July 31, 2011

           I used to own a four-door 1955 Buick Roadmaster identical to this one. I bought it in 1979, and walked away from it in 1994. After sinking some $21,000 into it, I decided old cars are a hobby for the idle rich. It was the four door model and it was made of steel. The paint job alone cost me $2,800. It ran fine at nine miles per gallon, but I had it parked at a lot that went into foreclosure and the car was seized. Rather than fight, I just left it there.
           Cars are nice, but the motor vehicle system is designed to cost every inch of the way. You can’t move 500 miles without shipping it or driving it. It has to be insured just to park it. It was the most luxurious car I ever owned and would do 151 mph. But today, I can buy one restored for half what I wasted on this mine. It is in Pt. Roberts, Washington.
           The job of music. I count 80 concerts in the area between now and mid-September. Everybody’s after the fast buck, I don’t know how the population base can support that many bands. Like Roger Daltry. I thought he was dead, or am I thinking of his career after he went solo? Or how about Toby Keith plugging concert seats for $600? Music piracy clearly works both ways. (Keith is good, but his top selling work sold less than 3 million. I find his publicity and music match his stage persona, that is, mostly slick, shiny plastic. I’d pay $10 to see him at a local club. If it was licensed.)
           Last evening was a musical tour, more like musical chairs. The “country” band up at the Wayside turned out to be a four-piece tour group with $40,000 in stage gear packed into the corner, a full-fledged touring band of pros. Overkill for any pub in this town. The bass player was world-class, he is either beneath his station or had his bass lines customized--only a classical musician does what he did. The drum kit was Ludwig’s with Zildjian cymbals.
           On the way home I stopped at Buddy’s. In another weird outcome, when I sang my country duets with the host, some dude in the audience decided it was a challenge to his rock show. Both he and his lady were booked consecutively so once they saw my act, the did four duets in a row. Slow, droning rock ballads that put the audience back to sleep but killed the moment. They were as blind as the Hippie not noticing the audience turned back to their beers and applauded only out of politeness.
           I decided to review some youTube bass lessons, the generic video material that clogs the drains of the Internet restrooms. It isn’t your imagination, the way they play bass really is boring. Lessons create boring bassists. And I automatically reject alleged “advanced” bass lessons, because those people are not playing bass. They are playing standard jazz guitar licks on the upper bass frets, a ho-hum concept at best.
           [Author’s note: To me, advanced bass is not complicated runs, rather where you can recognize the entire orchestra from the bass lines as captured by the player. Example the way I play Ringo’s “Photograph” or “Passionate Kisses” as solos. True, my opinion is biased, but not so much as I could be considering my experiences. To me, a guitarist is just another instrumentalist only so long as he cooperates. I play many so-called guitar songs, including the “lead breaks”, by employing only innovative bass progressions. I also play saxophone, piano, and fiddle songs in the same vein. So there.]
           While the basis of bass, as it were, is roots and fifths, if that is all you have to offer, get off the stage. Some of the lessons were produced by big studio names, but all treated the subject as if bassists are the singer’s half-retarded cousin from his mother’s side. All these videos approached bass playing from the wrong angle, that it is a backup instrument to be subjugated to the will of even the most pathetic guitarist. I oughtta write a book, “Bass Playing for the Thinking Man”, although that restricts my sales right off the bat.
           Later, I hung out at the bookstore. Ladies, if you want to meet guys, at least split up once you get inside. I was looking for Arduino material. The fact is, I may have already covered all the material available. Even the advanced texts are starting to get repetitious. What’s lacking is the know-how to apply what I’ve learned. But isn’t that always the case. The trivia today is those metal shipping containers you see loaded on the big transport boats. Did you know that 10,000 of those things are lost overboard each year? The ones full of beta video equipment.

July 30, 2011

           Here’s an historic house, Florida style from back in the days when Florida had any. This belonged to Joseph Young, the imaginative real estate surveyor who bought ten round-shaped acres downtown for $1,750 in the 1920s and promptly renamed it “Young Circle”. The same park now boasts 500 drug-related arrests per year. Here’s his house, which in accordance with American public law, has reputedly been repossessed several times for unpaid property taxes.
           Although Joe had not yet learned about World War II, the city is still growing, albeit at 1% per year. Could it be that there is no vacant land left? To his credit, it is now the twelfth largest city in Florida.
           Another round of good news, though mainly just welcome confirmations. The results of my May medicals are in. Provided I can stifle my urges to run the Boston Marathon, deep-sea dive, and take that $250,000 annual stock broker’s job (still an open offer if I want it), I won’t be dying any year soon. At least not of a bad heart. Or what’s left of it after Robyn C. Sanderson.
           They say, somewhat more scientifically than I, that folks who don’t adapt die. This “they” being the seventeen prosperous and well-rested doctors on my payroll plus the throngs of green-uniformed staff at Memorial who always smile and hum “Happy Days” whenever I arrive.
           But adapt from what? One’s chosen lifestyle, that’s what. It doesn’t matter if you are a vegetarian, two-pack a day huffer, or fry your eggs in bacon grease, when something goes wrong, you have to change whatever went before, the operative word being “whatever”. I miss my old life of philanderin’, Chinese food, county-wide walks and wild sex twenty-one times a week. It’s easier to take if you subscribe to the theory that as men reach middle age or older, it is natural for them to crave less and less Chinese food. I’ve heard tell of this phenomenon.
           Chalk up another Florida eight hours on Integrated Circuits. It’s all theory, since there is no place to buy them without crossing the border into the USA. This type of study slows everything for we have no idea what is practical or important though it certainly keeps one out of the summer sun. The question was raised, “Why can’t we use relays instead of transistors to control the H-bridge?” I undertook to learn the answer because we could, I suppose, do what we do without digital components.
           One, relays take a lot of power which we can’t afford. Two, relays themselves are bulky and expensive. Three, relays contain a coil that can flyback worse than the motor. Four, you cannot turn a relay on 10 million times per second. During this extra study, we took a long look at shift registers which apparently can operate 100 million times per second. We have no equipment to match that kind of performance, not even the rate which I can consume sweet & sour chicken balls. Our motors are dependent on Pulse Width Modulation and transistors are the best choice for that, far and away.
           Additionally, electricity is not electronics. It is difficult to change performance parameters without rewiring the whole dang thing from the ground up, the analog parallel dating women at your workplace. When digital is used, the change is initiated by altering the code. Said control is also many times more accurate and code takes your mind off Chinese food.
           While there is an abundance of easy electronics projects on-line, most are repetitious. I personally have no need for 50 versions of how to build a water level sensor or a cricket chirp sound device. What I did find curious is the large number of people whose advanced code begins to address the same problems I find with the C+ language, namely lack of intellectual structure, anal retentive abuse of punctuation marks, inconsistent command formats, and that sure sign of mouth-breathers, dot notation.
           In a separate occurrence, Laura the Karaoke lady texted me she was back in town. Considering I never knew she left, I dropped in and sang a couple of my favorites early last evening. The front row was packed with black ladies who were total country fans, unusual as it was not a country bar. There was also a tall blonde babe in sequined jeans, the kind you don’t see around here. A smooth tightie, more burger than bun.
           As I got to leaving, that blonde called out my name in disappointment I wasn’t staying. Wha? I have no idea who she was but A) I was broke and had to leave, and B) something like that is not wandering around unattached. When I say tall, I’d say she was 5 foot 8 and wearing spikes. The kind I like to take to the Hong Kong Kitchen.

