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Friday evening I tried to set up billing for soggywizards' G Suite Basic account.

Upon submitting my business checking account's routing and account numbers, I got the message "Invalid data".

I at first took that to mean I had entered the numbers incorrectly, but a few more tries convinced me the problem was on Google The Conqueror's end, so I filed a ticket.

First thing this morning Juan from G Suite support rang me up, told me he was unfamiliar with that error message, and asked if now is a good time for a screen share.

At the time I was on the bus on my way to my client's office, so I had to tell him that I could only mind-meld share screens tomorrow morning or late tomorrow evening.

Juan said he'd call at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

He also sent me an email with my ticket number.

G Suite Basic is only $5.00 per month. I just cost Google quite a lot more than my first month's service.

How the Republicans Broke Congress

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the “petro” backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy.

The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that “the 21st century has arrived!”

“Venezuela will create a cryptocurrency,” backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves, Maduro said in his regular Sunday televised broadcast, a five-hour showcase of Christmas songs and dancing.

Didn't Venezuela used to have a fiat currency backed by oil? Why would anyone believe that this new fiat currency, despite having cryptocurrency cooties, will fare any better? I bet that the public nature of the block chain is a significant part of the reason they went with this scheme. You know to prevent the people of Venezuela from buying the things they need on the black market. Like anyone would use the "petro" for that anyway.

And we may also have a sign that the bubble of cryptocurrencies is reaching an unsustainable high, if we have deadbeat dictators grasping at this particular bit of straw.

Living the dream

The BBC has a story about the discovery of a diary left by an Auschwitz victim.

Marcel Nadjari was a Greek Jew interned at Auschwitz and forced by the Nazis to escort fellow Jews to the gas chambers, burn the bodies, collect gold fillings, women's hair and to dispose of their ashes in a nearby river.

Realising that their own murder was only a matter of time, the Jewish slaves of the Sonderkommando documented their experiences secretly. Nadjari put his manuscripts in a thermos flask in a leather pouch and buried it near Crematorium III.

The flask was discovered by a Polish forestry student 36 years after it was buried.

Nadjari survived Auschwitz, but his parents and sister were murdered in another camp.

In the Spring of 2010 I was driving a really nice car while wearing a grey pinstripe suit. I saw a man standing on the median holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I pulled up next to him.

I pulled $200 out of my wallet then held it up in front of him then sternly said "No drugs! No Alcohol! No cigarettes!" then gave him the money.

"You just got me off the street!" he shouted in great joy.

"I was once just like you!" I screamed in agony.

"Pay it forward bro. Pay it forward!"

I gave him my card then asked him to call me the next day. I never heard from him again.

I was so upset that when the left turn signal turn green I very nearly crashed into three cars. All three of them swerved to get out of my way.

During the summer of 2012 I walked into a restaurant in Oceano California while carrying a shopping bag and a kitty litter bucket then asked the manager for a job. "Your kitchen floor needs to be swept."

"I'm sorry but it's the end of the season."

I sadly walked outside then pulled a newspaper from a garbage can so I could look at its help wanted ads. A man who watched me do all this walked up to me then without saying a word he gave me one hundred and twenty dollars.

I bought food with it, and shared some with a couple other homeless people.

A few days later I walked into a pr0n shop in Grover Beach. The manager said "Put down the bags." I didn't. I just looked at him. "Put the bags down NOW!"

I put them down then said "I came to apply for a job," then offered him a flash drive with my resume on it. That resume had over twenty years experience as a coder, with the last ten years being mostly self-employed as a software consultant.

"I'm sorry, I can't accept that. You need to apply to our head office."

"No worries," I replied then put the stick back in my pocket.

"How much do you think I could make," I asked him "doing work that I regard as morally reprehensible?"

He went slackjawed with his eyes open wide. "More than this shop makes in six months."

He was correct: as a result of my experience as a Quantitative Investment coder I had been solicited dozens of times to write Sub-Microsecond Precision High-Speed Trading code, mostly by Bloomberg and Solomon-Page. I never responded to any of them.

Such high-speed trading is the reason we really did need to Occupy Wall Street. Some Congresscriters have proposed a punitive very short-term capital gains tax so as to piss on all the billionaire quants but none of those proposals ever achieved traction.

I got paid today, in the form of a wire transfer from my client's Chinese subsidiary. I'm paid by China for Chinese tax reasons.

After work today I'm going to drop by the Portland Rescue Mission then donate a thousand dollars.

"Buy yourself something nice," I'll say.

I'm getting a similar wire in three weeks or so, when my clients OEM customers sign off on my macOS driver for a USB Video chip. My client just makes the chips, the OEMs build them into dongles for sale to end users.

When I get that final paycheck, I'm going to donate a thousand dollars to Right 2 Dream Too. It's more commonly known as The Tent Camp, and is a homeless shelter operated by homeless people.

R2D2 is quite forward thinking because both men, women and couples can sleep there, and one can sleep during the day. Every time I lost the bed lottery at the Portland Rescue Mission I was able to spend the next day sleeping at R2D2.

