Here is my Westclox back from the Russian watch repair dude. He replaced the mainspring and oiled all the friction points. You can tell by the tick-tock it is like new again, although he notes that many of the smaller cogs and pieces are showing signs of age and the clock will therefore always lose a minute or two per day. The alarm part is almost completely worn out. His wife sells replicas of Fabrege eggs.
I went for breakfast at Senor Café and decided not to go get JP up. Some time ago, Will from Jimbo’s mentioned they are having a big barbeque today. I was talking to him about the schedule of his guitar practice, as he is falling behind. He agrees, and we went to the Legion on Dixie one time to see the entertainment. It is a solo guitarist who does a lot of Broadway tunes I don’t care for. Lounge music. Mind you, that made it easy to point out to Will that we could be the ones on stage.By noon it was already becoming a furnace outside, so I did the week’s shopping and got right back here into the shade. One thing I’ll like about the new place is the ability to get a cross-current of air inside, both from the arrangement of doors and the new Pudding-Tat. I spent an hour practicing singing and there are certain types of tunes I can now fake as long as I concentrate on each note. Oddly, I have to focus so much that I often forget the lyrics. But then I remember, isn’t that similar to what I went through to learn each part of my entire show? It has all been a matter of co-ordination and this brings me one step closer to my goal.
While shopping, I met a guy installing a cash register scanner and it turns out we are both interested in the POS (point of sale) technology. He says there are complete databases already available for groceries and dollar stores. Those checkout scanners are frighteningly expensive, I believe over $4,000 each. That is likely due to the need for the lasers to read uneven bar codes from almost any scan angle. I may be able to get away with less because the book labels are flat. We have agreed to share any findings.
Broilers like today keep me indoors which lets me catch up on small projects. Sort of, since the work area is barely tolerable with the A/C on full. There’s only so much I can do wandering around nearly butt naked and tripping over the cat. I can’t seem to find the records I created for the ISBN codes I did for that dodo with the foreign rights (the guy who hired me to clean up his mess, but it turned out he just wanted his mess put on a computer). I think I’m about to sadly find out there is no big database of ISBN numbers. Too bad somebody doesn’t set one up in Lazybase. It is 93 degrees inside the house right now, but comfortable with all seven fans operating.
You know a song I like? That commercial where the guy in the pirate outfit sings about free credit dot com. I’ve discovered I can watch TV better if I have two sets. When one goes into the dumb commercials, I watch the other one. Then I can tolerate the thing and Pudding-Tat keeps out of my way. This is like a poor man’s PIP. One program showed an interesting item in operation, the ground penetrating radar. This contraption and I go back a long ways, I tried to invest in it during the early 1990s, but you had to know somebody back then, and just my luck, I knew Adolf.
The original plan was to use the machine to clear up munitions that had been tested on Indian land in the 1940s. The air force used to make target practice on the Indian reservations. I took the middle stance, in that the military pointed out the Indians had never made any such claim until the real estate became valuable. I was fully prepared to find what was down there, or get paid to not find what was down there. The negotiations with crazy Adolf dragged on so long that in the end I gave up on the venture. I’m glad to see the thing is not only in operation, but uses a computer to form an image of what’s in the ground (as opposed the polygraph-like ribbon printout on the original model).
The downside is that the radar has to be laboriously driven over staked out ground like a mine or metal detector, like a wheelbarrow on skids. I had hoped by now it would evolve to one of those systems where you spread out a set of detectors and the pulse takes a pictured of an acre at a time. Maybe I will look at the device again.
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