July 29, 2011

           Think back to the faulty bicycle lock. Lee’s on Federal replaced it instantly with no questions asked. That’s why they are still here after all these years, and doin’ better than most. Know what I’m sayin’, Florida? Here is a photo of the shop workbench with brand new vise installed. The blue-ish tinge is from the overhead tarp. Unlike my work shed, the club area is not enclosed.
           Now $240 over budget this month, it is time to pull in the reins for 30 days. I had to address the problem of the ants from the vacant lot beside me. Twice I got bitten in a week working in my yard. They were not responding to ordinary sprays and poison, I had to call in a pro for $80.
           It is clearly in the contract that was my responsibility, and I tend to honor all contracts. That’s why I’m still here after all these years, and doin’ better than most. Know what I’m sayin’, North Carolina and Canada? Then, I did what I do when it gets this hot. I went up to the library for most of the afternoon. I’m okay when the government borrows Chinese money to cool their public buildings. I said public.
           From the dumb sales pitch department, we have Monex selling silver with one true, but asinine, pitch. They have bags of coins with a face value of $1,000 (4,000 quarters or 10,000 dimes), from years prior to 1964. Those coins were 90% silver, or around $25,000 per sack. The point is, the currency has become so debased over the last 50 years, there is no way these coins will ever again be cheap. But they are still legal tender. Hence the Monex claim that “unlike other silver investments”, the coins can never fall below face value. Yeah, but duh.
           I’ve got some fan mail criticism of my distrust of government surveillance of private citizens. Wrong. I do not distrust them. I dislike them. Let me set a few people straight. This blog is not written to sell newspaper columns or win elections. I have seen too many hypocrites in my time, people who privately hate blacks, welfare, immigration and taxes. But the minute they are in public, they staunchly defend every lamebrain horses-ass middle-class ideal you could cook up. As long as they think they can be identified, they do anything to appear politically correct. Once back in private, the invectives start again.
           I do not believe in that kind of two-faced existence. If it was Nature’s intention that everything be equal, the zoo would be full of cows. I honestly believe it politicians were forced to represent their constituents, the war would be over, the borders would be closed, half the useless government departments would be shut down tomorrow and the mass deportation of illegals would begin in earnest.
           These are the words of someone who dislikes the government, not one who distrusts them. I defy anyone to prove I do not support the majority on matters of national concern. And as far as my repeated remonstrations of the authorities, if you don’t like my stance, get your own blog. If you want to give land back to the original owners, go find a dinosaur. On the really big issues, my readership expects nothing less than onesidedness. This is not the place for fence-sitters.
           I put the familiar Schwinn 12-function speedo/odometer on the eBike. The one saving grace of this piece of shit gadget from the once reputable is that it only costs 11 bucks. It works with the ingenious method of a small magnet attached to your bicycle spoke that generates a small current in a coil attached to your fork once in each revolution. Schwinn could have done wonders with this concept, but they cheaped out. The entire operation is so beset by quirks and bad instructions, you will wind up using two of the twelve functions, namely the speedometer and odometer.
           To give you an idea, the first setting is enter the tire size of your bicycle into the computer. Since more than on tire can be mounted on a given wheel size, you look up a chart that gives the number of millimeters of travel on each tire revolution, except they don’t tell you this. On a 26” rim with a 2” tire like mine, you enter 2099. Brilliant, there, Schwinn, but then, I’m okay with standard to metric conversion formulas.
           You can manually scroll or set to scan through average speed, distance (trip meter), maximum speed, odometer, clock, and travel time. Travel time measures only the time you were actually moving, it stops while you are sweating it out at a Florida crosswalk. Average speed is also based only on movement. But Schwinn has been taking lessons from Sony by controlling all twelve functions with two buttons.
           Said another way, they don’t work worth a damn. If you put it in scan mode, it won’t display is your total mileage. If you view the odometer, you can’t see your trip meter. The trip meter is even more bogus, in that you would normally expect to reset it to zero rather often. The instructions say press and hold the left button, but this repeatedly has no effect until suddenly, on the 20th press, it takes. But it also sets everything else to zero, your odometer, your clock, your averges. Everything now has to be re-entered including your tire size.
           How do I just know Schwinn management drink their cola with peanuts in the bottle?

July 28, 2011

           Robotics is beginning to cost, but that does not mean it is anywhere near as expensive as having no hobby at all. We are receiving a lot of encouragement from an unexpected source. Since we have to call around for even the most basic parts, it turns out a lot of older employees of former electronics shops will volunteer to help find things. Honorable mention goes to Alfa Electronics, Advanced Electronic Manufacturing (of Dania Beach), and Newark from out of state but with plenty of local representatives.
           Here’s another motorcycle pic that has nothing to do with my recent repair. It does have to do with the bad economy, and let me tell you locally, it really sucks. Here is something not seen merely two years ago, a complete row of parked cycles outside Home Depot. My rustic unit is shown in the far background. This is a sign of the times, and they are consistently the 150cc size engine I chose as the best compromise.
           I am donating my cutoff saw to the club, along with an almost matching transformer from an old HP printer. We are easily past the stage where we can safely and permanently wire such things together. Alas, my poor budget performance this month means the drill press is just going to have to wait. Alaine did call from Coconut Grove for a computer repair, but they were able to get it going again without me. Dang, I wanted to head over there to visit anyway.
           The club meeting went well, it was again two minutes of mechanics and two hours of basic robot theory. It’s that the mechanic part is dreary compared to each weeks discovery of new ICs, which in turn explain mysteries. I wonder how many geek types who brag about 64 bit computers actually know what they are talking about. Maybe one in a hundred. We are becoming able to categorize chips by their functions. That’s another skill that is not spelled out in the textbooks.
           We are still having difficulties getting easy circuits to work. That is something that time will eliminate. Just like college, it is wiser to forge ahead with new material and let the skipped parts fall into place once the bigger picture is formed. I’d guess we are around half way familiar with the 50-some concepts needed to actually make a robot do something. The hardest part so far? The computer coding. There is a lack of material describing exactly where it fits into the overall scheme of things. What we know, we learned by ourselves because there was no other way.
           In a remarkable few weeks, the new pharmacy went from vacant lot to open over on Pembroke. It would be safe to say that was not the work of some Florida outfit. The store is giving away all kinds of free stuff so I’ll be over there tomorrow with the lineups. I am impressed by how rapidly that store appeared from nothing.
           Who remembers Capt. J’s? It was a neighborhood pub over on Dixie, now closed up. The clientele has readjusted to the three remaining watering holes. Boston Johnny’s for those who can afford the drinks and the DUI’s. Buddy’s Place with no place to sit, and of course, Jimbos. They are a late crowd so I don’t see them much, but a crowd nonetheless and I’m thinking about Friday’s again.
           I was therefore also talking with Rhonda, the Karaoke lady. I did not know she worked a day job. She does drive a nice new van. We are both watching closely the difference the increased crowds make. While the pub does not hire circuit bands, we now rival the places that do for crowd size, variety of shows, and weekly frequency. I’d be ignoring reality if I did not wonder if Capt. J’s had taken my offer three years ago whether the situation might be reversed. Jimbo Fridays are still mine for the taking, but I don’t want to return with my same old show. Plus, most of the singing I do, the audience already knows the material from my Karaoke appearances. It doesn’t deliver the wow any more.

July 27, 2011

           It was the starter. And that was $56 not covered by warranty. No explanation as to why a new part gave out and two new replacements were also bad, but a potential explanation follows below. (We finally replaced the starter temporarily with one from a working scooter and it fired up fine.) It would seem quality control is a problem in China. Here is the bike on the hoist with the bottom end removed to get at the gears.
           The diagnosis was that, in another quality issue, it was discovered the spindles for both the electric and kick starter were dry, where they are normally packed with heavy grease at the factory level. I may have unknowingly worn these parts out due to that oversight. Of course, we could not have known about this defect until the motor was practically disassembled as shown here.
           I’m reminded of why I had originally wanted to become a schoolteacher. The two paid months off every summer. Ray-B just got back from Italy for three weeks, which explains why he wasn’t answering his phone. Like a many reports I’m getting from southern Europe, he did not care for the place. We both agreed how great it was to get back to the convenience of the USA. If you read back far enough, I used to get rush off the plane in LA and go walking through a shopping center just to get “back home”.
           Ray-B also reports another nasty practice, the hidden WOP restaurant charges. He mentions getting stung as much as $20 for things like ice. What part of “Italian” don’t you understand? Why do you think Italians are compelled to spread the word they are great lovers? (Hint: It’s the same reason blacks are forced to claim they are built large. What other hope do such men really have?)
           Ray-B also notes how musicians can play music most anywhere they want, including setting up outside a café and later passing the hat through the patrons. Things like that get you arrested in America. Your average Italian’s odds of stealing twenty American bucks are infinitely greater than his chances of ever legitimately earning it. And I used to know one hell of a lot of Italians.
           Ray-B’s got a small recording mixer card for his computer he’s not using. That would be a godsend for my backing tracks. I was hesitant to spend a lot of money on something I was not sure would be worthwhile. I used to think teachers got paid year round, but Ray-B informs me that exists due to an optional decision. Not knowing things like this reflects the lack of career information available when I was a teenager. Nobody told me about such details and you didn’t dare ask under fear of being called stupid forever. I also thought doctors had to work in hospitals and dentists came from England. Consider yourself lucky if your parents told you otherwise.
           My antenna mast is priced out, it should cost less than $20 to get 20 feet up into the air. The piping is PVC and while it is designed to flex in the wind, it is likely to be stayed by guy wires to the work shed and my existing hurricane anchors. This month’s expenses have been atrocious; I am nearly $400 over budget. That means a lean month of August. Part of that cost was combating the ant invasion I mentioned. The fact I have a sandy vacant lot next door is a factor, but also the fact is I don’t like ants.
           Learned to hate ants in Thailand, where there is a custom evolved ant for ever crack and crevice. Fortunately, the local infestation was not fire ants. I feel the cost of spraying should be borne by the office but I figured why make waves. I also sprayed barrier strips where any part of my new place touches concrete directly. I am very hesitant to use toxic chemicals inside the house. That’s even after I found a colony of ants feeding where Dave-O spilled a tiny drop of his coffee last week.

