This is part of my recommended retirement kit. If you were born rich, you probably already have one of these in all 19 rooms of your house. Civil servants won't be able to tell the difference. Stick around and I'll show you another vital piece of retirement gear. Remember, I have no intention of sticking around here and putting up with old ladies the rest of my life. Or as I used to say when asked why I never married young: "Men who have a choice tend to make one."
With Dave-O back to work, that cancels our big plans to head out of town in his truck. Which means I am again looking at a sidecar and train travel. I would go to Savannah or Charleston for a week right now if I could find that extinct animal, the safe hotel room for less than $100 a night. Amtrak says you can bring a bicycle, but to check first. Except there is no place to check without practically buying the ticket first. And sidecar motorcycles are still priced well over twice what they are worth. Weird eBay is still wasting people’s time by not revealing the “reserve bid”. Auction sale, my eye.Want to know what’s getting my goat recently? Ads that portray fat little kids as normal and happy. You know the ads I mean, everything from breakfast cereal to families on vacation. They all seem to include some fat-cheeked little porker. Why don’t I like it? Because the reality of fat is not normal and happy, and it sends the message out to other kids that fat is okay. I remember when they took slim young single women off TV and out of the movies except as bit parts. It was a sad day. I still maintain to this day is the role can be played by a sexy teenage babe, it should be. I don’t care if fat is the new average, I don’t like it portrayed.
While on that topic, I’ve noticed another effect that slips past a lot of people. It concerns fat people, Hindus, divorced women and Cubans, that tier of society. Individually, they can be quite nice, even charming. But that changes instantly when you get five or more in a group a talking politics and about how bad life has done them. This is not a scientific theory, I just wonder if anyone else has made the same observation.
An afternoon downpour caught me inside watching one of those screwball movies about how stupid people can make a bad situation even worse. They panic for no reason, they scream when trying to hide, and choose the worst time ever to admit they were lying, as if the situation lets them off. It just needs one more element to remind me of my family. That’s where you get dumb enough to actually think a promise you make today can negate one you made the day before. And my family has never been anywhere near North Carolina.
Joshua Bell. That’s the name of the violinist who sells out $100 concert seats. He took his $3 million violin to the Washington, DC subway and played six Bach concertos, some of the most complicated music ever written. He made $32. That was back in 2007. The Washington Post, organizer of the experiment, reports many children stopped to listen, but were made to move along by their parents. Even I can’t use a guy with that little stage presence.
The club meeting this evening lasted 5-1/2 hours, the longest meeting yet. During that time we got antenna parts, established the flow chart, and came to the realization that the club can only exist if we specialize even further. I will never be able to build fancy things and Agt. M has no intention of learning computer code beyond what is needed to grasp the overall functionality. We’ve learned plenty but the division of labor was present long before we started. If anybody tells me they built a robot on their own, I mean really on their own, I would probably suspect a little of the mad scientist at work.
May I add that Agt. M, without understanding computer code, was faster to catch on to the algorithms than the forum experts on-line. Those experts had trouble grasping basics, yet all of them have undeniably built robots, so somebody is not telling the whole truth. For example, when I made the assumption that our robot, as designed, could not return to its starting position except by chance, the experts wanted to know why that was important. They should not have to be told, but if you don’t tell them, they design robots that conk out after landing on Mars. I have no explanation how alleged experts can be so thick in the head, but I’ll wager it has to do with taking mental shortcuts.
The new antenna software (storebought) is complicated. But that’s what the club paid $240 for--so we would be miles ahead of old router technology. That’s also why we went digital. Our home-built antennas may have flopped, but we learned which features to look for and what not to buy. We now reach out to 30km. Our club has been metric since day one. I cannot think of a single instance in the club meetings of anything having to be said twice. Those who can’t spot the significance of that probably belong to some different kind of club.
Wikipedia, for all its positive points, will always remain a last resort for me because of its treatment of technical subjects. The concept of the encyclopedia is to inform the reader, not dance around in circles and talk nonsense. As Longfellow might have said, when Wiki was good, it was very, very good. And when it was bad you get utter crap like the definition of “Spanning Tree Protocol”. WTF, Wiki?
That scholarly woman’s magazine “Cosmopolitan” has discovered an on-line annoyance. It seems men are miffed when women reply to their lengthy text messages with a single word response. Nobody said on-line dating was better than the real thing. First of all, unless you are Longfellow, what makes you think you can text a woman into the sack? Second, a one word response is probably sufficient for such men and the caliber of women who would associate with them. Thirdly, I myself would have trouble finding the one word I would like to say to 90% of American men. Fourthly, if you need further proof those men are deadheads, consider that they just told their target women how to piss them off. Double-duh.