One year ago today: December 20, 2014, Italian Jewish ethnic joke.
Five years ago today: December 20, 2010, I play Afroman.
Nine years ago today: December 20, 2006, Mr. Brian is failing . . .
Random years ago today: December 20, 2009, Xmas dinner.
MORNING
To begin, the question is not what the price is on this property, but why anybody would be trying to sell if for an unusually low price the week before Xmas. A cursory flip through my now familiar criteria shows only one potential scam on-line, the old trick of listing a property in a bad neighborhood under the zip code of a nicer part of town. But if it is anywhere near the parts of town JZ and I toured last week, I’ll have that property within a day or know the reason why. I am so ready to move out of south Florida.
I play in a band not to get young pretty women, but to get women who are younger and prettier that I could otherwise. When that supply dries up, time to move. Although I did have a 50 year old lady today tell me she had a crush on me, whatever that means when you are 50. Quite shapely, she is, rather like I would fancy my ex after 30 years. In case you ask, the answer is no. It took her six months, not six minutes, to decide she likes me. Not near good enough.
A prediction. Trump already has the sway to alter government policy before he is elected. The fact he has not done so overtly already is that he does not seem to realize the power he has. The Liberal press can no longer shut an issue up by making it politically incorrect—and they are wetting their diapers over it. Trump has said before, why wait for the election? I hope he is shortly saying the same thing about changing policy.
Now, he would have to wait for the election to begin building the wall, but I would contribute to a fund if he started amassing the materials now. The more so if he would match the funds out of his own pocket with the cash he didn’t have to spend on a campaign. That is, begin, Mr. Trump, showing these Liberals that you are seriously not listening to their rantings by gathering up the raw materials to start the wall the day you are elected, if not the very hour.
Next issue is the water heater. The unit in there now is barely adequate. At my stage in life, I’ll pay for a little luxury. My concept is to replace it with the tankless unit, but to install a recessed box into the exterior wall. Like a medicine cabinet, but facing the exterior. It would make the tank a lot easier to install, maintain, and replace. I put the idea to JZ this morning after church, but he has not gotten back to me. The heater would be padlocked and accessible from outside the building.
I could frame the box in twenty minutes and line it with metal. I happen to have a surplus of metal pieces, formerly shelving units. Whaddaya think? Am I a genius, or am I a genius? I’ll think about that when I head for the movies this afternoon. I’ve been up since 6:30AM and deserve the break.
NOON
You don’t know the guy in this picture, name’s Bevin Alexander. I keep running across his video in my list of documentaries. This guy is a highly accredited military historian, yet he doesn’t know as much about the war as I do. He speaks the populist, propaganda side of history as if his is the keen insight others lack. Yet when I first heard the guy, I knew he was full of it. His "sources" appear to be entirely censored wartime publications or their aftermath.
I arrived at the foreign cinema to find my schedule was one day out. If I want to see the movie, it has to be after dark on some upcoming weekday. There was an opera telecast, but aye, I don’t speak Italian, and bee, nothing spells old and lonesome worse than going to an opera alone. So I went to the pub alone, where I fell asleep sitting up after one beer. I was back home within five minutes after that to play bass.
“Momma Tried”, the Haggard song I once though was a joke, has moved up to third on my playlist. I always could play the tune, it was a standard with boring bass. But I re-wrote the entire bass line so that while it is definitely the original, it now leaps out at the audience. For any new arrivals, I will explain what happens there. In every band, there has to be one instrument who keeps the timing. Somebody has to play rhythm. This aspect is normally associated with the drummer or a rhythm guitar.
The difficulty arises in a two-piece. The guitar player has to stop playing rhythm chops whenever he does a lead break. If the only other instrument is the bass, that is normally not enough of a background to make the lead break sound full enough to dance to. Hence, over time I developed the habit of “overplaying” the bass behind these lead breaks in an effort to keep up the rhythm.
This had two unexpected effects. One is that I can “outplay” a guitarist who tries to show off, and two, I can play certain lead breaks on the bass—as long as the guitar player keeps up his rhythm strumming. That is, as long as the guitarist doesn’t break stride. But do you have any idea how insane it is to find a guitar player who will tolerate a bassist playing “his” notes? No, you don’t have any idea.
Then along comes a tune like “Momma Tried”. I can’t play the lead because it bends notes that are incompatible with the bass string arrangement. But I can definitely play the fill notes. It is not quite the same a lead breaks, because I’m not taking over, I’m playing notes often from other instruments in the original recording. For instance, I’m great at piano riffs.
