advertisements. Heck, early radio pioneer Gordon McLendon got an FCC exemption for an experiment in Lost Angeles called K-ADS. Round the clock commercials. It was an abysmal failure, but the sales departments never learned any lessons from that, and now they control the programming content forcing on more commercials than program material. What is so amazing is that they do not seem to have any trouble selling 24 hours of commercials. Who that makes the ad buying decisions wants to be on a medium with overloaded competition?
So far, HD radio is a joke—literally. People in the industry are always commenting about those 3 people that actually own an HD radio. The radio industry is trying to get car makers to install HD as standard equipment, thinking that will give it a shot in the arm.
But the problem is it is a licensed technology. FM radio was actually a patented technology, so when buying a transmitter, a station paid a royalty and so did radio-makers for each radio made. That was the only amount due the inventors. But now, the developers of HD, license the technology and get paid every year that a station uses it. That is in addition to paying for the equipment itself.
What a system!
The only people I know who own HD radios work in the business. But there’s more. Nobody at the stations even monitors the HD channels. I have seen comments in the radio forums where somebody mentions that some station’s HD signal has been silent for a week—what’s going on? After a couple weeks, somebody from the station sees the comment, checks into it, and yup, the HD channel has been non-operational for weeks. Has happened a couple times in Indianapolis since I have been back. Heck, stations do not even listen to their main frequency anymore. Even on the automation forum, I see reports where somebody came to work in the morning, and the automation had stopped in the middle of the night. The signal was silent—and the person finding it had not even been listening in the car on the way to work! Some stations employ tech people who are competent, and those stations have equipment and software that detects silence and sends email and telephone messages to notify somebody. But there are no more board ops present at all times while a station is on-air anymore.
But there are no more board ops present at all times while a station is on-air anymore.
I was walking in to church one Sunday morning and saw a local dj who was a member also. I had just heard him on the radio driving to church! Asked him and he said it was the magic of “tape”. He had “taped” his 4? 6? hour Sunday morning show on Saturday night in about an hour in his home studio since he did not listen to the music or the commercials while doing his show. He then uploaded it to the station for the autoplay at 6am. He said that he listened on the way to church also to make sure all was OK.
Hey OFD, remember the nuns with guns? The reason I found that picture was I was looking for for a Youtube version of The Lord’s Prayer by Sister Janet Mead, of Adelaide. Why don’t you Google it and tell me what you think. I really loved it back then, and still do. There’s also Day By Day by Colleen Hewett, which is based on a prayer penned by a C14 bishop, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleen_Hewett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Mead
Here’s a tip if you want fewer commercials. Between 88 and 92mhz (tops out at 91.9) on the FM band is the non-commercial portion. High school stations, religious stations, and public radio stations live there. Around here, we have quite a number of high school and college stations populating that part of the band. They seldom play commercials (known as “underwriting announcements” in the non-comm realm), but mimic a lot of the music played by the commercial stations. There are contemporary hit stations, oldies, classic rock, and classical, just to name a few. It takes some patience and tuning, but going through those frequencies one-by-one might reveal a station plying your kind of music with very few interruptions for announcements. Typically, they do not have news, weather, or traffic reports, but it might be worth a shot if you do not need those. I always need traffic on my way to Indy.
Since those stations have considerably less power than most stations higher in the band, the ‘seek’ functions of a car radio skip almost all of them.
Costs to run such a station are usually in excess of $100k/yr, and I actually oppose high schools spending my tax money training kids for non-existent jobs. When most stations have only 1 or 2 people working on-air these days (or fewer—NONE for the Tiny Town AM station, which is 100% satellite fed, except for the weekend high school ball games), it really defies economic logic to train a dozen or more kids each semester to compete in an industry that has no jobs.
Worse, DJ jobs are notoriously very low wage; the lowliest of secretaries make more. And that DJ friend of Lynn’s who ‘phones it in’ as we joke about it (“voice-tracking” is the real term) makes even less than a fulltimer who works in the studio in typical markets. Of course, Houston is a large market, so he is likely making more, but outside of the top 10 markets, radio jobs these days do not pay a living wage. Most DJ’s doing voice-tracking usually have several stations lined up and spend all day doing one after another. What’s worse, a new program director takes over a station, and the voice-tracker loses his job as the program director hires his friends to fill those slots. Best hope is that the old program director ends up somewhere with a new gig for the voice-tracker. Radio is an especially tough racket these days.