July 26, 2011

           Here we have one of the more expensive bicycle locks on the market. It is an anti-bump special, meaning it cannot be picked using the old method of twisting the tumblers. This lock lasted 12 days and now cannot be opened at all. I came out from the ATM and the correct combination would not work. Fred was kind enough to come by with a set of bolt cutters and we had cut the cable in less than two minutes. I later had five or six people try the combination to eliminate pilot error.
           Thus, we learned two important things. First, all that a cable lock does is slow the thief down, although it takes two guys to make short work of the cut. Second, if you are respectably dressed, nobody questions two clean-shaven men cutting the lock on a $500 bicycle in broad daylight.
           The H-bridge, which is a miniature revelation of the million things wrong inside the brains of electrical design engineers. I’ve got it working again, but snorting 5 expensive Arduino volts to control 6 battery volts. I doubt robots will ever be efficient until all components are re-designed from the ground up. That’s not even considering the cost of code, which mercifully I don’t have to pay for, in cash anyway. Compared to coding, chess is an easy child’s game. Agt. M avoids even looking at my code printouts, and I’ve received countless compliments for particularly clean code.
           In fact, see for yourself. Here is a copy of my code that looks to see if the pedestrian crosswalk button has been pushed. Most can’t understand it, yet this is some of the cleanest code you will ever see. If it sees a press, it asks if the button has been pressed more than once in the past 5 seconds, or 5,000 milliseconds. If not, it proceeds to call the subroutine that changes the walk lights, if so, it ignore the commands. If you still can’t read it, consult Patsie the Programmer from Kenora. I hear she’s a whiz. A real whiz.

           int State = digitalRead(WalkButton);
           if (State = = HIGH && (millis() - IntervalTimer) > 5000)
           {
           SubPedestrianWalk();
           }

           How about that deficit? It looks like up to 45% of federal employees may not get a paycheck soon. Too bad, they are sworn to work regardless and it serves them right. Always re-electing the people who pay them rather than showing a shred of financial responsibility. They may cut off pensions as well. I’m not retired but I have three months cash tucked away and an excellent backup plan. Those that don’t have a plan, well, two-thirds of them need to go on a diet anyway.
           How about some stats on the electric bike? I’ve already got 80 miles on it, a cause for concern because it is not anywhere near as rugged a frame as the old Jamis. It cannot stand up to that much usage. I find I leave the eBike in top gear all the time, the lower gears are pretty useless and were obviously designed for regular usage, that is, not specially designed to take electric power. I’m averaging 9.9 mph, around 30% faster than I pedal. But it is the important 30% that makes all the difference.
           The top speed is around 15 mph, though I’ve hit 16.9 mph according to speedometer memory. I use the electric motor as a boost to zip up to speed in full electric (TAG) mode, then flip the switch and use pedal-assist (PAS) mode to make top speed pedaling quite easy. Range is just over 22 miles with this method, though the last bit of battery power is slow to drain and arthritic.
           I’ve also noticed a third mode while in PAS. The cycle seems to memorize how fast you were going and zooms you back up to that average speed without using the throttle. It is a gentle acceleration that cuts in around a second after you begin pedaling, and cuts off a half second after you stop. It has a sluggish feel of it.
           The brakes are typical bicycle hand levers. They must regularly be applied harder and longer due to the increased speed, meaning they will wear out rapidly. One thing to be careful over is that traffic is not expecting the bike to accelerate fast and will often cut you off unexpectedly, especially after passing to make a right turn.
           The scooter has not been mentioned here for a while, but it now looks like the problem may be the brand new starter. If the engine is bad, it is not covered by warranty. On several occasions, the motor has cut out at high speed, which I dutifully mentioned to the shop to ensure they knew about it. I’m hoping, but technically they are under no obligation to fix it. Goes to show you buying from China is not always a bargain.

July 25, 2011

           Gee, it would seem our teens are not confused enough. The mixed messages of the media need help scrambling adolescent perceptions of reality. Now they have their own book section at the Barn. “Paranormal” romance fans can get that comfy feeling that they are not alone having grope sessions with aliens and vampires. I suppose, however, it is a superior system to when I grew up and there was not enough information.
           I expended massive brainpower on the Arduino until the wee hours this morning. Until 4:30 AM. The author needs me to proofread his work, the people he’s using are missing too many spellchecker errors. Maybe I’ll volunteer since every word has to be read in context and I’m doing that anyway, it’s the way I study. But “data” and “date” are not to be mixed, and a lot of folks don’t know that “betyouen” means “between” in Hong Kong.
           It is revealing that on topics where I guessed, which was most of them, my approach and solutions were virtually identical to the Great Learned Ones. Better yet, on topics I’d never heard of, like shift registers and writing to on-line storage let’s just say I could now pass any exam they throw at me. I’m once more longing to build PCBs, printed circuit boards, as the book is mainly concerned intermediate computer code (beginner’s my eye). The code could, in a pinch, be copied by a novice, but that is hardly learning to program.
           Hot or not, the antenna goes up soon. I estimate twelve feet in the air through the back wall by the work shed door with my old D-Link router as a booster on the cable run. It is so annoying to see that free Hollywood Wireless signal just out of reach, even if it is still an old 802.11g network.
           We are getting calls from GMRS, who claim since they are “not selling anything” they do not respect the no-call list. I suppose there are as many definitions of asshole as there are telemarketers, but the true mark of an incorrigible asshole is they have no concept of leaving other people alone. Then again, I grew up with people who could explain to you at some length that being an asshole without an unwilling audience just isn’t fun.
           To get off the GMRS list, call 1-676-0661 and talk to an operator. They act quickly and apologize, but they wouldn’t have to do either if they learned to leave other people alone in the first place. Trust DC to make half a law against the second most unpopular interuption known to the average household.
           The club meeting was cancelled, M had to work late. But I’ve videoed a new experiment called the “English Traffic Light”. In England, I gather, the light changes to yellow after both the green and red signal. I modified it. The purpose of this apparently simple operation was to see if I could get the Arduino to randomly interrupt a regular cycle of operations. That is exactly what a crosswalk signal button does. I was unsuccessful.
           First of all the sample code was not thought out well, which I consider misleading on the author’s part. His code merely interrupts a green light, while mine interrupts a sequence of events. The problem is, the crosswalk button has no memory and can only be operated when pushed at the right moment. Still, a lot was learned and I report this is the first time in a circuit I used calculated values for resistors.
           I will pursue this concept on similar robotic principles. The robot goes along doing its job until a sensor triggers a different behavior. That event must be random and I suspect this important issue is going to be difficult to nail down. How do I just know that article after article is going to fail to mention how this is done and I will only discover the answer when I’ve re-invented it on my own?

