One year ago today: September 18, 2014, I quit.
(check why this post routes through Britain)
Five years ago today: September 18, 2010, Me: 1, Florida: 0
Six years ago today: September 18, 2009, Erik is gone.
MORNING
It’s too bad my camera was the first thing to get wet, but here are a few phone pictures of the worst flooding yet. So bad I doubt it can happen again. During a letup, I raced over to the library but got caught there for two hours, then another hour home because I had to backtrack every side road, then over to the highway embankment. I thought it great adventure but that was not exactly the way most people regard this.
Ha, did you hear about the Volkswagen case? They got caught cheating on pollution tests. The cars were designed so that when the testing gear was detected, it dished up false readings. So, if you were wondering whatever happened to the bozos that get fired from MicroSoft, the car plants are evidently a good place to at least find that mentality.
Interesting. Guitar strings, the round-wound variety, are not coated wire, that is, the little wire that wraps around the big wire is not insulated. Making it useless for coil applications. And the sounds you hear in my living room are not ghosts. I keep a can of acetone on the shelf. It expands and contracts causing the metal to flex—and it lets me know somebody is in the room. Body heat is enough to make it start burping. This does not prevent things from going missing. This week alone, two green rulers and a multi-meter. Fortunately, I have a half dozen spares of each. I’m not suggested anything stolen, that has never happened here. They’ll turn up.
I’ll tell you what is weird sometimes. These French-Canadiens. They seem all too willing to do strange things just to prove their culture is different. I went to fix some loose kitchen cabinets and the screws were a type I’ve never seen before. Like a Robertson with two parallel sides, but oblong with the ends rounded. Maybe it isn’t a screwdriver slot but made for some special type of key. Anyway, I bought this place from a French lady. I replaced the screws with a standard type.
So I get some flak. If I don’t watch television, how do I even know what “Wheel of Fortune” is, much less play the game? I can answer that. You see, stupidity is very widespread in North America. One of the first signs of stupidity is they have to be entertained all the time. The implication is that stupid people have only one form of self-entertainment and it cannot be mentioned in polite company. Hence, almost everywhere I go, I see televisions.
Since I usually go out in the early evening, of course I’m going to hear news reports and weather reports once in a while. I’m also going to notice which way the wind is blowing and for sale stickers. It cannot be avoided. Of course I mean that I do not watch television at home and consider people who do as marginally retarded. And by comparison, most of them are. But when I hear somebody asking trivia questions, I naturally begin to listen.
That does not constitute “watching TV” as a way of life. I know what Fox news is, but I’ve never watched it. Same with “The Apprentice”, and most shows with fat people, old women, or situation comedies. I know what they are, but not what they are about. I even know there is a current protest against romcoms (romantic comedies), as a joke. The premise is that women object to pornography because it portrays a false impression of women, henceforth, romcoms portray a false impression of men.
NOON
From the library, here is something I’m so glad I lived long enough to see. This is a NASA photo of the mountains of Pluto. Where, except for blatant job-protectionism at NASA, we should be exploring them by now. I see right away these are upthrust although there is an apparent cinder cone in the lower left quadrant. And what looks like a plume. This is not as alien a landscape as I hoped. I’ll need time to go over this and form opinions.
My background in this field is limited but my instinct is that Einstein and Darwin are right, that everything shown here is the result of extremely simple forces acting over long periods of time. I am already floored by the clarity. What are those rings in the sky, what are those patterns in the flat area? I am grateful of the number of technologies that had to be conquered for this photo to even exist.
Guess who I heard from? The lady at the doggie wig place. Don’t know about doggie wigs? Then you have not read back far enough. I happen to be a bit of an expert on the topic. Anyway, she finally retired and has been living in Arizona for nearly a year. Everybody’s leaving town. Even JZ says when I get a place, he’ll rent out his condo and pay the going rent [for a room at my new place] just to get out of south Florida. (But it would at the end of the day be 100% my property. He’s quite aware that I don’t think much of some of the women he brings home.)
What’s this on the radio? NPR never gives an unbiased answer, but I think they are avoiding saying that Hungary finally closed the border. Now all we have to listen to is the belly-aching “humanitarians” who care more about strangers than their own countrymen. Fine good neighbors those humanitarians make. As long it is your garden being raided, that is.
From what I gather, once Hungary acted, so did all the other states. Typical pukes, standing back and pointing fingers until the problem is shifted onto them. Then they think it’s okay to enact the same measures because they weren’t first. Why, and I’ve got ten bucks says I’m right about this, they were forced to do it, not by the migrants, but by Hungary.
You don’t have to say I’ve been 100% right about that whole fiasco. I already know. How do I know so much about that mentality? Easy, in fact it is the first type of human behavior I ever saw in my earliest life. And I saw it pretty much every day got the hell out of Dodge. Go figure.
AFTERNOON
I called JZ and told him not to come out here. I cancelled the club meeting as well. Everybody, just stay home and play it safe. I’m surprised I have not heard of any deaths from the floods. Read like I do, it expands the mind. But don’t worry, mine gets right small again because I listen to NPR. That radio programming is not only narrow, it is almost painful to listen to those people even on the rare occasion they are actually right about something. You see, being nice and being right are not much alike these days.
