Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Day 4394

I'm getting used to changing several times a day because of the rapidly changing temperatures. Our early morning walks with Dawn are very cold and I really have to bundle up. The later in the day it gets, the more clothes I can shed. I'm sure that Dawn would prefer to sleep in a little longer, but these early walks are the only times that Janet and I can walk Dawn together. It's too bad that Dawn is still afraid to walk alone with me. If she realized that I am really her friend, we could walk a lot later when it was warmer. She'd be more than welcome to come with me on my long walks as well, but I'm not sure she could walk that far anymore. Truthfully, I'm not sure I can walk that far anymore either. Some of these walks have been brutal on my feet lately.

I decided that I would go looking for some cable adapters so I could experiment with my star tracker some more. Target and Best Buy didn't have what I needed, so that led me to the Apple Store. What a bunch of woke idiots. The mall had just opened, so it was almost empty. That didn't deter Apple in the least. They had the most elaborate and nonsensical Covid protection scheme I've ever seen. Before you could enter the store, an employee standing outside in a red shirt would ask you what you wanted to buy. People looking for a phone were directed to one line. People looking for a computer were sent to a second line. I was directed to a third line because all I wanted were some cable adapters. I think that if you just wanted to look around you were told to go away. There were very few people in each line, because the mall had just opened. Each line had another employee in a red shirt acting as a gatekeeper. The short lines didn't move fast because Apple would only allow ten people in the store at a time. When someone left, a new person could enter. There were a lot more employees in red shirts than there were customers. The store was almost empty. 

When I finally entered the store I was greeted by another employee who asked me again what I wanted to buy. He would look up the item on his phone and then tell a different employee to go look for it. Customers couldn't browse or go look for the item themselves. We had to stay quarantined at the front of the store. It was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. If you entered the store in the computer line, you couldn't change your mind and go see the guy who was showing people phones. Each section has a pair of people. One would look up your item on his phone and then the second guy would act as a runner to go back in the store and find it. Needless to say, this guy would usually bring back the wrong item and he'd have to make four or five trips to find what the customer actually wanted.

The tag team of inept red shirted employees eventually found what I wanted after bringing me several things that weren't even close. The oddest thing about the whole experience was that the employee trying to help me appeared to be wearing a mask that was crocheted. This mask wouldn't keep a mosquito away. It would do absolutely nothing to ward off a virus. This is what we've become: people wearing masks as fashion statements, blindly following a set of rules that make no sense whatsoever. I'm sure someone in Cupertino had good intentions, but this plan made the folks controlling traffic in grocery stores look like geniuses.

I'm learning a lot more about how cameras can be controlled by computers, or in my case little star trackers. When the computer industry had to deal with connecting their products to printers and external hard drives, they came up with an industry set of standards that made connecting things easy. The camera industry hasn't done this. Each company has it's own proprietary way of connecting to a computer. My cameras just don't want to talk with the star tracker. I'll figure this out eventually, but unfortunately it may involve buying another camera body.

I managed to get 20,000 steps today, but they were slow painful steps. I probably look really awkward when I walk. I've found that a flatfooted walk where my heel touches the ground first and I never walk on my toes is the most comfortable. Bending the toes is what hurts the most. I think I'll keep walking though. I've seen the x-rays. Quitting walking won't bring the cartilage back. All a sedentary life will do is make me fat.

Hunter is today's Dalmatian of the Day


Watch of the Day