I'm also speculating - NOT investing: speculating - on cryptocurrencies. I plan to divide eight or ten grand evenly between bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, etherium and peercoin.

Just now I bought $1000 of etherium.

My credit union's security people do not permit debit card withdrawals by coinable - "It has a high potential for fraud," the teller told me after he rang up their security people. Three $60 and one $200 EFTs went through OK but I am uncertain whether the credit union will permit much larger EFTs. So I'm going to break up the trades, with the dollar amount I buy increasing with each EFT so I can be sure they all go through OK.

When I get that last wire I'm going to donate a grand to CityTeam Ministries. I speculate - SPECULATE now - that I'll make quite a bit of money off the cryptos. From time to time I'll sell some then donate to the Blanchet House Of Hospitality, Union Gospel Mission, St Andre's Catholic Church, all of them in Portland, as well as Vancouver's Share House, a church in Vancouver that serves a free lunch, the St Francis Catholic Kitchen in Santa Cruz California, Dorothy's Drop-In Center and Kitchen in Salinas, and Vancouver's Consumer Voices Are Born.

CVAB is a day center for mentally ill folk. They also do stuff like job training, they have six computers and a laser printer to enable the members to apply for jobs.

And an upright piano. The first time I saw that piano I was onto it like a pit bull on a pork roast.

"Consumer" is a euphemism for "Mentally Ill Person". I have a furious hatred of the word "Consumer". I call myself a patient. Look man, if you had heart disease, you'd call yourself a patient too, wouldn't you.

Two winters ago a Canadian Soylentil sent me three pairs of wool socks, wool gloves, three chocolate chip cookies, a Starbucks card and $50 cash so I could buy a pair of pants.

Please donate some of your own money to your community's soup kitchens, homeless shelters and rescue missions. I once met a disabled, homeless former welder who said to me "You talk to some guys on the streets, and they tell you they used to make six figures."

I didn't tell him I was one of those six figure guys.

I once earned quite a lot of money but for all the good it did me I should have burned the banknotes to stay warm on cold nights. But I live in a very modest way; I can easily afford to lose ten grand should the crypto exchanges collapse. I can easily afford to donate the occasional grand to those who serve Portland and Vancouver's homeless.

Amazon's Alexa is officially coming to Australia and NZ (early 2018)

"G'day, cunt!"

The "wisdom" I've learned, is that ethanol has 90% of the stored energy that gasoline has. That is, a gallon of pure ethanol contains 10% less energy than a gallon of gasoline.

Since most of our ethanol is blended, 10%eth/90%gas, then a gallon of fuel at the pump has 1% less efficiency.

Now, I've always kept track of my fuel mileage, since about 1976. Back then, I kept a notebook in the car - now I use fuelly.com to record all my purchases. Recently, I bought another vehicle - a 2002 Chevy Trailblazer. I started out putting ethanol free into it, because the previous owner told me that it gets better fuel mileage with ethanol free. I guess I put about six tanks of gas into it, before making purchases at random stations, whenever I needed fuel. (It is a minor inconvenience timing my fillup when I'll be close to the ethanol free stuff.)

Anyway, this vehicle is charted on fuelly.com as ranging from 10 to 33 mpg, with the bulk of them between 16 and 18 mpg. I was happy as could be to find that my ride was routinely getting about 21 mpg, and as high as 22 mpg. But then - ethanol. After a series of about 6 ethanol fillups, my mileage had dropped off to about 17 mpg. Hmmmmm . . . that's a much greater decrease than the advertised 1%!

A guy at work told me not to worry about it - the gas companies had switched to winter blend gasoline, and fuel mileage always dropped with that. I couldn't argue with him - yeah, it IS time for winter blend.

All the same, I went out of my way to fill with ethanol free. And, BANG!! I'm right back up to ~21 mpg again.

Something ain't right here. I'm sure there are some minor inaccuracies in my fillups. One time, I may squeeze the last drop into the tank possible, and maybe the next time a get a cup and a half less in the tank. That is almost certainly what happened with the one tank that shows 21.98 mpg - I just didn't get it filled exactly like always.

I'm wondering how much further my fuel mileage might have fallen, if I didn't switch BACK to ethanol free? And, where do all those lost miles per gallon go?

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chevrolet/trailblazer/2002/runaway1956/645719

Garrison Keillor fired by MPR: 'I put my hand on a woman's bare back,' he says (comments)

Garrison Keillor off the air after misconduct allegations (archive)

The Latest: Keillor says his firing is 'bewildering'

Garrison Keillor Jokes About Improper Behavior Allegations: 'All My Heroes Got Fired'

STATEMENT FROM MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO REGARDING GARRISON KEILLOR AND A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

State of sexual McCarthyism? Or was there a little more than a pat on the back?

Here's what he's known for: A Prairie Home Companion

The Meaning Of Meghan: 'Black' And 'Royal' No Longer An Oxymoron

Britain’s black queen: Will Meghan Markle really be the first mixed-race royal?

Oh yeah she was on a couple of episodes of Fringe.

Meghan Markle.