Trivia. I found out that cedar shingles and cedar shakes are not the same thing. Want to know the difference? The cedar shingles are sawn where the shakes are split by hand. I’m suspicious whether that means human hand. That reminds me of one type of shingle I have not seen in a long time. Tin.
And when I brought it up, some people have never even seen them at all. They are made from old tin cans with the ends removed and cut lengthwise. Then you pound them flat. Make that almost flat. Then you shingle the roof with them with a strip of railroad tar on each overlap. I’ve seen entire walls treated this way.
They rust but I know people who like that, considering it a patina. It won’t win awards. But don’t write it off, it works and it lasts 30 years. When the Internet fires up again, I’ll maybe see if I can find you a good example. The largest building I ever saw with this finish was the single north side of a horse barn.
EVENING
Almost totally concerned with long-winded electronics, but hey, it’s Friday and I’d rather be out on stage somewhere, but barring that I like my nice new hobby. But to show it’s not all work and no play, here is a new food I tried for the first time. Here’s what I have to say about it.
My favorite? Dip strawberries in it half-deep, then roll them in brown sugar. Give it I try, tell them I sent you and that I said you were worth it.
I measured and drilled the template for the new 7489 memory demo device. It is 30% larger to accommodate rocker switches and what a difference a drill press makes. This time around I have all the components, particularly the proper lights and resistors, the correct protoboards and the experience to assemble everything with no major mistakes. I may even incorporate a better buss to allow the user to make his own decisions regarding significant digits.
An aspect I like is one of those factors you don’t see until it happens. The new design is beginning to bear hallmarks of my influence. Certainly it has standardized parts, like a 3mm blue power indicator, 5mm red for memory, 5mm yellow for commands, and 5mm green for display. There is now always a battery holder screwed right onto the display board (as opposed to inside or underneath). And the ever-present female pins for connection to an Arduino.
If there are any beginners reading, I can now state with confidence the three major power tools you need for electronics are a drill press, a bandsaw, and a scroll saw. My total investment in all three has been, let me count on my fingers. $25 for the drill press, $70 (I think) for the band saw, and the scroll saw (I think) was $39 new from Harbor Freight. And I’ve spent around $30 for drill bits and saw blades. You are still going to need all your standard hand tools, but to begin cranking out real working articles, take my advice on the power tools.
[Author’s note: There are a few videos (no links) around showing me drilling out various articles, and I would issue a word of caution. Those are live, but they do not show the prep work. I’m saying when you get the power tools, don’t expect to clip along making perfect copies like it seems I’m up to. Sorry, it does not work that way. What you can’t see is probably more important to the finished product.
For example, the drill holes are have been pre-measured to exactness with metal rulers (designed for celestial navigation, believe it or not) and punch markers. I am a semi-pro with pilot holes, which too many others seem to regard as unnecessary, the fools. The pieces being drilled are masking taped on the reverse side and always placed on a sacrificial block to prevent tear-out. And yes, I always, always wear safety glasses.
Now, be nice here, because I know I’ve criticized other demos for making it seem easy. However, there are two major differences. One, I show all mistakes if they are made. My demos are start to finish on most steps, so there is no editing-out. Two, my not showing prep work, which I consider a separate topic, is conceptually far more justifiable than cutting out boo-boos to make the process look slicker than it really is.]
Expect pictures soon, of the template, and maybe an update on the counter, which has evolved a bit. Most noticeable, it will count only to 1 million instead of 99 million. This is in keeping with the toothpick display, yes, I already thought of that. I’m ditching the common anode 7-segments, those are a bad idea that gave me needless headaches. I got them free from the old Hacktronics anyway.
Another major problem is removing the 5 volts positive is not, as often stated in the manuals, the same as sinking the pin to ground. In practice, the LEDs often never quite go all the way out. There may be other explanations, but since I can avoid the whole issue by switching to common cathode. Another quirk is the anode models require PNP transistors.
For all you hear about them being the logical “opposite” of NPNs, they are more like inverted mirror images than actual opposites. Right? A mirror is left to right, but not up to down and the transistor is opposite to that. If you can’t picture it, good, then I’ve made the point. They are like normally-on switches that you have to ground to cause them to work. How to explain that?
To turn something off, you have to start issuing convoluted commands like (NOT (NOT OFF)), which is far too LISP-like for me. That project, after the change to proper components, for reasons I won’t delve into, has become known as the “super-heather”. There is no template for that project, as it was always designed to be built only on a breadboard as a demonstration of programming and logic skills.
&nbfollowing the Arduino saga likely already see the aversion these C programmers have to nested loops more than one or two deep. At the other extreme, I’ve written massive chunks of code where everything was eight and ten layers deep. I attribute that to having learned real computer languages long ago. Also, C people don’t much like subroutines, they are difficult to control in C. I’m the antithesis, my main loops often do nothing but call subroutines.
Again, the super-heather is a breadboard project, but you’ll need a good medium sized one and they are not cheap. The wiring is actually a breeze—as long as one pay’s attention. That’s always the catch.
There, enough reading for today. It’s evident I was cooped up in the house all day. It has now been raining around 65 of the last 72 hours.
Last Laugh
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