One year ago today: April 11, 2013, pretty St. Augustine.
Five years ago today: April 11, 2009, restored Boss Hoss.
What? I dare to open a weekend with another blog about my bicycle? Yes, for there is a point to make on that. Just read along a bit and you’ll see it isn’t the bicycle. It is the leisure time to work on it that counts. Here’s a follow-up on that most-repaired item, the inner tube. Years ago I published my advice to recycle your old tubes by wrapping them in an extra layer around your new tubes, as show in this photo. This extra layer put a complete stop to the standard Florida flat every 300-400 miles. Fact: no tire which I gave this treatment has had a flat and that amounts to years and thousands of miles. In the bottom photo I am peeling back the outer later to inspect conditions. After a while the two layers slightly fuse together.
Fridays. You can tell the successful retirement by the man who has Friday off. Anybody can take a nothing Monday off type of thing, but Friday is special. I worked most Fridays from age 18 to 41, when I informally retired. For those who just arrived, yes, I retired at 41. It was my backup plan that if I did not get rich by then, I would quit knocking myself out. I realized early that getting rich was neither based on your income nor your abilities, rather mainly on pure dumb luck and mainly being born already well-off to get a head start. This is not universally true, I know that, but it was the formula that applied to me.
One big element bears repeating. I did not say I retired rich. People tend to hear that, but it is not what I said. I am not rich. Did I just say rich is not dependent on income? Yep, I personally know people with just under seven and a half times my income who have not managed to lead fulfilling or exciting lives. Ability? Don’t make me laugh. Citing ability is like saying Bill Gates had business acumen. He could not even play the flutophone. I suggest self-made millionaires, should such a thing exist, could not be specialists as they would quickly have learned not to rely on others.
Another point. You are neither as rich or as retired as I am if you have to get up on Friday morning. I’m introducing a philosophical quality of life issue here, insofar as I know about such things. Aptitude alone does not get you rich or we would all just specialize in something ordinary. Nor can aptitude alone keep money, evidenced by why so many lottery winners are broke in a few years. I know that I was not happy back when I was making $62k sitting on my tush.
I could afford more things when I worked, but I realized those things tended to be precisely what I was giving up to hold a steady job. I fully understand what it is like to walk away from a job to which you sacrificed your youth and dreams. I grasp how some use that job to plunge into debt trying to reward themselves for staying put. And I recognize which people are cowards when they won’t quit such a situation long after they could have.
Expect a lot of editorial today, as when I work outdoors, I pop inside to cool down every half-hour or so. Nobody from the robot club was over, so this process went on for five hours, and you get my thoughts. I noticed on-line many of the teams were people who knew each other in grade school. I have nobody in my life like that. Put another way, not one person I grew up with ever went into a field that was mutually interesting. That makes sense. Where I grew up, for all the big talk about small town goodness, everyone who could cleared out pronto. Thus, no better than me who hates small-town gossip. Those who worked wound up in breweries, plywood mills, the police force, but as far as I know, no engineers or tradesmen. Lawyers and doctors yes, but no semi-skilled workers. Considering my origins, you just be glad I can even twirl a wrench.
Next, I watched a video on the creation of new commands in the most horrid computer language in history, C+. I have often said the language is not and advance because of its needlessly complicated formats and abuse of punctuation. Then I got to thinking, I’ve always pointed out C+ uses the same seven fundamentals as any other language. So why doesn’t some clever programmer invent a translation process that converts the cryptic C+ commands back into good old COBOL? There’s the challenge of 2015 for somebody out there. Get rich.
Soup can jet engines. I was surprised to see how many people actually build these inherently dangerous objects. There are youTubes of meltdowns, people holding Bic lighters to ignite the exhaust, and directions how to get explosive gasses in a glass jar. I like the videos of goofs standing around a home-made turbine and firing it up using an air compressor sprayer and a propane torch. You kinda gotta suppose about that. You know, why such idiots rarely post a second such video.
