homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

Fittop:

My grandson who apparently went to the Old Dux School of salt and Fresh Water Angling, and Advanced Worm Drowning loves to fish. There are a lot of fish ponds around here and many are in posted areas. Apparently he is rather adept at making useful friends and influencing people because he has gotten permission to fish just about everywhere. Today he returned with a story to tell me that was not exaggerated. I mean there was no fish caught or described anywhere in it. He had managed to somehow contact a fellow who had a large pond within a mile of here. The guy was quite a fisherman himself from the very large boat and trailer rig in his drive. Turns out he does a lot of tournament fishing and "T" says he has a tackle box to dream about. You know fish lures are really designed to catch fisherman and not the fish.

Anyhow it also turns out he is retired Air Force/ Navy. He claims he was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and deployed several times. Then he says he was recruited by the Navy to fly with the Blue Angels. He say he recently retired. Is that possible? No, not that he has retired. I mean is it possible he was recruited by the Blue Angels out of the Air Force? Too much inter service jealousy I would imagine for that. "T" says he has lotsa pix of the blue Angels and memorabilia. "T" is a fairly savy young man and not easily fooled. I'll ask what his name is and look him up sometime.

MG:

Not at all my friend. If my English was as good as yours I'd not have spent the best 5 years of my life in 2nd grade. The only reason I eventually got thrown out of there was for not shaving... I just added another Internet tool. !0-strike network scanner. Now I know I've received packets from someone somewhere in France and Israel.

You will be happy to know that as long as i can remember, my kneecaps have gone with me and supported me wherever I went. You might say I have grown quite attached to them, in fact. Gizmo's website is a good one for freeware. FreewareFiles. com is a new website I found today. I am missing old favorites NoNags and Freewareworld. They've gone the way of Surfmadison and Jumbo I guess. Those were the old days of freeware. One has to be very careful what you download these days and I don't know many websites beyond TuCows that have been around that long. If careless you can end up installing not only the program you wished for but 10 more bundled in with it you neither knew about or wanted.

You also need to know the difference in the semantics used on some sites. The difference between "Free Software" and "Free Download" is important if you do not wish to download something you then are expected to pay for. I absolutely despise "Crippleware" and will not even try it. Sometimes the only way you find out a "Free" program is restricted to say, only working on Tuesdays if there is a full moon by downloading and installing the crap. The halcyon days of true "Shareware" are pretty much gone forever. They were fun days though. The developers trusted us and we trusted them. I never got a virus from a piece of shareware and I never failed to pay for a program I liked and continued to use.

The Internet is clogged with all kinds of freeware, trialware, free-to-try-ware,crackedware, and more. I used to visit a place by the name of FOSSI where you could download all kinds of graphics software. I never found anything that was not precisely as advertised. Never found a Virus, Trojan, PUP, or anything in several years. It too is gone now probably rousted by the Internet Police I suppose. Now I despise crapware, crippleware, and hackers who delight in spreading virus infections onto innocent peoples computers. What i hate most of all my friend are copies of commercial software planted by their developers or their assigns that are stuffed like a Christmas turkey with viruses. They do this to punish the unwary looking for something for free and to discourage them looking further. I will paraphrase my friend Franc White TVs Carolina Sportsman who created a bumper sticker that read "DON'T RE-ELECT NOBODY, NOT EVEN YOUR MAMMA" . DON'T TAKE SOFTWARE FROM NOBODY, NOT EVEN YOUR MAMA, WITHOUT CHECKING IT FIRST.

Franc was also a marine biologist and active conservationist. He had a successful syndicated sportsman oriented TV show in many southern markets back in the 70s and 80s. What got his so riled against the NC legislature and the federal government was allowing foreign trawlers to come in so close to our own waters to gobble up tons of seafood and take it away when our own fisheries were producing less and our fishermen hurting. He had other gripes with the government as well. his daughter is trying to do something with his legacy of tV shows but they were just dumped into an old storage building and neglected over the years. Many are useless. I believe she has an idea for a website at the least. Franc used to have a zebra striped STOL aircraft he often flew about in. He was a good pilot. His Irish Setter, Fracas, loved to fly with him and anytime Franc was fishing that dog was sure to be in the bow leaning forward into the spray.