Can’t get on Internet and Bardot died.

Maybe since 8ish last night. IDK why yet. I thought, no problem, I’ll use my laptop. Using it now, but it’s brutal, because I don’t have my mouse USB receiver. I left it in daughters laptop, when she was down a few weeks ago, because she wanted me to remove a program she was having trouble with. And I used my mouse because I hate using the touchpad. It was a some effort because I’m not that familiar with Windows. So I have to use the stupid touch-pad, I’m getting a little better, but I have to google to do basic things, like scroll (swipe 2 fingers) and right click (tap 2 fingers). I mean even typing this is a pain. I type, then look up and I’m not typing where I want because my palm has touched the mouse pad. Although it also seems to randomly go places without the mouse pad touch.

I wanted to update my database because Bridget Bardot died. She was a real beauty… in her day. She didn’t maintain her looks, like Raquel Welsh did, as she aged. She didn’t seemed to be bothered about it, because her focus became animals. All these aging actresses/singers today trying to cling so hard to their looks, and they don’t hold a candle to Bridget in her youth.

I have to re-sign into everything, on this laptop, because it’s been so long since I have. It’s darker in this room and no lighted keyboard either.

Google wanted me to sign-in again, But it told me my Firefox browser wasn’t supported. So I startup main desktop and the Firefox version is the same, although I use Liberwolf. Anywho, came back to Laptop, and… now it works! Telegram wasn’t installed.

My son got a new game… Battlefield™ 6. So I wanted to look it up. So I type Battle, and look down and see it and it automatically jumps there. Now that’s what I wanted. But I didn’t select it. What if I intended to type “Battlefield 6 isn’t working”?

Bitwarden is not behaving like the desktop version. I check version and it’s 2024.2.0, Liberwolf desktop is 2025.6.1. Why? It’s not something I manually update. So I have to google/fix that! Now laptop is 2025.12.0. So apparently I need to now update the Desktop. I suppose it’s a good exercise. I guess I should use the laptop without the mouse every now and then.

It’s probably taken me an hour to type these few stupid paragraphs in. I need a nap… I’m exhausted.

Of course hours later it dawns on me that I could have simply used the USB mouse from my laptop… DUH!

I think this has become a challenge. It maybe painful, but I think I should use the laptop for a few days to be more productive in an emergency, I can still play games and watch The IT Crowd on the desktop without Internet.

I used Hercules longer ago than I thought

I used the Hercules IBM emulator longer ago than I thought. I thought my first exposure to the Hercules/IBM mainframe world was through Moshix videos around 2018. But I was looking through this log and I found a VM/370 entry 5 years before that in 2013. At first I assumed I entered a wrong date when creating this WordPress log. I started the log/blog by manually entering entries from a static HTML log file. So I went looking for the static log file and found it…

Sure enough it has a 4/9/2013 date. I only identified it as a IBM hardware emulator. However those “HHC” messages and console behind the VM/370 screen are definitely Hercules. So to my surprise I had actually played with Hercules and the IBM VM/370 OS years before seeing a Moshix video. However I don’t think I did much with it until I stumbled upon a video Moshix did on MVT, which I used in school, it was surprisingly very MVS like. So I’ll give him credit for renewing my interest in it. And doing much more with it.

Further proof that the 2013 year is correct is the entry about Linux Mint 15, above it. As you can see below, Linux Mint 15 was released in May 2013.

My feeble memory… another reason I like to keep logs.

Would I be doing computer work… today?

If my career was just starting out? Short answer… no!

I am so thankful for my career working with computers. But today and for a while now… it totally doesn’t fit my personality. When I got out of High school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I liked animals. So maybe something to do with that. One thing I did know was, I was more concerned with being happy than making a lot of money. I was a loner… still mostly am. I gave serious thought to being a forest ranger. Being outside away from the masses. I went to the local community college and got a catalog. I looked through it trying to decide on a major. Wow there were so many science classes and “ology” classes to be a forest ranger. So I looked on.

I saw “Business Data Processing”. The “Business” part didn’t really appeal to me, but I liked calculators and electronics. So I decided to give that a try. I almost gave up during the intro class. It just wasn’t clicking. And then half way through… it did. I made a A in the class, and every computer class after that. I didn’t have to socialize to do my work. I could just sit and code. However I did socialize some, because there were other people there with the same interest. You could write logic using flowcharts at home, and I did. However to actually translate logic to code you had to be… on campus. This was the late 1970s. These were mini and mainframe computers. For the most part, people didn’t have any type computer at home. You had to be on campus to write code.

The job was perfect for me at the time. I could just code without a lot of human interaction. This is not true today. Programming is all about teams and collaboration. Tools such as git are made for this purpose. I could go on, but I have a feeling I’ve already talked about this.

More info regarding GPS accuracy

This whole issue with me came about, because I wanted to enter GPS info for locating family grave sites, into my family webtrees database, because in the past I would go to the cemetery with my mom to visit family graves, and sometime they were hard to find. I now know it’s not going to pinpoint down to the inch the exact location. At least that’s true today… it may not be true tomorrow. Technology is always improving.

Below is where Google Earth thinks a family member is located, based on the latitude/longitude info I recorded standing next to the grave site. Needless to say my family member isn’t buried on the road. It’s in the general area, but there are quite a few grave sites in that area. Are they inside the large circular area or behind the bushes?

I have to say, it’s pretty amazing that you can see the headstones. You can’t read the markers, but pretty amazing detail considering the satellites are 300+ miles above the earth.

GPS Preciseness

Regarding this recent post…

I just learned GPS is not as precise as I thought. I literally thought the latitude/longitude by my computer would be different than in my bedroom. But it’s the same. To clarify it’s not precise using the compass app I used. Read on to learn, what I learned about increased accuracy.

GPS is typically accurate to within 3 to 5 meters (10 to 16 feet) under ideal conditions with a clear view of the sky. However, accuracy can decrease to about 10 to 20 meters (33 to 66 feet) in urban areas or environments with obstacles like buildings and trees.

On further study I see more decimal places expressed as DD (decimal degrees?), gives better accuracy such as…

Computer: 16.184708, -70.143522
Bedroom : 16.184728, -70.143640

or DMS (degrees, minutes, seconds)

Computer: 16°11’5.2692″N 70°8’37.490″W
Bedroom : 16°11’4.8865″N 70°8’36.924″W

Note: The numbers above have been changed, but they reflect what the numbers look like.

So knowing this, the GPS coordinates I got at the cemetery from the compass app I used is not as precise as I would like. So I need to go back to the cemetery to get more precise readings. The sooner the better, while there might be some memory retention, of where the headstones are located.

Here is the app I found (also has a compass), with more GPS precision than the Compass app I used. It got 4.6 stars and 100K+ downloads