July 24, 2011

           This is an emulation of an English traffic light signal with crosswalk button. I’ll explain it tomorrow. For now, admire my nice clean handiwork now that I am familiar with breadboards. My typically bad photography equipment has to be excused and wouldn’t you know it, the shiny washed-out blob on the right side of this circuit is the single newest component—a tactile button you can’t see. But I’m a programmer, not a photographer. I work the angle any pictures are better than none.
           Education is again becoming expensive. I abide by the old saw that if you think getting educated is expensive, consider the alternative. Today I purchased a book specifically on the Arduino, and I’m dedicating today’s blog to that subject. The electronics I’ve been learning is not the Arduino, nor did I necessarily take on these topics in the correct order, though I can explain. All I have is a smug sense that it worked for me.
           Let me drag a few things back into the correct sequence. First, the Arduino “brainboard” came out in 2005, so this is not something I’ve studied for any length of time. It took me a year from December 2009 to save up and buy one, and it turns out the delay was beneficial. The earlier models were relatively difficult to use. Also, the available tutorials followed the computer format where the easy stuff was too easy and the hard stuff was too hard.
           I programmed the Arduino to control LEDs and this was a lucky choice. LEDs were all I could afford and it turns out are one of the few components the Arduino has the oomph to work without transistor current amplification. I soon bewailed how I was programming instead of building, which caused the last four months to focus on hands-on and other practical matters.
           The whole robot subject, now that I have some experience, is fragmenting into what I’d call “mental departments”. Before, everything was an insurmountable and hazy brick wall. Now I realize I’ve programmed LEDs, but that is a form of computer output, like sending data to a printer or installing a new device. Child’s play for me. I’ve barely touched processing sensor input and done nothing practical by way of interacting with the meaningful physical environment. Zero, zilch.
           Here is the point to draw a clear distinction between the Arduino and the electronics of the robot club. The club has done no work on the Arduino. You see, I’d given up on electronics several times in the past because of the gargantuan amount of theory that most courses throw at the beginner. Without the early incentive of successful Arduino coding, I could not be sure I would not throw up my hands in frustration yet once more.
           Today marks the timely arrival of my first Arduino book, “Beginning Arduino”, by Michael McRoberts. It is easy to imagine my dismay how an author who first heard of the Arduino around the same time as myself did one year later publish a world class instruction manual that shows a grasp of the topic I can still only dream of. I console myself by realizing I missed the C+ programming takeover and that McRoberts talks about owning electronic kits as a child, another dream situation for me. (He must also have had at least two other valuables my family would not recognize if they came along and bit them in the ass: privacy and encouragement.)
           Now armed with a little foreknowledge, I am reading the text book knowing I can accomplish anything that is in there. It is still a text full of jargon so beware! Claims that the Arduino, which uses the C language, is easy to learn are pure nonsense. Read my lips. Arduino and its accompanying software cannot be learned by everyone and if you are over 40, run the other way. The assumption in front of every C language concept to be learned is that you already know what in hell they are talking about.
           The Arduino instructions are no better. Try this test on yourself. Do you even know what open software is? How about a bootloader? Ever used an IDE? These words meant nothing to me, but I learned I could make the Arduino function without cluttering my brain with definitions. I gained a sense of what I could gloss over. Even the acclaimed author just mentioned has a rough tendency to throw technical terms at you as if you were raised on the stuff, mind you, he is awful nice compared to the rest.
           Going back over the material six months later is filling in the cracks. The word “open” when applied to computers means the code or the hardware can be copied and used by anyone without paying royalties to the owner. The inconsiderate punk who called this “open” should shove his mohawk up his ASCII, but we are stuck with the term. “Open” is something that applies to doors, windows and the minds of people who have them. Why couldn’t they just say, “Not copyrighted”?
           A bootloader is a small program burned into a chip, such as the one on the Arduino, which allows it to communicate with a computer. And IDE is a corresponding mini-program you put on your computer to let it communicate back with the bootloader. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, another useless and confusing term invented by the same dunces.
           I have the valuable new textbook on my nightstand, I estimate it will require 200 hours of study to grasp everything. In fact, I spent some three hours learning once and for all about the bootloader just mentioned. I learned the Arduino chip, the big long one on the board, can be removed and used on a printed circuit board, presumably once it loaded with debugged code. Then, a new chip is inserted in the Arduino socket. This replacement chip must have the bootloader installed or the computer won’t recognize it. Or you must install it yourself. Or it can be copied from another chip where it is already installed. I did not know any of that.
           I also learned what embedded means. That’s another word that typifies how small-minded technicians lack the imagination to invent new words for new things. Embedded means the programmed computer chip is placed into the entity being controlled. Your TV remote has embedded software. And here I thought embedded meant rocks in the ground.
           That’s all for now, this was kind of my state of the study report. It has been a large six-month circular trek back to the Arduino. I estimate the time and cost so far equals one college semester. For the first time in my life, I’m experiencing why so many dumb rich kids can become doctors. You see, I can study when I feel like it, not cram like in college because the borrowed money was running out. It takes much longer to learn anything, I sure notice that, but its like daddy is paying for it now. I always wondered about the 35 year old couples at university who lived in subsidized “married student’s quarters”.
           Imagine what I would have done with such opportunity. I studied several hours at the free coffee shop at Winn/Dixie on 203rd and at Barnes & Noble. Both times I was distracted by females continually hiking down their skirts as men walked past. Ladies, may I say something? If men dressed the way you women dress in public, you’d turn around and look too.

July 23, 2011

           This is about as domestic as I get. Ironing next to a sewing machine, cell phone recharging, tea pot in the back ground and radio parts on the kitchen table. The heat drove me indoors so I took care of the laundry. The afternoon made for an extra siesta. Florida is not comfortable in the summertime, I should be in Colorado. I’m working on it, you know. I don’t watch TV so I only found out about the heat wave this morning.
           For no reason I bought a newspaper and worked the crossword up at Dunkin Donuts early this morning. What’s this, an anti-immigration attack in Norway? Hey, it serves these Scandinavian countries right for allowing immigration. The rest of the world’s population has nothing they want or need. Ninety people died, so I did the laundry. And watched “Human Contract”, one of the worst DVDs I’ve ever seen. You know how men think they look cool when they smoke? And divorced women see themselves as hot catches? That’s the plot.
           Has anyone ever noticed that once you order cheese and salami pizza, after that all other toppings make little difference? This pizza was to celebrate a reasonably successful bingo with a smaller than usual crowd. Afterward I stopped at G’s Place to see the band. Talk about overkill, a five piece blues group at concert volume. They did not play anything I recognized, which when it comes to blues is not always a bad thing. The singer looked like Elivra with a page boy [haircut].
           When break time came about, a serious consideration with five-member groups, Elvira stayed and played. It was some kind of all over the place guitar ballad perfectly strummed. To my ear, most jazz blues fusion sounds like somebody who took too many lessons is trying too hard to get original. I wondered if she did any country. My strongest memory of the show was that a mosquito bit me on the knuckle of my right middle toe.
           I have another winner with “Passionate Kisses”. The crowd is not expecting it. I stopped at Karaoke and also sang one of my duets, “Jackson”, with the club owner’s wife. Duets are uncommon at local shows. I have no theory except most of the singers do come across as loners. I have no trouble getting women to sing with me since I do a lot of chick tunes. And I have no trouble doing the whole song solo if need be. To date, all my accompanists have been, alas, married women.
           Not only is Borders [book store] bankrupt, half the countryside is kicking the corpse. Turns out Border’s has some $300 million dollars of inventory sitting on their shelves and it is about to go on sale. So sad, it is the passing of an era. If anything happens to Barnes & Noble, my days of free reading may be over. The smaller bookstores intentionally don’t provide any place to sit. The problem with the whole industry is, in my opinion, that prices are too high. Books simply cost ten times what they are worth. There is no need to ask why people refuse to pay $60 for something to read.
           What’s this new DNA proof that Neanderthals and humans have interbred. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen jocks climbing mountainsides and kayaking the white water. That’s their mating call. But I do wish National Geographic would quit glorifying them. How they love to present some dumb ape risking his neck on a snowboard in the Andes as a “scientific expedition”.
           And Amy Winehouse is dead. I’ve never heard even one of her songs that I’m aware of. But I did watch her pictures change from a bouncy babe to streaked hair and Tammy Faye makeup. Drugs again. Nature’s way of telling people talent is too often wasted on the undeserving.
           Last for today, there is still no solution as to why my H-bridge passes so little current through the transistors. But we are finally ready to make the quantum leap forward to the next stage of our robot studies: the direct control of IC pins with the Arduino rather than using energized transistors. Reality hints that probably some combination of the two is more practical but any alert researcher has to notice how closely the brainboard pin and transistor base currents are matched.
           The difference this will make is the speed at which events can be accurately controlled. If bats can avoid spider webs with 100,000 Hz, I should be able to detect a brick wall with 40,000 Hz. I have no method of measuring either frequency. Your trivia for today is that bats use FM waves to hunt, not AM.

