A tour of the town y’day shows that only three places have Karaoke on weekends any more. What are people supposed to do? That would be a laugh if the only club left standing becomes Jimbos. Several factors are working to make things lean that way. I would have to laugh if that happens. I’m talking downtown, not the beach area, but few places over there have live music anymore either. Why are weekends picking up at the club? It’s a mystery. I don’t like the bureaucracy, so sometimes I do little things to shake it up. Several months ago I found a bill (for $5.21) stuck in a library book to somebody who must have lived around this area many years ago. Shall we say it was one of those nasty bills nobody likes. Knowing it is the last thing anyone at the other end would expect, I paid it. Too bad under the circumstances I can’t tell you all the fun that started, but the apples are still rolling downhill.
That reminds me of another useless bill, the tags for my motorcycle. Why do I have to pay $40 for “registration” that does no good, that I don’t want, and keeps a file that only benefits those I don’t like? Yep, vehicle registration, the most successful scam in America. And don’t hand me that crap that it protects me. I own much more valuable property that doesn’t require a record at the government office.
The batbike rewiring job is looming, as a store of stranded asbestos wire has been located in a back bin at American Breakers. As we speak, it is being dug out and measured, but I think there will be more than enough. Rather than outright replace the wiring, I may leave the existing where it is and run parallel wiring with waterproof connectors.
Here is the fuse assembly that fried. See that tiny bit of green? That’s what is left of the 30-amp fuse casing. That’s why the wiring needs attention, this happened on a clear dry day driving down Dixie. (Notice the raw blog in the background, probably the only time most will ever see it in that form. It would normally be deemed a security risk.)What’s this? Back west in 1999, Wallace and I set up a camcorder to tape a particularly dangerous intersection. For some reason, I kept copies and have them made into a two-hour digital movie. That’s a lot of work and I don’t remember why. But here is the disk, completely documented with time and date. It is hard to believe I ever lived in such rain and slush. I’ll hold on to it in case I recall why I kept it.
Here’s some nostalgia. Back then, effective disk editing was still in the future. Let me describe how it was done. You needed two VCRs with infrared remote controls. A pre-edit was done to get all your raw footage on one of the tapes, which you placed in the playback deck. Then, you reviewed the tape on a regular TV tapping the computer space bar to select what you wanted. The computer memorized the tape counter for stop and start positions.
The software came with two tiny infrared LEDs, which you placed in front of both tape decks to emulate the remote. Then, you put a blank tape in the record deck. The computer, using the storyboard you created from little thumbnails then sped back and forth on the playback deck to your markers and assembled your finished product on the other deck.
Yes, it was time-consuming, inaccurate, and required superb camera work to get useable scenes. The title edit was primitive but there were many transitions and special effects to choose from. The process was so labor intensive most of the frills never got used. My original software was Pinnacle which never did work right until years later when I connected it to RAM capacity that was unheard of in 1996. I went completely digital in 2006, ten full years later. I’m a cautious purchaser.
The trivia is some new terms, let’s see if any of them become household. “Clanking” is (I think) the term for self-replicating nanobots. Some are concerned that clanking could let the robots get out of hand and begin to gobble up all available resources. That could include humans, they say. “Bioavailability” means the degree to which medicine can be directed to where it works best. How does aspirin know where the hurt is. It’s one of those questions like how do they get Teflon to stick to the pan? The aspirin, like most drugs, lacks bioavailability, instead, it dilates all the blood vessels in your brain.
I said I’d eventually tell what a mercaptan is. It’s a sulfur compound, the rotten egg smell they inject into household natural gas. I’m watching “The King of Texas” again, but not for the acting which is best described as “mercaptan”. They spent more on the scenery than the talent. Aging rancher wills his estate to daughters who then throw him out, whence he winds up in sanctuary with his enemies. Every cliché except the loyal Indian scout. Them cowboys sure had fine dental plans. If the plot seems familiar, it is based on Shakespeare’s “King Lear”. And not much else.
Today I learned I was wrong about Enron employees being victims. Ten years ago I thought the company had a rule the employees had to have their 401(k)s in Enron stock. Wrong, I discovered they had eighteen options but most chose the stock because it was outperforming the market by four times. It also turns out the company never blocked any sales. What really happened is the management didn’t tell the stockholders about the pending collapse until it was too late for them to dump the stock. They are only victims in the sense they failed to sell worthless shares to other Americans. Most who lost on Enron got what they deserve.
Has anyone else noticed that on the days I choose not to cover the Honda with the tarp, there is a torrential downpour that lasts three to four hours? And the Internet is down third day in a row. I can hear the rain when in my reading chair, where I spent the afternoon reading about sensors. Did you know that the word “sensor” was invented in 1958? Not really that long ago. It was popularized by Spock on Star Trek. I’ll leave you to look up the definition yourself, but sensor is not the same as a measuring device.
You know what else I don’t like? Those jerks who post a video of some electronic device. That’s it, no explanation, no commentary, no schematics. Thanks for being a big help, guys. Or worse, crank up some of your dipstick indie music in the background. You’ll really get lots of chicks with that.
One last bit of trivia. There are 91 elements on the periodic table. Their atomic weights go from 1 to 92. Hold on, that doesn’t add up. Right, for you see, element 43 does not occur in nature. And on the reverse of my fortune from the cookie, there was an ad for Chinese lessons.
ADDENDUM
To see if anything has changed, I took a look at diamonds as an investment and at the underlying facts. What a scam that is, plus the emerging economies of the world, the ones that will have any money left, haven’t been sold the nonsense that diamonds are forever. Unlike metals, I could not find any source to follow the changes in value for diamonds over any time period. I can tell an ounce of silver by picking it up, but how to say what a diamond is worth?
I’m uneasy with the trade itself. Whereas I know I could sell or trade silver at street level, diamonds would pretty much have to be sold to a jeweler, the one person best equipped to shaft you. That makes the market easy for the big players to manipulate and dominate. Too European an industry, one might say. I believe the tales that diamond companies have tons of stones stashed away to keep prices high. While you can’t do that with sheets of plywood in Florida, there is no law says you can’t gouge in the diamond business.
There is a major aspect of speculating that beginners overlook. Amateurs don’t prepare right. I’ve seen people speculate without a plan and they wind up selling at a loss because they are caught in the very crisis they’re trying to cash in on. Duh. Events don’t happen in isolation, there are always surprise repercussions. Speculation takes intricate planning and (some people aren’t going to like this) it takes money, lots of it. No plan and no money are the definition of a sucker.
Then I watched “Blood Diamond”, the movie. Both the stars have identical front teeth. I think all diamond mining is inhumane even though I hear there are some legitimate operators. I can’t see myself having much to do with the diamonds in almost any form. Plus, can you just see me haggling the price of a ring with the type of person who becomes a jeweler in the first place? “Oh yes, uh-huh, yep-yep, such clarity, um, and yes the cut, yep-yep. . .”
