Walt's Corner

I’m opening a new category of post here. Alt Sunday School (ASS). Wherein I write an expose on one of the lesser publicized bible stories.

This is one of my favorite Sunday School stories.

Taught me to be an overachiever.

I Samuel 18:25-27

Then Saul said, “Thus shall you say to David, ‘The king desires no bride-price except a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, that he may be avenged of the king’s enemies.’” Now Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king’s son-in-law. Before the time had expired, David arose and went, along with his men, and killed two hundred of the Philistines. And David brought their foreskins, which were given in full number to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter Michal for a wife.

The Word of the Lord. (English Standard Version 2016)

Let’s break this down. David, before he was ruler of God’s chosen, wanted to marry King Saul’s daughter, Michal. King Saul was current ruler of God’s chosen. King Saul is not too keen on this marriage but also seems hesitant to just outright say no. Perhaps to not get on the bad side of his daughter. I mean, you’re king, right? As Mel Brooks says, “Sometimes it’s good to be king.” This is not one of those times. Additionally, he doesn’t even have the balls to tell this to David himself. He’s having someone else tell David. Loser.

Instead, King Saul has David told that the price to marry his daughter will be the foreskins of 100 Philistines – God’s Chosen People’s arch enemy at the time. Go cut off the junk of my enemy. 100 of them. Bring them to me. Then you can marry my daughter. But there is an ulterior motive here. He assumes that no one will be able to march into a Philistine city, cut off the junk of 100 of their men and leave.

David not only pulls this off (see what I did there?) but being the overachiever that he is, doubles the pile. He secures 200 foreskins, brings them back and presents them to King Saul, who then lets him marry Michal. And how did he present these to the King? A literal bag of dicks?

The real question is, how did Saul *know* they were Philistine, and not say, Sodomites? No, not that sodomite, you sicko. Actual. From the biblical city of Sodom.

I joined Twitter in August of 2008. It was still pretty new then. There were no ads that I can remember at that time. I recall a Twitter app but it was very lacking. Hence the introduction of the clients. My preference at the time was Echofon. Soon, Twitterrific caught my attention and for a few years I would use both – whichever I was in the mood to use. Eventually, Twitterrific won out and became my sole way of tweeting with exception to auto posts from other applications.

Back then Twitter was still trying to find a way to make revenue off their service. Advertisements seemed the way to go rather than charge a fee. Just like other social media services. That’s where these 3^rd party Twitter clients really shined for us users. There were no ads. They successfully filtered them out and only brought us the content we wanted out of Twitter.

We all want our favorite social media outlets to be successful and to… live. That is, we want them to be around today and tomorrow. That can only be accomplished through revenue when controlled by a single entity. That is where I was conflicted. While I do hate ads and certainly enjoyed the ad-free environment provided by Twitterrific, I also need Twitter to be financially successful. I aint gonna lie. I was very surprised that Twitter allowed these 3^rd party clients to exist when the same 3^rd party clients allowed us users a reliable way to circumvent the very revenue process that brought us the service we were using. Crazy, right? But hey – they allowed it. Of course I was going to take advantage of it. I figured Twitter owed these clients in part, if not whole, for their very existence in the first place; so they turned a blind to this usurpation.

When Megalomaniac Musk bought and took charge of Twitter, I said to myself, “Self, this dude is all about the coin. The first thing he will do is cut off all these 3^rd party clients that are robbing him of his revenue.” But no. That’s not what this fool did. He ran the company into the ground as if he was pissed. Pissed that he changed his mind on buying the platform, but the company he no longer wanted was actually suing him to coerce him into buying. So fine. Buy it. Run the bitch into the ground. Fine, you want me to buy you? I will. And then I’ll make you wish you didn’t. That’s what I think is going on. Or at least was.

Now that his errant actions are reaching into the other realms of his life, he has to change course. He has to find a way to make money. Especially since his initial actions caused Twitter’s top 30 advertisement companies to drop their spending by 42%, according to Reuters, and is being sued for rent. The most effective way to take advantage of revenue is by banning 3^rd party clients. Perhaps there could be some way to charge 3^rd parties for a license which would then be passed along to that 3^rd parties customer base.

Even though I hold Musk in very low regard (like he cares), this is the one thing I can’t really hold against him. I can say he did it the most dickish way possible. No warning. Immediate cut off. Certainly could have been handled in a more courteous way. It really sucks for small companies like The Iconfactory.

From the Iconfactory’s good bye blog post, they add “Finally, if you were subscriber to Twitterrific for iOS, we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple. The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s. To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating to a small company like ours.”

Absolutely. Absorbing a $10 hit collectively as the customer base is a much more appealing consequence than The Iconfactory having to shell out en mass. I’d call it “Reverse Crowdfunding.” Mine just renewed January 3^rd and shows that it will renew again January 3^rd 2024. I most definitely will not be asking for a refund. Just this alone could be enough to eradicate this small business, let’s not compound it by everyone trying to get a refund for something as small as $10. Maybe someone could start a class action lawsuit to collect that refund from Twitter. I’d join.

Enjoyed a long weekend at Davis Mountains State Park over this Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday. Turns out we did the same thing last year over the same weekend at the same park. Different site. Habits die hard I guess. Looking back over the years it seems to be split between Davis Mountains and City of Rocks State Parks.

Both are pretty remote and contain poor cell phone coverage, if any. Mostly not. Which brings me to the topic of this particular article. Gaia GPS. I’ve been experiencing degrading reliability with my go-to app, All Trails, for hiking. I’ve been a user of All trails since 2015. Subscribed to the pro-version since 2016 to be able to download map data because where we hike there is no cell phone signal. That renders most hiking/biking/running apps useless to me. What do these fuckers think? That we all hike where there will only have reliable cell phone coverage? Some apps, like Map My Run, will not even start up without signal. Ridiculous. My wife gets plenty of aggravation out of that every time.