Ray-B is just such a musician. He’s now aware of the shifting roles possible with a solid rhythm guitar. I have about five songs I can outright play both the bass and rhythm. And another fifteen I would relish the opportunity to match up with a guitarist. An example of that would be Buffet’s “Volcano”, were I can play all the steel drum riffs on the bass. I do not believe anybody else does that (if only because the fingering pattern breaks the rules taught in bass lessons, which focus on the bass as a guitar accompaniment instrument.).
NIGHT
Sad but true, there is something wrong with the design of the solar powered battery chargers. That is a misnomer, as solar panels (except on a very large scale) cannot recharge a dead battery. They can, in theory, trickle charge to maintain a battery at peak level. And that theory has broken down twice. The charger must have enough wattage to “push” DC current back into the battery cells forcefully enough to overbalance the battery’s internal resistance. This is normally 13.7 Volts, but various Amps, depending on your battery ratings.
Until further notice, this picture is the controller from Harbor Freight that you DO NOT WANT. Stay away from the Thunderbolt Magnum for now. It costs $26 plus tax. If you are not sure what you are doing, read this material from Northern Arizona Wind & Sun. I had an unshakable hunch that a real controller must use pulse width modulation but didn’t want to incur the expense. Now, I may be out a nearly new $80 battery.
Here’s the technical part as a treat for those who have read this far. The abbreviation MPPT, sometimes called “muppet” is maximum power point tracking. Every solar panel has a single point at any given output where the voltage and current max out. As the sun gets brighter, or the cell gets warmer, this ideal point is surpassed and the factors (volts and amps) get out of balance with each other. In theory—and I stress only in theory—the controller should transform the overall output of the solar panel back to the ideal maximum output point. Note that this point moves around constantly, it is not a fixed entity, meaning your controller has to rapidly recalculate it.
And the power at that point is what should be utilized to top up your battery array. I will not get into PWM other than to tell you it is pulse width modulation. I know how to program the Arduino to do it. PWM is a robot motor basic.
ADDENDUM
You know, I have a confession to make. Even if the media make it so difficult the copy anything on the Internet that you wish you’d bought the original, I doubt I would ever actually buy the original. I see that a new generation of audio streams are difficult to capture with Audacity. But if it will play through my speakers, I can record it. It’s not like I would, under any conceivable circumstances, go out an pay for a copy of Buckaroo. I’ve mastered it as a bass solo but I often need the to hear the guitar part so I know if the other guy is doing it right. Or at least adequately.
It was in 1996, that long ago, that I suggested a “restoral” command for the Windows operating system. This is similar to the registry cleaners of today, but mine is a command that goes back through the entire operating system and purges what is not supposed to be there. But that would be contingent on Windows making the operating system separate from anything the user subsequently added to the computer—and MicroSoft has always been much too sleazy to provide that option.
So now, this computer is too clogged up. I knew way back in 1982 that DOS, the precursor to Windows, would have this problem. That MicroSoft would discover that to sell computers to idiots, you had to make them easier to use, which meant adding more RAM, which created the temptation to begin using that RAM for other things. Now, it takes so much RAM to run the operating system itself, that there isn’t really enough left to operate the computer as anything more than a single-function playback device.
One of the musings at the coffee shop last evening was a type of “Angie’s List” of real estate and real estate agents. A place where people could go to post comments about properties and real estate agents. Face it, the ads placed by all real estate concerns is overwhelmingly misleading. If you viewed a property that was unsuitable, would you post your results on a site if that site was easy to use?
Later, I read that last passage and I think I should throw more light on this database idea. I’ve paid a lot of attention to the Wiki pattern of “truth by majority rules” and the semi-moderated sites like Angie’s List. My concept is not some pie-in-the-sky saloon talk, I am 110% capable of writing, populating, and administering a superlative database that would be unbeatable for content. I listen to that theory saying to get information on the Internet, the best path is to post the wrong information and sit back.
Note how Shkreli dresses like a slob for this television interview. But I see that as his message to the establishment of "GFY". I suspect he's doing what I would have done in the same circumstances.
I would gouge the real estate industry for the right to post rebuttals. I would “squeeze them until the pips squeak”. I would model the company on that lawyer who posts bad reviews and then blackmails companies to take them away. There is no love lost between me and real estate agents. There are by far too many of them and most of them need to realize how basically stupid and unethical they truly are. It goes without saying that, ahem, me and my people over here are the only ones qualified to make this determination.
Martin Shkreli for Minister of Finance.
Last Laugh
(I say he looks like Kirk Douglas.)
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