July 22, 2011

           I met a barmaid last evening. I had her unsplit attention for half an hour. Was it my toothy grin or the fact that I was the only customer on the premises? I dropped in to see if Ray-B was playing, he wasn’t. It was hard to tell if she took a shine to me or was just doing her job. She did mention she has a twenty-year-old son. The last time I dated a gal with a son like that was 1994.
           When he found out I was doing her, he took a baseball bat to the windshield of my completely restored candy yellow 1973 Mustang, like the model shown here (courtesy Classic Pony Cars ). I'll always remember her for a man doesn’t get inside a car like that very often in this life.
           And for trivia, did you know the day the Mustang hit the market was March 19, 1964? Near-riot crowds surrounded the showrooms and on that single day, Ford sold 22,000 of these cars. It has become widely accepted into mainstream American culture that the then company president, Iacocca, has never once shut his mouth since.
           I see a few people suggest my surprise on the local crowd at the beach was nothing more than due to hot weather. Listen, I live here and I know that while this is a hot spell, it is nothing unusual for Florida. The numbers of people on the beach is still several times what I’d expect. WalMart is doing a major renovation and the construction crew were impressed by the eBike. For unknown reasons, they were down here from Ohio.
           Polyester and nylon. That’s what I’m using for thread these days. Two bucks a spool but it doesn’t fray or break. After some experimenting, I see that what I need is several days practice sewing seam after seam. I’ve been putting it off because it is nowhere near as exciting or cerebral as electronics. When I step on something sharpt these days, I look for a missing transistor. But I could have used some new cutoffs to ride the bike around the last few days.
           Success. 3:45 PM I got the home-made H-bridge to work, even if it was a pitifully low current. And I built it without PNP transistors. As a reward, I ate a half pint of chocolate Blue Bell [ice cream]. Yee-haw. This means I can proceed with the Arduino programming, for thanks to matrix LEDs, I know how to code paired transistor switches in my sleep.
           Next, I hauled out the new Ibanez semi-acoustic and ran through my song list. I’ve only got 22 songs but that’s enough to start. Plus, my lack of guitar lessons means my arrangements don’t sound anything like the so-called originals found on youTube and net radio. I’ll still need some help and I prefer to chorus through the lead breaks which will sound even better if I can get some help. The sound of the Ibanez, both acoustic and through the PA system is remarkably clear. I’m looking at the Roland PA again.
           Cancel my plans to tour the beach on Friday. An evening downpour kept me inside. I read some robot material and isn’t this interesting? A major purpose of the robot was to free mankind from work on an assembly line. Yet, if you look at the robot kits they are teaching high school students to build, well, what exactly is that training them to do?
           I also read some advanced robotics tutorials. Asimov’s robot law is often referred to, where rule one is that robots cannot harm humans. Tell that to the Taliban. There is some great material at Society of Robots if you put on your thinking cap. The consensus is that truly autonomous robots do not exist yet. But robots already exist that can easily outperform humans that are lazy, unmotivated, uneducated, and you can throw in who are overweight, overpaid, lying, cheating, cold deadbeatin, two-timin’ double-dealin’ mean mistreatin’ . . .
           The critics of robot performance are quick to assume every trait is desirable if it results from human emotion. They claim it is our instincts that defeats Martians. That’s plain dumb. The world has never needed as many bad actors as each generation produces. Without a lesson in psychology, I observe that nothing cures obnoxious human behavior faster than letting them know their replacement is standing by. That is why both preachers and housewives detest mistresses. The unwashed masses require incentives to quit being themselves. Robots do an admirable job of it.
           Maybe I’m only out to build your basic back-and-forth robot, but that’s not where my thinking stops. Furthermore, I don’t necessarily buy the popular view that robots will do drudge jobs. There are humans whose intellect is perfectly suited for zero work. It must purely be the bad attitude of such humans that cause us to seek their replacements.
           I propose a different definition of a robot. A robot is any machine without an on-board human operator that replaces a job formerly done by a human. Thus, a bulldozer is not a robot because of the human controller. A remote control airplane is not a robot because it is not replacing a human job. But the combat drones at war definitely qualify. My intention is that definition is very flexible, for who knows what we’ll invent. I didn’t say the brains of the proletariat could not be made useful by rewiring. Removal and rewiring.

July 21, 2011

           Kudos to the Wonka company. This is a box of candy. When you open it up, it really is full of product. Or they’ve invented a candy that is far less apt to “settle during shipping” than Smarties or M&Ms. True also that bottle caps are the cheapest possible of all candy but the box is full and you gotta like that. Are you listening, Nutty Club?
           Speaking of misleading packaging, don’t you hate DVD covers that show photographs but inside it is an animated version. I got scammed and bought a Van Helsing cartoon. The world “animated” appears once in the fine print on the reverse side. Most memorable line of the movie: “Lay back. Close your eyes. Think of England.”
           I like anything free even if it doesn’t exist in the strictest sense. If you go to the Publix on 203rd, you will find a free Wi-Fi coffee shop. The Internet connection is free, and the coffee is free. It is at the front of the store with windows facing the street. Is it permanent or an experiment? Will a few bad apples take advantage? Either way, if it creates a Starbucks-free zone, it has my support.
           The ongoing work with the robot motor and gears leads me to an understanding why engineering is such a fragmented subject. You don’t often meet one of them smart enough to grasp the whole field. It’s a world of compromises and tradeoffs not by need, but by design. Each discipline seems cheaped-out and fine-tuned at the expenses of the others. This again reduces me to trial and error, the worst learning method ever devised.
           What to do in this heat except stay inside and read? I was at the library y’day but I’ve read all the good books in that branch. I even got to reading how to weld and another useless chapter on antennas. As for robotics, I’ve gotten to a stage where things are complicated enough I can’t study for more than a half-hour at a stretch. So I was watching old war movies on ThisTV. With the German Shermans.
           With the studies, I am at least once again reaching levels others must have reached, as with the H-bridge. I’d never heard of these before, now I must learn to build them. What a curious way to learn anything. Textbooks are a major waste of time in electronics. Or, you find a good text but it is not understandable until you’ve already learned what it is talking about.
           I must be getting somewhere since I find I’m often and regularly defining a problem before I discover anything about it in writing. Like the H-bridge. I was trying to figure out how to get a motor to reverse without using up too many costly Arduino outputs. What would it be like to not have to consider the cost, to just forge ahead? My estimate is I’m studying 60 hours per week on the topic, that is, more hours than when I attended university.
           The club meeting was dominated by this H-bridge, which we learned is apparently a common apparatus to those who go into air conditioning repair. During the meeting, we discovered the same type of bridge is used to operate electric car door locks and certain pneumatic operations. This robotics club was one of the smartest ideas I’ve had in this century.
           I then went for late coffee, partially to avoid the new lady. I discover the staff finds her repetitious conversation style as exasperating as myself. Then I got inspired to take the eBike out to the beach. There were two bands on the beach, Toucan’s and the Walkabout. Both stocky middle-aged househusbands playing the usual “look at me” standards taught at guitar school. All with gleaming new expensive gear polished up between each gig. And somebody should tell short men those beach pants make them look like bow-legged little monkeys.
           I met a guitar player who said he played some country, but a beach bench audition showed he was just another soloist gone wrong. The type that think they are so kewl they can play anything that pops into their heads and if you were at all “in the pocket”, you’d be able to “follow” them. Mind, they lack any ability whatsoever to follow you because, like man, you aren’t even a guitarist or nothin’, so get real.
HWB is no more. Barry sold out a few months back and it is now “Jakes”. I went in to wish everybody the best and there is a strong chance of a mid-week gig. For reasons unknown, the lack of tourists has rebounded in a busy local crowd. I’d say it was busier tonight that last January-February prime season, probably 600 people on the broadwalk, a truly surprising throng.
           My incentive to play the beach is because the crowd is likely to change on a weekly basis. My show works best on people who’ve never seen a bass act. That does not mean I can’t endure, anyone who thinks my act is flash in the pan can refer to my record two-year gig at Jimbos. Maybe I can’t play anything as technically correct as the average guitarist but with their Saharan personalities they best never dare call bingo.