Regarding things you should, or shouldn’t, call women. I know the word OFD is referring to and agree that it will make most women go nuclear. Once uttered, leaving the planet is your only hope. I find that you are often best off by not talking to women in the first place. A most dangerous business!
Well, since I had a very innocent and naive upbringing I can’t imagine what that word would be. I’ve had negative reactions to ‘bird’ and ‘chick’ but no woman has ever gone nuclear at me. I sometimes use the word ‘slag’, but not yet at a woman, just telling someone else what I think of a woman who is absent. I wouldn’t dare call a woman a slag to her face unless I was really mad with her.
Unlike you northern hemisphere misogynists I really like women, and not just for the obvious reasons. They’re so much more interesting than guys.
Pretty complete list of alternative terms for women.
http://onlineslangdictionary.com/thesaurus/words+meaning+woman,+women,+female.html
I have only ever used one word to a woman’s face besides their name: babe. But even that brought me the wrath of the 8 year-old in the Strausberg house. “Don’t call me that. I am NOT a baby!”
For our naïve Miles, this is the word in question:
http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74361
Oh, I think that ‘slut’ is far far far worse than the c-word. The c-word is almost polite nowadays, but slut never will be. If I was a woman and was called a slut I wouldn’t just go nuclear, I’d go thermonuclear. Anyone who called me that would be advised to start running and keep running, and hope I didn’t catch them.
Oh, there are definitely women who give the otherwise pleasant and attractive cents a bad name.
The worst reaction I’ve had from a woman about a term for a female was when I called a group of pleasant and attractive young women, barely out of their teens and much younger than I, “nice young girls”. Some feminazi who was listening-in to a conversation not directed at her, went ballistic at me.
I apologised most sincerely. I told her I was truly sorry that she’d been upset by overhearing a compliment that was not directed at her. My compliment had neither been to her or about her, and I certainly didn’t want her to think that I would compliment her. For some reason that didn’t seem to mollify her. Maybe some of that borderline Aspie thing going on, although for once I’d intended everything that had been implied and at least most of what had been inferred.
Well, I know women who simply won’t take a compliment. I just avoid them. When I was at Adelaide Uni in the Seventies there were a lot of feminists who just seemed to have an overwhelming hatred and distrust of males, but one of the rabid feminists, who was a communist and lesbian to boot, was really quite pleasant to me and many other guys, even though we were poles apart politically. One male on the left – but not hard core left – said that she made an effort to look attractive. There were other interesting types, such as Loine Kennewell, whom I could describe as Paris Hilton on steroids. She really caked on the makeup and wore party frocks to uni. The other feminists hated her for dollying herself up. Then there were the usual members of the hairy armpit brigade who should have been forced to wear burkas – they were that ugly and unpleasant.
I’ve never thought of “cunt” as being specific to women. “You cunt!” can be directed at either a man or a woman. Interestingly, the synonym “pussy” is used almost exclusively to refer to a man. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever heard “slut” or “whore” used to refer to a man, other than jokingly, although of course some men are in fact literally whores. Conversely, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman referred to as an “asshole”, although they obviously have one each. And “bitch” is almost exclusive to women, other than some gay men using it to refer to other gay men.
Yeah, the word cunt was so obvious I thought OFD and Bill must have had some other word in mind. I was expecting a word that was more or less exclusive to North America.
I don’t think Davy or I ever alluded that cunt was an exclusive word for women, just one that will set many of them off.
Bitch as a male term is reserved mostly for prison.
“Bitch as a male term is reserved mostly for prison.”
I hope you and Bubba had a good time… 🙂
Gee, I am so whatever that I won’t even use the word on this board. Been brainwashed by years of women going into fits if it was used in their presence. And I know that there may be women reading here, though participation is extremely rare.
