I was also looking for updates on the Arduino. They have a new model out, called the “Uno”, stating that was easier for non-Italians to pronounce than “Duemilanove”. I get the point. The major design change is that it can now be programmed to emulate computer peripherals, such as a mouse or keypad. I have not yet examined any of the software for those functions.
Last weekend was a write off due to the cold spell, but today I was chatting with Alaine. Yes, I’ll be there for Christmas. But we usually go to the Catholic festival around this time of year and I missed it. They lost the manager at their second location so that means nearly a total loss of spare time, meaning fewer visits. Rain or shine, her and I have a date after church next Sunday. JZ will likely be around for at least a few minutes. My best friends in town [JZ and Alaine] and I have not seen them since February.All that is about to change and it may change drastically. I now have supporting evidence that riding a motorcycle does not affect my ticker. I shall begin saving up right away, but meanwhile I still want that bicycle motor. Sure enough, two months ago there were dozens for sale, now I don’t even get a response to my Craigslist ad.
Speaking of no sales, there are now 60,000 foreclosed properties in the county and nobody is buying anything. There is no harm in waiting and only eleven properties traded hands last month and a waitress up at the club who bought in July has already lost $22,000 on her “dream home”. This is not the time to be buying anything.
The neighbors must be overfeeding Pudding-Tat. She is starting to look like them. There are still five of them in Eric’s old two-bedroom, all except one on some kind of government assistance. They sit in the house all day, between them barely any money left even to go to the movies. Instead, they walk their dog up to ten times per day and the woman that talks constantly. They argue out loud a lot. I would not be surprised if the Frenchies register a complaint.
Over the previous several months, I’ve researched all the popular writer’s sites on-line. All the places that advertise to pay for contributed articles. I stopped just short of my 100 articles after receiving merely 26 cents pay in an entire one month and nothing thereafter. As it turns out, every last on-line writer’s site that pays has complaints about shifty practices such as basing the pay on non-verifiable criteria.
Some copyright all your hard work in their own name (Factoidz), or don’t pay if you quit writing for a while (Orato). Others (Firehow) pay so little you know they are pocketing the real money. In general, there appears to be no reputable pay-for-publish sites, all fall short of the mark. (Wikipedia does not pay.) There is no place with a simple cause and effect payment arrangement.
Oh, and I flag all ads that say internship, even the valid sounding ones. My position is that the rich who write for free should not be taking jobs away and the poor who write for free are demeaning to the profession.
Bryne is planning to move out of his place. From what he describes, the landlady is an aging neurotic who wears the clothes of a teenager. She shops obsessively, is addicted to self-help books, and trolls the Internet for a man. The ring tone on her phone is Disney’s “Some Day My Prince Will Come” which I’m not even going to touch. Head for the hills, guys. She’s a twice-divorced control freak and a whack job to boot. (I was later to learn this is hardly anything unusual in Florida.)
I have a firm offer on the Taurus, a hundred bucks less than I wanted. Let me count on my fingers, yep, that is the most cost effective car I’ve ever owned, the least being the Cadillac at ten times the price and ten times the maintenance costs. I would then have enough cash to get a really decent scooter or motorcycle, say a 150, but I’m holding off until the home situation stabilizes. For instance, Pete the Rock seems to have disappeared again, already.
[Author's note 2020: this is a short videor of the Arduino published ten years later, almost to the day. The significance is it represents one of countless "blog coincidences". I do not discover these until after I link back to a date using my Yesteryear feature. I have no conscious recollection of looking at this microcontroller on this day in 2010. Some could say it is sub-conscious, but that is too far-fetched to explain such exact to-the-date matches.]
This is an animation of the Arduino Uno, best I've seen. Not too exciting, I'll admit. But if you know what the TX/RX blinking lights mean, it's loading. You probably have to watch closely as the TC/RX LEDs flicker, then the blinking begins. It's a medium size program.
TCan you see the sequence, how it loads and runs, causing the LED to blink, L1. This is one of the older Arduinos, I think. I'm not sure because I could not have been the only one who strongly disliked the surfact mount ATMegas (the big long chip). It's more economical to remove a programmed chip to a basic PCB board for project usage, freeing the Arduino board to program with another ATMega.