July 20, 2011

           This is NG for kids. National Geographic is selling to children. Er, I didn’t think they’d stoop that low. Anyway, this represents news, maybe good news. I bumped into Ruth, the doggie wig lady at the bookstore. NG has an article in last month’s issue on the doggie wigs. It turns out a year and 12 more fired employees later, I am still the only person in the world besides Ruth who knows the doggie wig business from the ground up. Keep your eyes open.
           I was at the bookstore due to an unsuccessful morning planning session for the robot. I cannot control motors directly with my precious Arduino because it outputs maximum 40mA and the DC motor requires 500mA. Therefore I must build or use a controller. The control system was diabolically complicated and I studied it for 8 full hours. I’ll build it, but for a different reason than it being difficult—the chip gets hot.
           These motors must be able to go forward and backward. Therefore I tested a controller called an L293D. Even with a computer chip sized cooling fan, the chip gets hot enough to burn your fingers. Certainly hot enough to damage anything it touches, such as my expensive plastic breadboards. But I learned the chip contains an H-bridge, something I can build out of spare parts already in the bin over here.
           [Author’s note: the L293D chip is an example of sheer engineering stupidity. Further research shows that the manufacturers are quite aware of the heat problem, but dumped the chip on the market anyway. Other chips that do the same job do not overheat. The fact that it is a known defect with no warning sticker tells you what kind of people you are dealing with in this trade.]
           Most pleasant was the discovery of a new generation of well-written Arduino books. Plainly the use of this model has become popular enough in the past year to attract decent authors instead of the eggheads and jerkfaces that came before. If I’d moved faster, I could have been one of the new authors. But, as usual, not being rich was a severe impediment and it does not help that there are so few places to buy electronics in this third world state. Even the common ICs have to be expensively imported from California.
           Expect weekly progress again. The said books are incredibly expensive but I have a budget for August to December of $200 for educational printed matter. It will cost all of that easily. I do not recommend any book for beginners as I am only able to understand much of the material after painstaking experimentation and needless failures. But keep at it because after a while I could go back and read the books and see what they meant. But I also see they were sufficiently retarded to screw up the explanation in the first place.
           Did I say the motor was complicated? I should show you complicated with what are called shift registers. Remember the experiment I published where I got two LEDs to count down from 30 to 0? Without detracting from that major feat, those LEDs were still not doing much but blinking. They had no memory or knowledge for what numbers were displayed. I could not add or subtract any of the numbers, much less get them to display a reading from a sensor. (A proprioceptive sensor, in case you were wondering.) More about these registers to follow, they are a fascinating contraption.
           The motor must be geared. That single realization took hours of research. True, I could have just asked a robotics expert provided one was available, but the investigation covered acres of other information so not a minute was wasted. The electric motor by itself is so weak, you can stop it with your fingers. That means as soon as you set the robot on the floor, the wheels stop. Try using a bigger motor and the robot will crack into the nearest wall before your sensors have time to react.
           This led to an Internet search for plastic gears. I was appalled at the costs for these pieces of plastic. Lego dominates the market and they are expensive beyond all reason. They are generally packaged as specialized kits containing parts shaped for one specific construct. Their gear packages appear to contain dozens of the same gear size. What good are twelve gears the same size?

July 19, 2011

           Here you have it. Times are tougher than you think, and much tougher for those who don’t think. This is sidewalk advertising for what were once professionals. The car is ugly too, but hey, a guy’s got to make a buck. Maybe I’ll check his rates since he isn’t too far from where my shop used to be.
           I’ve met someone but she set off my alarm signals. She’s old, maybe as old as me, and I’ve just finished relearning life’s lesson about associating with old ladies. Read my lips, if a woman over 24 is single, guys, there is a reason for it. I’ve known this one several years from the computer store and she has begun to talk to me at the coffee shop. There is a vast educational gulf between us and she seems to have trouble making decisions over simple things like, “Should I take the bus tour of Key West?” And I mean vast, as in 25+ years of general study and experience. Judging by all the mothers I’ve met, raising children does not raise your IQ even one point.
           While I’m not in a relationship, only a fool thinks that makes me a beggar. For that matter, I highly advise beggars to be careful choosers, because they are less able to absorb negative consequences. She’s nice, but I dated a nice girl during the late 90s and found it a boring and bland diet. Nice girls too often give the impression of always holding back something, sort of always seeming like they pretending to enjoy things. In a worst case scenario, nice girls expend too much effort being nice—to everyone but you.
           It will be 15 years before I can say, but this morning found an old acquaintance on my doorstep. In serious trouble because a neighbor got arrested and sold her out. I contacted the proper authorities and scheduled a court appearance for late August. The episode is significant to me because this is a person I had repeated warned to be more careful about how much personal information she let into the system. But she always defended the system with child-like trust.
           She was wrong. This happened because she was too easy to identify, too easy to find, and too easy to assess. The neighbor knew enough to spin an elaborately believable story to the cops. It is entirely her own fault that neighbor knew so damn much about what was inside her house. The system that protects you is also the system that will put you in jail if you provide them with enough information. That’s not speculation, I sincerely mean if you give them enough information they will eventually own you. Don’t buck the system; just have as little to do with it as possible.
           Then for fun I ran my statistics through an on-line retirement income calculator. The results were some kind of a joke, but the scary part is that for most people, those numbers are not funny. Another joke is the Social Security advising graduates to work lots of overtime in the early years. What, when your income and hence your overtime rate is at its lowest? I rarely worked overtime at the phone place until I was making top union scale, then I piled it on. Spend your youth having fun, not busting your ass for something that may never pay off.
           My advice would be nearly the opposite. Never plan on working forever. Is that what you were born to do? Is that what you would choose to do? I say if you are not rich by the age of 29, then follow a plan to be comfortable later. But don’t knock yourself out and don’t tie your money up where the whole world knows about it. I worked hard until 29, then said to hell with it. I went to evening school and learned to calculate to the penny what I would need to survive, then what I’d need to be comfortable, then last what was required to thrive.
           No, I’m not rich. But neither are 99% of the people who point that out. But consider the facts. I’ve worked just 14.5 years in my entire life, but I’ve got most of what everybody else really has. Maybe I live in a trailer, but my equity in the trailer is 100% and that’s more than anyone with a mortgage. What would I care if my trailer lost 50% of its value? And to any big mouths out there, in a couple years I may well be the one buying your house for ten cents on the dollar. Let’s see who laughs about trailers then.

