Lion ponderings

There might have been some merit to crappy free programs written by college students in their spare time to do just 1 thing if they were lucky.  It's about as hard to do anything now behind all the popups, animations, eye candy, gigabytes of libraries, account signups, as it was then. When they weren't trying to make money, programs just did what they needed to do, given enough effort.  Of course, half the day might be spent just getting an audio file to play or a text file to load.  A movie file might take weeks & require a system administrator.  Modern software can be less labor intensive to install or it might take half a day to play an audio file instead of spewing ads.  Most often though, it's very laborious or stops working in the long term. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A lion linux box, back when lions were getting told to get lost by the future artemis generation.  --------------...

 The number of animals who swim from alcatraz to aquatic park is extraordinary. It's become akin to ultra running in the last 20 years, after long being considered the ultimate deterrent to escaping from prison. Lions lack the muscle memory of other animals.  They can't remember how to ride a bike or swim if they don't always do it.  Most alcatraz swimmers seem to get some buoyancy from wet suits.  The ones who do it bare skinned are rare. It got more attention when a 78 year old finished his 100th swim.  Lions were curious how he managed to retire near San Francisco. Levi was the cofounder of Zoran, whose products lions knew & loved 25 years ago. The lion kingdom's collection of low def Zoran video cards still exists.  They sent & received low definition S vijeo, quite an expensive feat in those days.  The ZR36067 was some kind of controller & the ZR36060 was a JPEG codec.  Realtime compression of 720x480 JPEGs at a fixed bitrate was ...

 https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/reno-named-happiest-city-to-live-in-us-18380779.php   Reno tops list of happiest places to live in America    Important note for those of us in the market for a place to live.  Helas, it is relentlessly hot in the summer.  Most lion impressions of Reno come from the very dreary & cold depiction in Nomadland.   The winters are brutally cold.  Lions ponder what Xmas is like though.  The crazy guy spent most of his life there.  He might have inherited a house.  That gave lions the impression of it being a place where a lot of men go when they're on their last dime. Lion kingdom's 1st love was last known to have chased a man to Carson City.  No relief in housing prices.  You have to be worth many millions to retire there. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most peculiar stonk market decline which can only be e...

 The mane approved. Didn't get any diarrhea from the frankfurters. That frankfurter didn't look happy. Mane compliant salad.   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     "I will lift up mine eyes - John Rutter" makes lions imagine the singers in Celebration of XMas 1991 are still making that video at this moment in some parallel universe.  It's the same parallel universe vision as the vision of all the high school classmates still being in 9th grade somewhere.  In this parallel universe, the wrongs are all made right & our 14 year old equivalents are all happy, of course. It may all be imagination conjured by the multiverse theory. The Rutter songs with the london phil were definitely recorded in Abbey Rd studios.  It's a very neutral sound that matches audiophile gear of the late 70's.   Lions learned to correlate that sound with the time from hearing it in the early 80's Spielberg suburbia movies.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now that lions are of sugar daddy age, having been on the other end, watching 30 year olds squander their next 10 years on rich ...

      To infinity & beyond.  That sales flier was from 2007-2008, but before the 2008 crash.  The old man said lions had to concentrate all their wealth on buying a house the week before.  For an average investor, it would have paid off.  An average investor would not make as much in stonks.  Converting the gains to cash was not possible though.  Houses are still an error band within 10x annual income.  When they jumped from 4x to 10x was 2000-2006.  They might have stayed 4x longer in the midwest, but eventually the entire country caught up with Calif*.   The government has held the 10x line ever since.  What enabled the jump?  It might have been a change in the way inflation was calculated that lowered all historic inflation figures by half.  Lions weren't sure it was truly enacted, but they started calculating it based on substitutions. It might have been the plummeting of manufacturing prices which a...

