Here is some “extensive damage” done to my new bedroom. This is the A/C unit from my original unit over on B West. Of course, it has not been inspected by a deficiency expert, but this is the back wall of a Florida mobile home, for Christ’s sake, not some condo in Whistler. I like individual room A/C. It is more efficient as I do not wander from room to room all day like some people.
Success at the club meeting y’day, in that we got our first logic circuit to work properly. I had given up on it after several hours, but when we got the circuit onto the test bench with two pairs of eyes looking for the problem, it was working in no time. (There was a 100,000Ω resistor where it should have been 470Ω.) This circuit does nothing more than test itself. Yet skipping this test would have been “pretty stupid” in the real of things.The club so far has been a very productive association. While we have not yet manufactured anything, the ground covered is many times what was possible operating independently. For example, he didn’t know how to make a voltage divider and I didn’t know how to recharge a wall A/C unit using gas from the auto store.
Agt. M is a fan of gadgetry. He’s got the iPhone and cables to connect it to his computer or TV. I tend to be conservative with expensive toys, particularly when what I see so often is not actually new, and electronically, much of it fits into an existing category. Like “Dick Tracey” watches. I’m slowly getting convinced by the iPhone apps although my spider sense says there is something fishy about the way the apps are sold.
While there are no adult robotics clubs in Florida, I see there are some 90 teams of high-school students who compete for prizes. By the looks of their web sites, they are well-funded beyond our dreams. But, are they true clubs when they speak of “uncrating” their robots and using joysticks. We are now just known as the BRC for “Broward Robotics Club”. If you are a stickler for correct terminology, our robots will be nonholonomic.
If there are robotics clubs in Florida, they do not show up anywhere. The old saying rings true, “The first robot is the hardest.” By virtue of the disciplines that need mastering, that is true enough stop most people. And [it is] why we allowed for a year to get something off the drawing board. If only Wallace’s relations were here to help, we could do it in a week. That’s if you believe what you hear.
Why pick on Wallace? Well, because. I drove past the old place last night to notice the rent sign still in the window. Are they actually trying to run that place without me? What are they thinking? In two more months it will have lost a third of its value. With me, it would now have a new roof, a complete new air conditioning system, and have a room rented year round. With the way those people read others, they are probably lucky it is vacant. That way they will only lose their shirts instead of their shorts, too.
How rare I start reading a book I don’t finish, but another author has managed. Paul West. I read the first 24 pages of his “Rat Man of Paris” before closing the covers forever. West is one of those authors who tries to “write in circles”, as it were. While the story has a flow, it is all over the place meanwhile. Snippets of unrelated nonsense in every second sentence give the opposite impression than he is trying for.
As near as I figure, the book is about a Jew or not about a Jew who keeps a dead or not dead rat or fox tied around his neck or not tied around his neck. He flashes tourists and while they are distracted, the pickpockets help themselves and pay him a share. Or he fishes old WWII airplanes out of lakes and sells the metal. Something like that. Or not something like that. One thing is certain. I got nothing out of this book but a sense of wasted time.
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