Wanda, the Karaoke lady, has passed away. I knew her only from her Karaoke show at the club, which where I learned to sing. This time I was troubled and walked up to Dunkin for coffee, the old folk’s Dunkin on Federal. She will be missed, as was Ron, her husband, who passed away two years ago. I stayed home all week to keep from spreading the flu and did not find out until bingo nightAnd the bingo crowd was reminded that it is gambling. The crowd was slightly larger than average due to some new people. They’d never heard of powerball and they won it. That’s a night on the town. Another guy was fast enough to play four cards (twelve squares) at once and handily won 7 of the ten games. Folks, it is all in the odds and these things happen. The guy was bingo-ing before others had a single number (I call that “using your invisible marker”). Tips? Worst ever. I made one dollar.
Skipper, the 70+ guy who lifts weights, is moving north. That leaves four regulars at the club, down from nearly twenty when I first performed there. Not that it’s any better downtown, but at least they get packed weekends. And increasingly random sellout crowds during the week. Not just a bar or two, but the whole block is packed. Reason? I suspect the beach has just become too over-priced for the tourists. While it is neither cheap to convenient to commute between the two locations, if you are going to party all night, Hollywood Blvd is a bargain compared to Ocean Drive.
I’d planned to visit the beach but the lure of quiet comfort kept me right here. Where it is easier to think. There are much worse things than not knowing any interesting women for the moment. I’m don’t mean anything wrong, but company isn’t quite the same as interesting, and I prefer interesting. Got some e-mailing done, updated the books, read the entire newspaper minus the sports and auto, and studied a little (see addendum).
You know who else went full-retard? The Yahoo! search engine people. They’ve changed the edit rules for their text box just enough that if you are used to the standard the rest of the world uses, you get errors. And even when you figure out what doesn’t work, it is inconsistent. Yahoo! if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.
JP finally called so I gave him until Wednesday to make up his mind about the Andre Rieu concert. The guy has never been to a symphony, I couldn’t believe it. He was worried about parking. I understand he was a little broke at Xmas for spending $14,000 on his teeth. They put titanium screws in his maxilla. But I assured him (at the time) as long as he could eat corn on the cob, everything was going to work out right. Now, am I not the greatest pal, or what?
“I’m on a budget”, he says. My eye. I’ve seen it. That’s not a budget. What’ I’ve got is a budget. He’s got a dream retirement fund. So retire already, will ya? I know I was the same before my heart attack so I don’t expect others to listen. But I expect ‘em to know I’ve got this budget-retirement link down pat. I had even considered going to church today, I find their rituals very enchanting. But I would have seen his teeth. His teeth make me jealous.
So what does my buddy do? He starts buying cheap cuts of meat because he can “chew the hell” out of them. I had to walk outside a while and look up at the stars on that one. He still wants to use his truck for our pending trip to the west coast (St. Petersburg). We have never picked up any women with that crate, though we’ve been flashed often enough. He tells me the sidecar is unsafe. I tell him maybe one of them screws is a little too deep and a little too tight. On Thursday I buy two tickets and if he doesn’t decline but then doesn’t show, I’m inviting his girlfriend.
And sending him the bill.
ADDENDUM
All electronics this time. What a hobby that turned out to be. We now know how little we knew, but at the same time there were no guides to help along the way. We’d seen the teenagers with battling robots before we knew they were using kits. And the snazzy gadgets before we knew about the machine shops and plasma lasers. Just y’day, after 25 months of searching for sources, we find for the first time one of the largest and best suppliers is nine miles from my old house in Bellevue, Washington.
Our approach was ground up because it had to be. I expect the first working flip-flop to pass muster this week, but still cannot find anyone that explains how to use the thing. Par usual, once I figure it out myself, I’ll find dozens of articles that are unfindable right now. They’ll be one word or one obscure term away from being handy to find.
I’ll give an example example. I saw the initialism “TTL” early along in my studies, but trying to find out what it signified resulted in the usual frustrations. The geeks will only tell you what it stands for, then relapse into gibberish. A visit to Wiki was like setting foot in Nerdland. In the instant it takes to pull your foot back, your lose your boot in the muck. Transistor to transistor logic is merely the gates I’ve been building. The transistors act as switches and by combining them (transistor to transistor) in clever ways, you get them to perform logic. See, Wiki, it really is not that hard to say it in plain English.
It turns out TTL has many shortcomings, including being slow and causing delays in signals that must stay in sync. I say so what and for learning, stick with transistors. Once you get that down, all the other devices get easy since in the end, they must perform the same deeds. What’s more, I can buy transistors just up the road. Try that with a variable capacitor.
Another perplexing topic was the Hall Effect. Even the explanation of the venerable Forrest Mims was confusing. He states a “strong magnetic field caused a voltage to appear across a thin film of gold through which an electrical current was flowing”. Duh, if there is a current, of course there is a voltage across it so what’s the deal with the magnet? (It turns out his use of the word “across” is ambiguous. He meant something more like “transverse” to the current flow.)There is no excuse for authors guilty of grammar and syntax errors that do not make sense to a beginner. Such poor performance perpetuates itself because once learned the hard way, few will go back and re-read an account known to have been confusing in the first place. Well, I’ve decided to sideline a little and play with this Hall Effect. Remember how Gilligan would restate what the Professor said in ordinary words? It is the K.I.S.S. formula, and the geek-nerds of the world need to embrace that as firmly as they do their virginity.
The Hall Effect is easy. Lay a one inch by one inch piece of foil flat on your table and run DC current through it from left to right. It works because the foil acts like any metal. Now connect a voltmeter to the top and bottom of the same foil. It reads nothing because the current is flowing left to right, not top to bottom. Ah, but now place a magnet on the center of the foil. Your meter needle moves, meaning there is now a current transverse to the battery flow. Turn the magnet over, your needle moves the opposite. That is the Hall Effect. But I am only showing it possible to explain it without confusing the issue. I have done this experiment and it did not work for me. Shown here is the foil, with the hallmark club indicator light that power is flowing. Aluminum cannot be soldered, so the leads are held with masking tape. See the array of meters? I could not measure any voltage across the foil. The textbooks said it is a voltage. I’m going to list my thoughts to give us a peek into my learning process.
♦ Why didn’t the needle move? Do I need a stronger magnet? Or a smaller but pointed magnet? Maybe a larger foil? Thicker foil? Thinner? The examples use gold foil, is that important?
♦ The meters don’t budge. Do I need more sensitive meters? I’m already at 200 millivolts, which is practically no volts and still nothing. Anything less is transient.
♦ Does the needle stay deflected, or does the magnet need to keep moving? Why don’t these bastards say? Can the magnet touch the foil? Why not? Should I amplify the signal?
Since early 2003 I’ve toyed with the idea of using electromagnetics to construct a simpler seismometer. The mechanical designs I’ve seen, with bricks and hinges, are cumbersome. And all suffered the same drawback. To turn the seismometer into a seismograph, you needed some way to record movement. None of the designs addressed this in any practical way. I knew I needed electronics, but I only understood coils. My early experiments with slinky and magnets failed. The Hall Effect produces a voltage without a coil. Aha, I’ve got a maybe.
The new GPS got me thinking. All the seismo sites I visit use triangulation to find the epicenters. And they use the customary three dimensions. But the GPS works at any angle, right? I think I shall begin with a one-dimension design. Not build, design. And to record any movement when I’m away, we have Arduinos. Lots of Arduinos.
