One year ago today: January 8, 2016, I don’t like grapes.
Five years ago today: January 8, 2012, the cashier toasts bagels.
Nine years ago today: January 8, 2008, hacking Cragislist.
Random years ago today: January 8, 2011, fully literate, right?
MORNING
What the bejeezus am I doing up at 5:00AM? How about I give you the tale from the trailer court, and you decide for yourself what’s with that? There I am in dreamland and I hear this distant howl of a wolf. Woke me up. Nothing. So I slip back to sleep and there it is again. I’m wide awake now. There, I heard it while I’m wide awake. How far back in the toolies have I moved? There it is again, a little louder, a little closer. Then I find the source. My tummy was growling.
Ha-ha you laugh. But consider that I so rarely have such noises that I didn’t know right off. Who’s laughing now? If it wasn’t down in the 30s this time of day, I’d hop on the Rebel and take the day off. In fact, let me check the yard monitor. Yep, it is 2.7°F above freezing out there. This is about as close to roughing it as I’ve done since I was last on the road. Except on the road I don’t have the option to bake a chicken pie. Why, I think I’ll make one now because I’m staying inside until she warms up again.
I’ve got the electric run into the sheds, requiring about three hours since dawn. This was a lot of ladder work, since I’m not taking a chance of laying these cables on the ground where they quickly get covered by leaves. Where they get driven over by mowers and motorbikes. No work is done on the interior wiring yet, all this back and forth was just to get the 14AWG extension cord over to the shed wall. If you look close, you can see the cable running though the home-made insulators. This work shed is becoming a serious requirement. I can’t afford to keep replacing things that I can’t find because have half a room in the house full of tools.
[Author’s note: I’m not really roughing anything. My place is not insulated, but I have two space heaters, lots of blankets, my coffee pot, and making anything in the kitchen heats that room up right tolerable. Still, this is cooler than Miami at the worst of times and I am certainly above the frost line as it exists as soon as you get more than twenty miles inland. Most weather here comes from the Gulf, which is like this big warm lake. The wind has been out of the north for nearly 20 hours. It’s cold.]
Here’s bad news. I have three things missing inside the house. They’re in here, I need them, and I cannot find them. I’ll tell you what they are so when they turn up, that’ll be the test if I got the Alzheimers or something. My bass tuner, my electric clippers, and the controller for my heating pad. In each case, I moved them from their usual positions to near the door so I could find them easily. And haven’t seen them since.
So I spent the morning going through every box in the place that I’ve not unpacked yet to see what turns up. Why I kept all that stuff, I’ll have to wonder. Questionnaires from 30 years ago when Prudential Insurance was certain they could make a salesman out of me. Records of how many toothpicks were really in a box of 800. Some transcripts of diary entries from 1984 when I lived in Thailand. All this while I’m listening to gospel adultery radio. That’s Bushnell, Florida. Give it a dial, every second or third song concerns adultery.
Pacific Coast Highway, Baja, Mexico.
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NOON
My intention was to just get the electric up to the back shed, but you know how it goes. Well, I’ll run in the one light. Well, maybe I should wire in the switch as we;;. One thing leads to another and it took an additional three hours, but I have two major lights (300W each) now working. I didn’t have that much daylight left, so I finished the job using coal oil lamps. The shed was quite comfy to work in with the sun shining and I threw a tarp over the door opening. It can never really get that cold in the daytime in Florida because of the sunlight.
I got the radio reports of the storm and it sounds like it is country wide. Now it is supposed to flood in California. And some inland weather office near Orlando reported a wind chill factor of 23°F last night. This is supposed to be Florida. What’s going on? Russian weather control. Ha, did you near the latest on the Russian hacking? They’re saying it’s been going on for years. But as long as it was perceived as in their favor, the radical left said nothing.
Double ha, how about that survey that shows more Americans trust the Russian media and Russians period than they trust the Democrat party. That’s gotta hurt. Hey, it’s the Democrats who okayed the government keeping records on private citizens, so Mr. Trump, haul out the files. And start wholesale firing of all Democrats from civil service jobs. Hey, they’re the ones who chided others for having “something to hide”. Now turn it on them—they’ve shown their treachery by using their positions to oppose an elected government.
