One year ago today: September 9, 2015, the Wal*mart stance (a great read!)
Five years ago today: September 9, 2011, real inflation was 15%.
Nine years ago today: September 9, 2007, I can count to ten.
Random years ago today: September 9, 2012, the sale of the non-cabins.
MORNING
Alright, back to work. Enough of this holidaying just because this is Florida. I began before daybreak pulling out those hundreds of staples holding in the chicken wire and insulation. In the quiet before dawn. Then came the mystery, are you ready? I want a breakfast sandwich and a half a loaf of bread has gone missing. In the kitchen. There’s no place for it to fall behind and nobody’s been over. It just got curiouser and curiouser. Like this photo. I thought it was too boring before I picked up that people liked the map in the background more than the loaf.
See here how the nails into the old joist pulled the heads right through the new 2x4” rather than pry out of the 1946 lumber. Damn, this Vivitar has a fuzzy spot right between macro and regular that makes pictures a foot away slightly out of focus. But I’m pointing to the nail head and the hole where it came through.
The room has no floor at all by 10:00AM, so I hope I don’t get any surprise company over the weekend. I’m toying with the idea of raising the new joists by a fraction of an inch to minimize the amount I’ll have to shave the old joists. As I uncovered my work from last week, I found the leveling marks I had made and sure enough, the old floor itself was flexing in some cases up to 3/8ths of an inch. Too much to ignore.
At noon, I’m taking a break and going to the library. I must say, this work has been very therapeutic, though I’m a long way from being able to take on a project for anybody else. You know, I now drink more coffee at the library than any of the shops in town.
Sorry that this idea cannot take off everywhere. The last thing Broward needs for now is jittery drunks and spastic bipolars staggering around with hot liquids while normal people are reading and hence not on the lookout. But it is strange how the libraries won’t police the system because they are so scared shitless of being accused of anything. But they’ll sure complain when the city closes a library for disuse.
Wood knots.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I can’t find my old File Express User Guide and the new website doesn’t offer a download. That’s $100 because you have to buy the program first, but it is nice to see that the software still exists. By reading the FAQs and forums, I see the program (that’s what they were called, File Express remains popular with ex-military and security types because of ease use and because of what it won’t do. It is very difficult to hack.
Here is a product I’ve not seen before. Purely Elizabeth, made from grains the various departments have been trying to popularize since the flood. I forget what probiotic even means, but that brings me to today’s trivia. Did you know only 1% of American farmland remains uncontaminated with genetically modified materials. And any land that has had GMOs grown on it or lays downwind from such land is also polluted with poisonous pesticides and artificial fertilizers.
I did not know it takes three years of expensive treatments to return the soil to an organic state, something that very few small farmers could afford. But apparently there are movements in Wyoming and other prairie states to keep farms afloat if they want to take the leap. Meanwhile, I continue to refuse to listen to complaints or waste sympathy on those who have health-related conditions from eating genetically modified food.
These include food allergies or addictions, morbid obesity, eating disorders, hypersensitivities, and altogether too many offspring with birth defects which were incredibly rare before 1960. It’s the food, you imbeciles. Read the label on the box. If it looks like a list of floor sweepings at a mining camp, don’t eat it.
AFTERNOON
I sat and stared at the floor joists. If only I knew of a way to plane thick lumber to shape. Part of the floor movement problem is that girder. It warped as unevenly as the ground settled and I don’t know how to fix it. I know what I’d like to do. Run a 4x6” post down the center of the floor and hang all the joists from that.
Still, I’m making the floor itself level and it is taking two hours per joist, most of it to get the hangers exactly right. Each one has to be custom fit. Shown nearby is the laborious process of leveling each component, using two bubble levels.
By dark I got merely four feet completed, except for the insulation. I need a run to the hardware for more 2x6”s and deck screws. You bet I’m using screws to really clamp everything in place. Nails are so last century. You are talking to the King of the pilot hole and Jack of the broken drill bit. I’ve got flooring experience now and I’m dog tired. If I could draw a rough parallel between hot weather and hard work, this afternoon required two quarts of iced peach tea just for me. I just know in the end there will be some resultant compromise caused by leveling the floor but not the house.
NIGHT
Blissful retirement. I thought about driving into town to catch some entertainment. Then I lay down for a moment and was out like a light until past midnight. Do not be concerned I’m straining the old ticker, on a scale of one to a hundred, I never tax it beyond one. This work is invigorating. Like all construction, shortcuts are for morons, so take your time. The work is indoors with fans everywhere, but in Florida, summer work is still muggy. That’s partly why I was out like a light for the past six hours.
If so, that almost guarantees a trip to the Smithsonian. My theory from 2010 still holds true all forms of transportation in the USA now fix their prices so your door-to-door costs work out around the same. Bus, train, plane, car, the true costs are nearly equal.
That formula upsets if you get a free van.
I even took the time to repair the power cable on my circular saw. As you see here, the blade is carbide toothed and can cut through its own cord in a jiffy. Yessirree. Fortunately, most robot hobbyists have all the skills and materials necessary to affect a perfect a permanent mend. FYI, I have finally developed the ability to cut a near factory edge free-hand with a circular saw. That took long enough.
Having found the box with some of my robot texts, I did a few hours reading on gate circuits, not something that would tweak most people’s interests on a late Friday. As with most electronics you get too much how and not enough why. I don’t like that because it narrows the thinking. Gates are circuits that respond to inputs, similar to those experiments you did in Ninth Grade science lab with the little light and two knife switches. Which taught you nothing.
So here is today’s learning component. There are basically only two gates, the AND gate and the OR gate. You should easily remember how those work, so I won’t cover it. Turns out, the more useful gates are the inverse operations, the NAND and the NOR. That stands for NOT AND and NOT OR. Conceptually, it means the light goes out until you activate the switch, the opposite of what you’d expect. Very useful for computers.
Some gates latch, others do not, where latching simply means the gate stays on when you quit pressing the button. Like your rewind button. It requires a separate action to unlatch that type of gate—an important point all too often left out by the experts.
There is a variation on these gates called the EXCLUSIVE. This is where things get sticky. Think of it as an OR gate that turns off if both inputs are activated. That’s it, with a thorough grasp of all this, you should be able to build any computer circuit I’ve done. A computer is really massive numbers of these gates.
Several years ago I tried to build an Half-Adder out of discrete components (only resistors and capacitors and such). I stopped when it became apparent the teaching material failed to mention one critical concept. That some of the gates had to turn on by themselves, hypothetically speaking. You can’t do that with the ordinary switches like I was using, but I’d like to retry the experiment some day now that I have a box of relays.
ADDENDUM
Sunday is the anniversary of 9-11 and you know, I hope it will pass quietly. Patriotism is one thing, but unless they also tell us why the bad guys attacked the USA, it’s not going to make an iota of difference any more. What did America do, that they attacked us and not England, or Russia, or China? Answer that question before you start any flag-waving. What did America do?
That was 15 years ago already. And they’ve got us tangled up in that war still. Since that was their prime objective, they’ve won and the illustrious leadership of this country fails to recognize it. We could have handed each of them a few million dollars each and come out ahead. It turns out a dozen people knew about the attack in advance, including the guy who had just bought and over-insured the buildings. There’s your false flag incident of the decade.
Same dirty politics as Pearl Harbor.
Last Laugh
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