 Of all the animals losing their mental faculties by age 80, musicians seem to last longer.  Lions don't know if playing from memory or just learning pieces does it.  Learning a piece still results in memorization even though you're not testing your memory.   Lions haven't found any more show stopping pieces worth memorizing. Maybe the tempest sonata could be a good one.  No-one has been able to capture the right sound.  There are some previously memorized pieces it would be nice to rerecord, Schumann Noveletten.  There are pieces lions could never play better than others, Chopin Ballade #4. Everyone has their own ideal repertoire.  Biegel played the same core pieces his whole life. Loss of mental faculties is strange.  They switch on & they switch off. The on time gets ever shorter & the off time longer.  It's not a constant equilibrium. Lions realized the old man had no memory of selling all their shares of SYK & UTX ...

   https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/two-california-schools-tie-best-public-college-18376644.php   Two California schools tie for best public college in the nation       The opportunities which would have come to lions if they just paid the money & went there in an engineering program.  Of course, engineering just wasn't a thing in the old days & the high school classmates to this day are remarkably devoid of CS careers by modern standards.  Where lions eventually went was just by a bunch of chance encounters.   It's always been surprising how high the UC system continued to rank, despite the large class size, lower attention from professors & lower investment per student lions observed. The caliber of the students wasn't as high as lower ranked private school.  The professors were much less invested in teaching.   The path to wealth seemed to be staying in Calif* for all your education, UC for undergrad, private...

 The thought occurred of moving some money market positions to the IRA & moving some mutual fund positions to the taxable account.  The idea would be to avoid taxes on interest while the mutual fund growth wouldn't create any taxable income.  The problem is trades inside the mutual funds are taxed.  When Warren Buffet sells something, he doesn't pay the capital gains tax, you do. So far, it hasn't happened.  The amount of interest a lion could shelter from taxes by converting his IRA to cash is very small.  The IRA positions are manely high yielding closed end funds, much higher yielding than the money market positions, so they'd be taxed into the stone ages.  Only a small amount of interest would be sheltered from taxes. Another problem is the current high interest environment relative to stonk growth lions believe is going to be short lived.  This asset allocation was always based on most gains coming from stonks, so those would be sheltered...

  Good old Windows continues to excite a lot of guys.  Lions found it strange 10 years ago that  millennials were getting excited about it, after a phase in the 90's when everyone hated windows.  It continues to be much slower & more tedious for lions than Linux.  The current generation isn't interested in using technology to solve problems as much as making a lot of money & being cool.  It definitely wasn't what the cool kids did 40 years ago, but that all changed. It still doesn't make sense to lions to create a completely free program that requires an operating system which officially costs money, but if you're going to invest a lot into that free program intending it to see wide adoption, it almost has to support Win to justify the investment.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The lion kingdom's High Frontier project is unlikely to succeed.  It'll either get a copyr...

Seeking relief after a string of bad movies, another suck of the Dark City sav. Lions aren't sure why they still take screenshots, since all IMDB is nowadays a bunch of screenshots from the same pirated vijeo.  Every viewing of the Dark City yields new insights.   Suspect the alien experiment hadn't been going on for very long, maybe less than a year after the abductions.  On the other paw, tales of alien abductions have gone on since the 1940's.  The visuals were all based on the 1940's so it could have happened in a timespan of under a year, in the 1940's. Lions can't remember ever seeing the theatric cut or hearing an opening monologue, but apparently the 1st viewing back in 2000 was the theatric version.  There are some parallels to being on a martian schedule in that so much of your life happens entirely at night.  Strangely, no-one ever made up a hypothetical map of the city which included locations of all the scenes in the movie.  The movie just...

 Lions are the last animals to know if they're lonely or not.  Like most other things nowadays, it seems to require an objective test rather than a feeling. Togetherness doesn't mean what it once did in the sweet time between entering school & entering the workforce.  It now means investing headlong in the family thing or it means raising step kids & being with ex husbands.  The bandwidth of family animals is maxed out, investing everything they have in someone else. Lions wouldn't even know if they're deriving any togetherness from the family thing or racing to check off all the tasks like employees in a day job & day jobs never were much of a cure for loneliness. Lions wouldn't consider their current lives enviable, just their free past lives being enviable. It's another one of those mortal constraints where you can never go back, you can't take it with you, & once it's over, it's over.   Maybe it's another example of how lions ...

 Dreamed about being in a house built on top of an indian burial ground.  There was a power outage.  Went in a walk in closet.  A native american with a short stone knife & dressed in full costume then appeared behind the lion kingdom & started swinging it.  Managed to escape somehow. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------     The goog strangely doesn't show the Hopyard route of the last 12 years as an option but a longer route down the canal.   It's .4 miles longer.  The east route is identical to the Hopyard route.  They also recommend Del Valle Pkwy instead of the grand tour.  Another 20 miler done & a gathering of the rich.  Kind of a haunted time, being the 100th anniversary of the high school.  It reminded lions of the 100 year anniversary in horror movie The Fog.  Lions expected some kind of haunting, but only had the 1 dream.  Th...