Of course, that is what the US as a whole did to Germany not that long ago, but let’s not split hairs.
“Meet Me In the Gravel Pit, Honey, cuz I'm a Little Boulder There.”
NIGHT
Of course I’m home. I wouldn’t ride a bicycle in this weather. I drank hot cocoa and read up on dark matter. Don’t mix this up with anti-matter or interstellar dust. It is called dark matter because you can’t see it. My hypothesis is that a collision with dark matter is what caused the hundreds of shallow round lakes in Florida. If they were sinkholes, they’d be deep. Your trivia is that this dark matter has never been found, rather its existence is only inferred. The reason is that most galactic clusters behave as if they are far heavier than the total weight of their stars. In some cases, up to 400 times heavier. Since only matter can have gravity, well there you go.
In the shed I found a pack of Robyn Williams DVDs. The guy cannot act so why have I been lugging around his disks? He as okay as a comedian although I questioned the guy’s energy level since the first day. My major objection is his later movies where he gets disgustingly politically correct. Remember RV. If there’s a teenage daughter, she should be a little sexpot. That movie has a skank, and Williams will also put fat people in roles that don’t require it. I dislike that as well. It promotes the wrong idea. Like the concept that there are five or six different sexes. There are that many types of wierdos, but only two sexes. Have they ever considered their “parades” have the opposite effect?
ADDENDUM
It got cold overnight again which does wonders for getting people to stay home a lot. The snag is, they wasted the time watching cable TV. I hauled out a book on memory architecture because one of the things I found in the shed was my failed memory circuit, the one I tried to build from discrete components (switches, resistors, capacitors). Later, it transpires that to work, this type of circuit needs momentary relays, a type of switch that when you flip it on and off, it stays one. It requires a separate action to turn it off.
[Author’s note: here is a diagram of the circuit, note I specify it is a diagram and not a schematic. If it is built as per what is shown here, it does not work. Yet this is typical of every diagram of the circuit that most students will ever see. This typifies what is wrong with the “engineering mindset”. They leave out the part that makes the circuit work.]
For those interested, we’ll delve a little deeper. The use of RAM in computers is known as the Harvard configuration. It keeps the stored program separate from the data. It is the stored program that is kept in RAM, and it uses busses to transport the data as required. Hence, if power fails, that’s why your program crashes and you lose the current data, but not your stored data. This system is not used on microcontrollers as a rule. Both the program and data are stored in a type of memory called EEPROM and yes, they often compete for memory space. However, most people never get out of the blinking light phase and never experience this.
I miss not having a robot tinker desk. Newcomers, beware of deciding to build a robot. This is a daunting and expensive task. Don’t be fooled by kits and remote control gadgets, those are not robots. A robot has on-board programming that allows it to make independent action. That can be a fine distinction. Normally, a robot contains sensors to react to its environment as opposed to following orders from a remote operator.
There is plenty of overlap. The Mars rover is a hybrid. It can perform many tasks autonomously, but in the end, it gets all major commands from Earth. This means it does neither task very well. I was thrilled initially to log onto the NASA site that gave command of the rover until I discovered it was one computer one vote. If the standard 1% of humans with brains want to investigate a curious rock, forget it. When the 99% with no brains “want to see how fast this thing goes”, you log off and never go back. NASA has never learned that free people aren’t equal and equal people aren’t free.
As for the peek at RAM, I want it on record that years ago, I was taught this material wrong. I took computer courses at both college and university level, and it caused years of going down the wrong path. The “instructors” and “professors” were, I now realize, often just a chapter’s reading ahead of the students. And it took me until I was 35 to finish paying for that nonsense. The best that can be said for most degrees is that they’ll open doors, but don’t be thinking most grads ever get a job in their field. Except for the professions that have severe entrance requirements, one degree is as good as another.
An example of severe entrance requirements is example is medicine. You can’t do it unless you have access to $250,000. Nobody said the barrier had to be upfront, honest, or obvious. Look how women traditionally get through law school. Those late hours aren’t all spent at the library.
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