July 18, 2011

           This is a bicycle trap, Florida style. The bicycle paths of this area are designed by the sick-minded. I’ve described how they often go several blocks from nowhere to nowhere. Then disappear without any ramp to get off the roadway or onto a sidewalk. Sometimes they end in grass, which is impossible to pedal through. This bike path squeezes to nothing, see the paint stripes, and ends in this axle-breaking hole around 8 inches deep. I saw it in time. The broken pieces in the hole tell a different story for others.
           Children of the Harvest. That’s the name of a documentary on children working farm labor jobs. Agriculture has no minimum age. The video did go on about how childhood should be a time for playing, how the children belonged in summer school instead of sweating in the fields. The theme was that back-breaking farm labor robs them of their childhood and places them at a tremendous disadvantage in all aspects of later life. The pity is focused on Mexicans. Apparently the sympathy of WVTJ-TV does not extend to white children who lived through the same hell.
           There is now a national organization who watch child labor, but once again, the mercy does not apply to farm families, rather only families whose children work for farms other than their own. That was a fine line my parents were careful never to cross. Don’t you love such national groups? Such swell, fine, nice guys who figure it isn’t illegal child labor as long as your own parents are the azzholes.
           The budget is something political that directly affects me. There are so many slackers on the government payroll that no constraints will ever be ratified. One of the first cuts will be to social security. Old dying people, while an expanding sector, are no organized voting bloc. The budget forces have backed themselves into a corner. By putting off measures for years and paying the bills with borrowed cash, they have wrecked their own credit. Now it has come back to bite them and time for me to sit back and watch them stew in their own juice. Me pity the middle class? Not bloody likely.
           The parts for the first autonomous machine are being collected. Note, I avoided saying robot. The frame is to be wood, with one motor and plastic gears. It is what materials we have on hand. The design is monorail, the control is by pre-written code. Allow me to introduce the lofty “Chapter Four”. (No website, but it is from Laboratoire d’Analye et d’Architecture des Systemes Centre National del la Recherche Scientifique.) Read it if you’d like to know where I am with studies at this point. It is a treatise on a theoretical car-like robot.
           I couldn’t help watching TV. Combine intense study and stormy weather, even I have to kick back. There was a projection on Florida construction. The population here is due to explode by 2030 so they are glorifying construction. Guys, construction is mostly labor and where it isn’t, you have to be a machine operator, not a foreman. Some outfit called Career Watch says we need 250,000 workers now but avoids stating that those jobs don’t pay.
           I suppose $12 an hour right now might look good to anyone who has seen the $7.25 jobs of the past five years. Be warned that a bare-bones existence in Florida is $20 per hour. With the enormous pool of unskilled illegal alien labor in the streets, you will never see that kind of money. A side effect of that cheap labor and minimal unionization means you could find yourself sweeping the floor alongside carpenters and electricians.
           For distraction I played Talk City trivia. It’s an old chat game based on Ridiculist, but not near as cerebral. A few top players who live there can rack up points in the thousands. I’ll often go there to dominate the board for a half hour just to show them who’s boss. Today one question was what animal is born male and turns female when it matures? I passed on it. How could anything both mature and become female?
           It was also check the real estate market time. Nothing interesting. Prices falling. I got as good a deal as I could right where I am. Do nothing until the results of the budget are known. Silver is over $40 per ounce, a good sign if you own 250 ounces. I also gave a listen to the top tune in ten countries (such as “Go Go Summer” in Japan, “Mr. Saxobrat” in Germany, and “Last Friday Night” in Canada). Post Generation X pseudo-music. A mixture of old rock, that single pre-programmed disco beat, and half-rap lyrics. Sounds like Florida guitarist original material. Does the phrase “bottomless pit” mean anything to you?
           Another but fun robot meeting. We are headed for a difficult stage of coordinating construction and code, a realm we have no experience. The two hours tonight was demonstration enough that we require an entirely different approach to subjects we do not mutually understand. I can’t build the cart and M can’t program the code.
           Does it travel to the point and stop (which requires braking) or sneak up on it depending on an inverse speed depending incestuously upon the last reading? If it overshoots the first reading, a situation that must be accounted for, why not let it do an ordinary binary iteration seven layers deep and say that is good enough? The only solution is to compromise and let M build it anyway that satisfies the forward-back motion any way that satisfies the programming criteria. It comes down to circular logic.
           But at least it isn’t politics. I read a chapter about America’s prelude to the Korean War. My conclusion is the decision was made by a pack of two-bit jackasses and I shudder to think that the nation is today led by the fantastically less qualified. I read how reporters “deduced the situation was most serious indeed” because a career diplomat known for fancy dressing arrived without a jacket. What manner of ass-clown goings on is that? Defense policy is communicated by dress codes?
           I read where people died while the politicians argued over the wording of the declaration. Our top leaders didn’t have the balls to tell North Korean to get the hell out now. Their brains were paralyzed until a 57-year-old secretary came up with the phrase “call upon”. We called upon the North Koreans to knock it off. We must be careful not to hurt their feelings. It’s that kind of shit, White House.

July 17, 2011

           Here’s a photo of the Lamp Post, a pub. I hear people mention it time to time, I think I actually played in there once, anyway. The drunk driving laws make the local pubs rather segmented by neighborhoods and clientele. I remember I did not care for the place. Did I play there or stand in on the bass with somebody? If I hear a subject often enough, I sometimes record it here. Who knows?
           Today I mourn the passing of the space program. Not NASA, not the budget, not the trip to Mars, but the program. What is gone is the one great good that America should have been eternalized for. It was the epitome of what a nation like this would have done if our people had only evolved out of politics and wars. Instead, we are financially and morally bankrupt, led by weak politicians, and stuck with our noses in everybody else’s business.
           It Mars trip was the grand ideal, the one thing all good-thinking people agreed upon and would have paid more taxes to preserve. Our system has become so corrupt that our leaders dared not ask the question directly to the populace, for it would work so well there would follow other questions. Instead, the program was sabotaged by glory-seeking politicians borrowing money to fight unpopular wars and support outdated agencies. It takes a divided and complacent citizenry to allow our leading position to be overtaken by foreign brute force. Shame on the whole bunch of you.
           Now back to robotics. I won’t amount to an expert, but at least it is a project that could potentially do the nation some good. Sadly, I’m finding that to make things work, one has to resort to trial and error. Lack of good documentation is a bane in electronics, no matter how ill I thought of computer texts, electronics is worse. And worse still as it has been around longer and should have learned. Don’t look at me, I can already write. But I set out to learn something new, not publish the rulebook.
           Up until now, the Club has done all computer work here. That has to change. The sensor feedback requires a computer with the Arduino serial monitor feature installed, something we do not have at the clubhouse. Without a monitor, one can only see the effect of the code, not the actual values of the data that streams back. It also means that prototyping can no longer be done on a breadboard alone. The connections will be too fragile for most robotics applications. Again, this avenue points toward making our own printed circuit boards. We had not really planned on that.
           Also, I have an academic hurdle with the ICs. I cannot find any literature that describes if they are meant to be controlled by software. And I cannot imagine anything more than some basic flashing lights. Up until now, none of the circuits tested with these components have been controlled by code. I know it must happen in some wonderful and brilliant combination, but where to look for examples? To put it more scientifically, where can I find out how ICs are used as intermediary controls for motors and gears?
           Writing jobs appear to be one of the few legal occupations that pay less than minimum wage. For example, the one likely ad today wanted someone to write lessons for children on subjects such as “rainfall”. They wanted a definition, an explanation, an interactive activity, and a photograph all packaged as entertaining to a four year old. For this, they offer pay of not $2,500. Not $250. But $25. Anything else, your majesty?
           Hot or not, I straightened out the work shed, weeded the yard, and connected the eBike charger through the front wall of the building. Beware, the charger only comes with mayber a ten foot chord, not enough in the majority of cases. Yet it carries a caution not to use it with an extension chord. Typical. You know what went missing? My case of resistors. That’s right, my plastic case with twenty compartments of sorted and labeled resistors. It’ll turn up, but for now I am baffled.
           Last, let me explain what social blackmail is. That is when you meet somebody who demands to know your last name, your address, where you work, this type of personal information. If you comply, they will begin to interfere with your life, if you refuse, they will put it about you are a serial rapist drug dealer child molester. Because if you weren’t you’d be okay with telling them what they want to know, right?
           I note there are three ways in my life I have ever associated with such people. Family, working at the phone company, and people imposing their acquaintances on you. Y’day I had the misfortune to meet Phil Simms of Hollywood, Florida. Beady-eyed, beer-gut, mouth-breather, alcoholic and social blackmailer.

July 16, 2011

           This is a keyless lock with a twist. One of the Pop magazines features it this month. It has no key, you control with your smartPhone. From anywhere. Which is nice when the relations show up to use your ensuite. If they ever do, that is, or was that just more talk, too? You could let them in remotely. Provided you’re smart enough not to lose your smartPhone which can be a real challenge for most relations I’ve ever seen.
           My first time underwater since Wallace was here two years ago. Dave-O likes to snorkel, I was just going to wade near these four babes in blue bikinis. The ocean was warm, like bath water, so I went out to the edge of the reef and plunged in. About six feet down there was a freezing thermocline. I cleared out but since I did dive six feet, that qualifies.
           Dave-O was over to test all his phone equipment on this cable Internet connection. Everything works, but that is because I’m an old phone man, not a computer media freak. He totally overestimates what can be done with the resources at hand. He also does not understand you cannot just go on the Internet and instantly find what you want. We were at the beach twice today, since we were up there at 7:00 AM for coffee. We went back for that swim much later. I may invest in a mask now that I’ve found the water less taxing than I remember.
           The beach area is like it has been for 60 years. Perpetually torn up for repairs without any apparent improvement. As with all beaches, there is inadequate parking. A bagel and coffee runs you $7.00. The sand is broiling in the summer sun. I took some pictures with my cell phone. I dislike doing that because of the complicated menu navigation system to get the pictures back out. You have to email them to yourself one by one. Typical 1990-think.
           Bingo went on despite frequent electric blackouts to become a seasonal record. The house was crowded for this time of year. Since we finished early, I had the eBike downtown and had on me enough money to do anything I could want to. But I looked around for nearly an hour and did not see one woman I would approach. Without specifying anything wrong with downtown Hollywood, I find it is just not my kind of place. I thought about continuing on to the beach, then decided to leave that until I am more familiar with the eBike performance.
           The places I looked were the Octopussy, Whiskey Tango, some Irish pub, the Coyote, I even looked in the door of The Big Easy. I did see one attractive blonde lady but watching from the corner of my eye, she did nothing but primp and fidget for five minutes until I moved on. She was worse than my brother in front of a mirror.
           It was unusual in that it was definitely a local crowd downtown. You don’t usually see the yokels out in force. I have the same complaint as five years ago. The quality of the available women is so low one does not even want to be seen hitting on them. There are fifty ways to interpret that last statement, but until you go over there and look for yourself what I’m talking about, don’t be running off at the mouth. Don’t bore anyone with that beggars can’t be choosers quip which assumes every last person who ever made a bad choice was automatically a beggar. Hell no, I’m getting back on my feet and will soon be back in the saddle.
           Instead, I biked home, cranked on the A/C full blast and made coffee and sandwiches. Mmmm, smoked honey ham with lettuce. While I rather be showing some spritely gal a good time, I spent a quiet evening reading. One thing I ran across unintentionally was a spinoff of the ultrasound sensor operation. While deciding whether to have the motor itself move or let it drive a belt (like inside your printer), I see that some way should be used to indicate what the software is doing. I’ll explain.
           Have you ever seen those little LEDs on the side of a battery powered device that is green when charged, then turns yellow, then red when the thing is dead? That’s a rhetorical question, because I know I learned something most people never give a second thought. I said the LED turns colors. Did you notice it did not fade? That’s the thinking part. If it changed color due to the power, it would also fade but it does not. Therefore, it is reacting to a range of measurements. And is that not exactly what the ultrasound sensor needs be doing? Maybe I can work these two together off the same data files.
           I’ve seen these expensive lights (up to $4.00 each) but thought they were a specialized component for color advertising displays. If I connect one to the sensor, I may create a visual readout without the complication of downloading and compiling code libraries. The light changes color as it gets as close to the data reading as possible. I must look into this. The club does not have any of these fancy LEDs.

