600,000 miles and growing

My 2001 Saturn SL2 is passing several milestones this weekend. Friday the odometer turned 600,000 miles. The transmission was replaced at about 400,000 miles, I am on third engine. The first made it to about 495,000 miles, replaced with a used engine that I got about 100,000 miles on and then put another used engine in it which is running like new. Monday the car will celebrate its 15th birthday with me as original owner. The car has been in most of the contiguous United States from Key West Florida to a the coast off the state of Washington. Essentially the places it has not been is North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan and the northeastern states above Pennsylvania. It has gone from Georgia to Arizona about five times. Pictures included on this article showing car and odometer. Dwight

You got to vote to complain

Make sure you vote. There will be others than Hillary and Trump on the ballot for president and you can always write in someone. If you do not vote, don't complain the next 4 years. I have no problem a person voting for x and then discovering they disagree with x a lot and complaining about x. I have a problem people complaining about x when they did not vote. Lindsay Graham and other politicians that say they are not planning to vote, I would disagree with them a bunch. They all know the importance of voting and the need to participate in the electoral process. I suspect Senator Graham would not have been happy if a number of Republicans had said if he had won the nomination that they were just going to take their marbles and go home. He and the rest of them can vote for whoever when they get in the booth, it is a secret ballot, but they need to vote. Get out and vote in November in the election.

Teaching kids and robots

Whether you are raising kids or robots you have to be careful what others teach them (or yourself) or you may be amazed what comes out of their mouth. With robots it is simple, turn them off and re-program, with children you have to teach them different and may take time Microsoft put a robot/AI program/device on the Internet to interact with people and others thru Twitter taught it to be racist. See this article http://www.fiercecio.com/story/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-learns-hate-speech-twitter/2016-03-24?utm_campaign=AddThis&utm_medium=AddThis&utm_source=email#.VvQvWIYwNqE.yahoomail

SuperPACs

Sounds like Trump is actually following the law on SuperPACs that there is to be no coordination between the campaign and the SuperPAC. If he is not saying which is the correct one and they do not know what the message is to broadcast then it sounds like no coordination. When the SuperPacs say the same as the candidate and change together it is obviously coordination but somehow the FEC looks other way. Trump really does not need a SuperPAC as the media is giving him the free publicity with lots everyday on whatever he ways. If Hillary would play cards right she really would not either if she used Bill effectively as he is free large spread publicity.

How to record vinyl LP albums to PC (Watt Thoughts)

You can record your vinyl LP albums and cassette tapes to your computer and then make CDs of them. There are a couple ways to do this. The first is to run a cable from the line out on your receiver/amplifier to the sound connections on your PC. You will hook to line out on the receiver and you will connect to line in on the PC. You will probably need to get an adapter plug for the PC end that will have the multipart straight pin plug to go in eth PC and the RCA plugs on end of line from receiver plug in pother part of it. The key will be trying to get volume adjusted on line out and you will lose some quality thru all the connections and conversions. I did this approach until recently and it worked but was not as good as the record had been. You will need a sound program on the PC to record it. Audacity is used often and you could use the sound recorder that comes with Windows. If you wanted to record cassettes it would be same just connect tape deck to the receiver The second approach is to get a USB cassette desk or USB turntable. Now it is much easier. All you will do is connect the USB cable from the turntable or tape deck to the USB plug on PC. It will automatically set volume going through the USB cable. You will still need a sound recording program, but usually these decks and turntables include Audacity or another program with it. I bought a Westinghouse USB turntable from Ollie’s a week ago and it is doing really great recording. Extra part in it was it runs at 78, 45 and 33 where most only do 33 and 45. I have some of my mom’s 78s and they record good. Doing the first way required getting a program that altered speed of recording. DAK sold me a program several years ago and the ida was good, but not as good as this way. From a legal perspective as long as you are recording the albums to the computer/CD (you just need to burn the recording to CD using CD burning software with Windows or buying a program or getting another freebie) as long as the copies you produce are for your own use and you are not giving away or selling copies, you should be ok on copyrights. This will give me the ability to listen to many of my music on records more as I can listen in car etc.

The economy - mixed stories

The beginning of the week a week ago, I heard President Obama say that the economy is doing good now with unemployment near 5%. Then the end of the week I was listening to an interview on the radio with the head of the Democratic party in Georgia, Dubose Porter. He was making comments about the Republican debates a couple nights prior. He commented that the Republicans only wanted to get rid of things and he said his biggest disappointment was that none of the Republicans said how they would put America back to work. The president a Democrat says everyone is working and the head of the Georgia Democratic party is wanting to know how the Republicans will put America back to work The unemployment rate may be only 5% but it covers up a lot of weaknesses. Many people are working part-time because they cannot find full time work. A large number of Americans have given up looking for work. In my area I keep hearing the technical colleges need to prepare more students for computer careers. They site large numbers of computer jobs in the area. The problem is that the jobs available all want people with 5-10 years experience. No matter how well I train my students 95% of them do not qualify, (I get a couple each year who come to expand their knowledge.) I am trying to help them find jobs and it is hard. We need government to find ways to get more people to work with good jobs. This means in some cases the government getting out of the way of employers, in other cases encouraging employers to hire more people whether thru government stability or incentives. However what approaches are used they need to be considered of whether it helps short and long term and keeps economy growing in both. The political leaders need to get their stories straight.

Microsoft and privacy

I wrote a newspaper article about this over a week ago that is on my articles page (technology article 308 on 9/16/2015 (that was the publish date in newspapers) on my web site. Now Microsoft has responded to similar reports in the press http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/28/technology/microsoft-windows-10-privacy/index.html