A particularly useless update about 2 years ago to All Trails made it crash upon opening a large map. I had downloaded the entire area of Lincoln National Forest from Cloudcroft down to below Sunspot, NM. That’s maybe around 25 miles north and south, with a swath of about 10 miles east and west. All Trails became useless at that point. Worked great for a few years prior to this. Since we had no cell phone coverage (which is actually my preference) that means we spent an entire long weekend without being able to use All Trails. Which also meant sticking to known, well marked trails or roads. No cross country hiking. Boo. Upon returning home I made a much smaller map to use and it quit crashing. Back to the large map – crashing again. Currently, it drops map data. I have to switch to another layer and then back to regain visibility of the map I downloaded as well as my progress.

That’s when I made it a point to find another app to rely on. Enter Gaia GPS. Read a lot of nice things about it. Plenty of features I’ll never use. But it did seem to excel at downloading offline map data to use and track my hikes. I like having USGS topographical and satellite maps. So I gave it a shot. A yearly subscription to it was around $50 which included a membership to some other set of online resources that as of now I have no interest in and probably will never use. But hey, it’s the price of admission.

I set up my areas, this time around the entire area of Davis Mountains State Park to include Fort Davis Historic Site. As expected, no signal in the park. The downloaded map populated and the app tracked our progress up the mountain and down into the old fort and back. It does just a good a job at tracking me as All Trails did when it was working, and then some. I like that it not only tells me how much elevation I have ascended, but also descended.

For now, I’m sold on it. Will definitely be using it for the year of the subscription. Meanwhile, I just received an email from All Trails telling me the yearly cost was going up and will renew in February. Fuck All Trails. It has now fallen victim to Cancel (subscription) Society.

January 10, 2020. 3 years ago today. The day we got Bailey spayed. Poor thing. I have never felt more sorry for a dog than I did with Bailey that week. Especially the first time she had to drop a deuce. She was crying and whining the whole time. Scared me so much I took her to the vet again just to be sure she was OK. She was.

She was a good sport about the cone of shame she had to wear for over a week. Out of our three dogs, she is the only one that we have had since she was a baby. The other two were already spayed by the time we accepted them into the family. Both of them had about 4 years under their belt when we adopted them.

On the intelligence side of the house, Bailey is the smartest of the bunch. She learned how to use that cone to her advantage real fast. She was able to run and power herself through the doggy door to get outside. The doggy door! With millimeters to spare on each side, she knew just at what angle she had to hold her head to make it work. And she ran through it at full speed. She used it to secure her food. Drop some food on the floor? PLOW! She would get that cone over it, sealing that cone to the floor, protecting that piece of food from the other two vultures.

Compare that to our middle baby, Abby, who had to wear a cone for a few days last week to keep her from licking her cut foot. She couldn’t even make it through a human door with her cone on. Literally. The cone hit the side of the door frame and she just looked as us like None Shall Pass.

2021. December. While at Big Bend Ranch State Park we must’ve hit the the driver side rear stabilizer on something and bent it a bit. I torqued it back into place and used it. As a result, it no longer went up/down very smoothly. Forget about using a battery powered drill to raise and lower. Hand crank required. Not only was it harder to put up and down, but it wagged back and forth as it did. Still usable. Just harder.

When we returned to base camp I dug into it and found some replacement ones on Amazon for around $80 for a set of 2. That got me to thinking. Weighing my options. $80. Or a little more effort. 80 bucks. Work. Being a cheap bastard, I chose to use a little more effort. I could use the work out anyways. Who cares if my right arm ends up being larger and more tone/fit than my left?

2022. December. While at Big Bend Ranch State Park we must’ve hit the driver side rear stabilizer on something and bent it… no, scratch that. Tore that mufucka right off on the frame side. It was hanging by the one bolt on the cross bar that runs from left to right. Just a swingin’, like John Anderson and Little Charlotte. The wings that come off the stabilizer where it bolts through to the frame actually tore right off. Old bolts still holding it in place. Ain’t gonna be no torquing that thing back into place. To continue our FTX, we just held the jack in place and raised it until it was supporting that corner of the trailer. The pressure of the trailer held it in place. Which brings up something I think I’m going to do: Buy a regular old scissor jack and just store it in the storage bin. If we ever demolish a stabilizer, we’ll at least have that to hold in place for that camping trip instead of having to call EndEx.

Maybe I should start trying to figure out which part of that rugged road is making that happen and approach it at an angle if possible. Anyways… Now it’s no longer a choice to weigh. Unless I’m weighing stabilizer or no stabilizer. This time when we get back to base camp I had to look up that part again. And of course the price is a wee bit higher than it was beginning of 2022. For a 2015.5 year Model 1995, that ended up being a BAL 23222 set of 2 “C” Jacks with handle – 22” if you were to do an Amazon search. I picked the set up for just over $100 with tax.

For a minute I considered a scissor type stabilizer from Harbor Freight. But the frame of the trailer is not big enough to accommodate the bolt pattern.

The new C-Jacks arrived Thursday and I replaced the old one. I used another scissor jack to hold one end of the C-Jack up to the frame while I bolted the other end on. Interestingly, the supplied self-drilling bolts that come with the jack are a bit smaller in diameter than the originals. The t bolts on the main frame lined up just right and I used the old bolts to secure it. The bold that mounts towards the center of the trailer did not line up. I ended up using one of the new bolts to secure it. Works perfectly. A new handle to raise and lower the jacks comes in the package as well. Since the set came with 2 C-Jacks, I now have a spare to keep in the storage bin. Just in case.