July 15, 2011

           Here is Agt. M and one tiny part of the recording studio he’s rigged up for the church. Shown here is monitor of the choir area with smaller touch screens for all the popular controls. This is several hundred feet away in the back of the church. You can barely see a white grand piano on screen left with a lady in a brown shirt singing.
           As figured, the sensor of y’day turns out to be the crap of today. The “official” explanation is incompatible with the physical design. The blub says the sensor detects the “length” of the return signal, but the design says the sensor’s shared pin must either transmit or receive, not both. I comprehend that digital signals, at a high enough frequency, behave like analog but this is not the case here. The pin cannot detect a return signal while it is transmitting.
           Therefore, I quit taxing my brain and took the eBike for a spin. I told you stats would improve. I traveled for 53:03 minutes covering 9.447 miles at and average speed of 10.7 mph. I can work with these numbers, considering my gasoline bill for the scooter is topping $44 per month. Electrically speaking, I get 53 mpg, mind you this is a very tricky and complicated conversion. One has to consider the effect on the electric bill.
           I invested in another ounce of silver. Do note these are troy ounces. I do not know why this precious metal is not weighed like others. You can look that up, I’m busy. The price has risen $6 per ounce in the past month. But thanks to the eBike, that may have been the most economical trip to the silver store on record.
           Dave-O came by. He’s convinced the frequencies that become vacant once they close down NASA will become available for free global phone service. What a theory. Even if it was free, they’d still require an $8,000 phone and a two year contract. This is America, so they’ll also want picture ID. The American system excels at preserving a system that is 60 years out of date.
           For the sixth day in a row, I’ve helped Dave-O communicate with his family in Texas. I suggested that he might be better off to drive there and take care of business himself and all I’m saying is he did not say no. Next, I will casually hint that I would be willing to pay half the gasoline. It was another too-hot summer day, so we drove around looking at fancy houses. (His vehicle has excellent air conditioning and he knows a lot about the history of the buildings in the downtown core.)
           It can be hilarious listening to us communicate. Despite our similar backgrounds, our upbringings were utterly polarized. He lived in the city, I lived in the bush. He attended university from a frat house, I lived in a $40 per month firetrap. But oddest is our connotations of ordinary words. I call it lamb, he calls it mutton. It’s a distancing caused by environment. He worked for his father, I had to keep where I worked a secret so my father would not steal my paycheck.
           So we were looking at yards with trellises. He calls them by some fancy Japanese word. And I say the stucco on the side of a house was applied by a person in the plastering trade. Dave-O says no, it is called “stuccoing”, a verb I’ve never heard before. If it is mud-like and applied to a wall with a trowel, I’d say plastering. To Dave-O that means to get drunk and cause a fight. Same planet, different worlds.
           I did a quick Karaoke show uptown and ran into a guy names Jeff. He plays no instruments, just plays backing tracks through an expensive looking room full of gear and sings along. Turns out he is a country music fan. We’ll see, but two strong personalities don’t mix in showbiz.
           Ants. We are invaded by ants. Time to buy Bengal, the ultimate anti-ant powder. For some reason, ants like my cactus bed. They appear to have declared a truce so all of them can live on the east side, where there is no shade in the morning. Grrr.

July 14, 2011

           You may have to stare to see what’s in this photo. That’s my feet in the Atlantic Ocean, about knee-deep in the water. Yep, the electric bike is proving its worth. I’m beginning to think I should have bought one years ago. The scooter is still necessary for road transport. For short trips, the eBike is comparable and in some cases faster, since I can cross a vacant red light.
           Next, I’ve been slowly checking my ability to drive an automobile, in this case, Dave-O’s truck. He’s awaiting some documents from New Orleans, so we’ve been having morning coffee at PJ’s Bagel House. And I’ve been driving there, around a five mile round trip.
           If you don’t know, driving was affecting my blood pressure enough that I gave up driving cars some years ago. It cannot be proven, but the condition was likely aggravated by a highly stressful job. I am hoping that over time, I can once again drive at least short distances. Note, I seem to have no difficulty driving a bicycle or scooter or riding in a bus or airplane. Explain that one.
           PJ’s Bagel House is a rarity. A family restaurant. It has a counter with stools, a vanishing tradition. There is something about a stool that invites the lone diner without taking up a booth. Also, the menu is what it should be: right out of the 1950’s. I might add it is the only restaurant in this town that employs single, young, slim, pretty blonde girls. By young, I mean late teens and not one year older. Sorry, North Carolina.
           The Thursday club meeting was supposed to be short, say a half-hour. But matters have evolved to the stage where every topic has become sophisticated. Yet that is a wonderful sign of the progress since March. For example, today we weighed the pros and cons of a single wheel drive over multiple wheel drive for an entire hour without conclusion. Agt. M prefers multiple, I champion economy and simplicity. I say one wheel on a rail, a monorail. This conversation could not have taken place a quarter ago.
Much of the discussion centered on the ability to control speed and direction without using gears, which I do not know how to program. A monorail solves the problems of steering while qualifying as a robot. While a multi-wheel vehicle gives another degree of freedom, with my current level of programming skills steering would require remote control. Robotics and remote control are not the same thing.
           The club owns one advanced sensor, the ultrasound (sonar) device. I have yet to operate it on the bench, much less get it to control anything. We have several dozen passive sensors such as relays and photocells, but being passive they are reactive only. The heart of the system has to be the Arduino brainboard. I have decided to begin writing the computer code before the robotic components are built to demonstrate to Agt. M the complexity required. Please, gang, never forget I am still learning the Arduino.
           What I’ve been able to figure is the ultrasound sensor collects a signal from the nearest object in its path that will reflect an adequate echo. This is equivalent to a sonar “ping”. The transmitter must be carefully controlled to the microsecond, that’s 1,000th of a millisecond. This I can do but short distances increase the error margin. The standard is 29 microseconds per centimeter at sea level. The maximum length we can use is 50 centimeters so the apparatus will rest on a kitchen table. These will be sensitive measurements indeed.
           The operation is slightly more involved. The sensor emits a ping, and continues to emit the ping until an echo of that particular frequency (40kHz) is detected by the echo sensor. When the echo arrives, the sensor stops transmitting. The duration of the ping is proportional to the distance. Is this how sonar really works?
           Currently, I am standing by the computer and tracking documents for Dave-O. I’m beginning to suspect he might have been wiser to go to Covington and take delivery personally. If it takes longer than today, I may suggest that very trip. I have one task today and that is to put a speedometer on the eBike. Strange it does not come with one, nor any lights.
           I also purchased a New York bike lock for my expensive transportation. It cost enough. The upper limit of mileage is around the advertised twenty miles, meaning a ten mile travel radius. More stats to come as I learn them.