Those Hindu tech movies are getting my goat. Tech? Not the Bollywood stuff, you know, that reveals they want American possessions but not the American culture to use them properly. Rather, the increasing number of tutorials that you don’t know are East Indian until you hear the accent. My objection is the way they think they can teach western technology back to the west after it has been mysteriously improved by eastern karma. The information is just rehashed and presented back secondhand. The transistor was not invented in Calcutta or Bangladesh. I’ve noticed that Hindu (I use the term collectively) movies no longer trample any movie search like they were starting to, so it means they are being filtered out. Could the same concept not be applied to other searches engines? Hello?
I did learn why commercial jet engines have multiple blades, both on the compressor and on the turbine. Are you ready? It is because the impeller-like turbine blades turn different shafts back to the compressor, which can then operate the blades at different speeds. This maintains an optimum flow of fresh air back into the chambers, and allows the engine to operate when the airplane is stationary or slow-moving while on the ground. One-blade jets must be jumpstarted. I found this video very informative, if you have the time.
Then there is Win 7 with their retarded changes, such as the unsuccessful png format. If you wonder why I pick on MicroSoft, it is so the others who don't like it know they are not alone. You have to enable special settings or it will default to png picture format, which nobody uses. We can only hope that MicroSoft continues to “improve” itself right out of existence.
Who remembers the classic movie, “The Russians Are Coming”? A 1966 classic about a Soviet sub that grounds on a US sandbar. Oddly for such an old production, it is not posted on youTube. It made $17 million profit, a lot back then. Not many know the title was inspired by an insane American politician named Forrestal, who upon hearing sirens ran around screaming, “The Russians are coming.” (The Navy named an aircraft carrier after him—after denying that he had attempted suicide in Florida. Three times.) If I could find it free, I’d definitely watch the movie again. It’s corny acting is actually much better than much of today’s offerings and it is more thought-provoking.
So was a series of formulas I saw, formulas which described the physical motion of inventions from patent applications. It caught my eye because they were notations added at the patent office. Turns out they are Swiss and the formulas were none other than the hand-writing of the clerk, A. Einstein. He was verifying the patent for claims of originality. Not many know that is the only job he could get, as theoretical physics was non-existent at the time he graduated.
What is the layman’s explanation of why one cannot go backwards in time? I believe it was Einstein’s clock experiment. Imagine, as he did, you begin to move away from a clock until you reach the speed of light. The clock would appear to freeze, yet you know back at the clock time is moving on. Relativity. This is as far as I got ever studying physics. I could not understand why one could not continue traveling even faster and indeed, the clock would appear to move backwards, as those were the light rays reaching your eyes. But, there are other over-riding barriers to that ever happening. That is, until I finish building my time machine, “The Spirit of St. Jimbo’s”.
Imagine going back to when a hamburger was 49 cents. Actually, they are. On Wednesdays up the block here at McDonalds. There is a reason I was looking back. When I was around ten years old, I saw a movie called “Magic Boy”. I was trying to find that movie again and got nothing but dead ends. I only remember the part where the old master tells the boy to haul water up the hill as part of his quest to learn magic. Typical old fart mentality. The kid wants magic and you make him do your dirty work. Anyway, I saw the movie because back then, you went to whatever single movie was playing on Saturday night at 7:00. The projector was set up by the local pharmacist. Why 7:00? Because there was a 9:00 town curfew.
ADDENDUM
Here is one of the few books I’ve ever thrown out, “The Essence Of Anthropology”. I thought it was a learning aid on anthropology but that title is misleading. The primary focus of this book is latent homosexuality. Nearly every chapter, segment, or point of view expressed contains references to how other cultures, or races, or species, are more tolerant of—now pay attention to this distinction—not of queer behavior, but of queer behavior in public. The author, William A. Haviland, is evidently a maladjusted closet queen who apparently fancies himself clever enough to slide in his “third-gender” theme past the reader disguised as anthropological discourse.
Yes, I am intolerant—of men with hidden agendas. Oddly, not so much with women but that could be since in the end women only wind up deceiving themselves. Do not let this man, William A. Haviland or his wink-nudge “colleagues”, near children. Mentally, those guys have never been potty-trained.