I have used “bitch” as an insult for other male drivers out on the roads, exclusive of prison.
You know Greg, sometimes you try too hard.
I guess I agree with Greg that the c-word is—IMO—less offensive than “slut”. But since I only use the “babe” word (in the presence of a woman) and even that sets off female kids, I am no judge. I learned in my testosterone-high youth just not to be in the presence of women who set me off, so I never have a chance to get upset enough to direct anathemas at them. Although I once had a female boss who knew absolutely NOTHING about my job and tried to tell me how to do it. In that case, I just ignored her and undid everything she did—although it was hard to keep up with her. She once went onto the set of a show I was responsible for, and took props away (behind my back). Two months later, I was gone—100% because of her total incompetence.
Of course, in those situations, no one ever pays. My shows had won the overwhelming number of awards the station received during my 8 years there, and about two years later, the newspapers were writing articles about how that station, which had always won a major percentage of the city’s awards, had won NONE for two years running. But there is no word to describe that woman’s despicable behavior, so I have none to hurl at her. Thus I directed all my venom at Carly Fiorina, who single-handedly destroyed HP, but as with all CEO’s, never paid a price for doing so.
I suppose the c-word (I’m being circumspect because I’m at work) can be used in many circumstances, and I do use it, but I don’t think I’ve ever called someone a slut, and I can’t think of any use for the word except being directed at a person. I wouldn’t use the c-word at work, especially directed at a woman, I could get sacked for that I think. And I wouldn’t use the s-word, except under the most extreme provocation.
I had a boss like Chuck did, she was incompetent, but managed to get a contractor sacked for some reason. Then she went after a friend of mine for supposed incompetence, which was laughable. My friend was more competent than me, and I was more competent than her. Whenever she was doing some technical IT work she needed her hand to be held. Anyway, she got someone higher up on her side, lets call him CS, so they were both going after my highly competent friend. *Then* she turned on CS on an unrelated issue, and his support for her in the original case went away. And a good thing too, because my friend was just the sort of programmer the organisation needed.
She’s now pursuing new opportunities, as the saying goes. Not sure if she jumped or was pushed. She was a nice woman in a way, but I was always very wary of her. She was outstanding at office politics and little else.
I really hate it when management screw up, destroy the value of a company, and then get fat bonuses and golden parachutes while the lower downs get screwed.
Amen! And it eventually always comes down to that. One of the hazards of unrestrained capitalism, IMO. It is like the old axiom that families who make lots of money in one generation are back to poor in the second generation, after the first generation of descendants spend it all. A company built over decades with a niche and a fine reputation, can be utterly destroyed by someone like Fiorina, and then it can never come back. And that is a real travesty.
In my field, a mistake made by management at the first TV station I worked at, caused ratings of the evening news to plummet to last place from first place. It took EIGHTEEN YEARS to regain that number 1 position. But there is often no recovery possible from stupidity.
Wow, I take it you don’t like Carly. Did she screw up at other places or just at HP? She ran for the senate against Barbara Boxer in 2010. I would have voted for Carly. I’d vote for a brown dog against Boxer (pun intended).
I remember that HP printers were the gold standard, are they still worth getting?
Speaking only from my own personal work experience over the years in IT; very few women in genuine tech roles, and the ones that are, don’t seem to stay long; they move into “management” as fast as they can. (and while they were doing the tech roles, they did as little as possible and got away with it.) Once in management they go full-tilt boogie at office politics games, which most of them are very good at, and that is the sum total for their 40-hour week. At the higher levels we have people like Fiorina and at the lower levels we have the half-dozen or so female bosses I’ve had over the years who were totally incompetent, knew nothing about our jobs and what we did every day, made our lives miserable daily, ruined organizational goals and objectives and projects, and continued to merrily skate on their way through more promotions until eventual nicely comfortable retirements.
Carly is about my age and started out in college with softy majors, like me, in philosophy and medieval history. Then she suddenly went off to MBA school and the Sloan program at MIT and took off like a rocket through AT&T and Lucent before arriving at HP to drive it into the doldrums and get into “Republican” politics. She is a nice illustration of the old Peter Principle.