In a most unusual event, Fred was not in the shop today. We had a crowd waiting outside, but the rain drove us away. I’m an old Seattle hand when it comes to rainy days so I read a 40-page Arduino text, concerning intricacies of the coding language. It uses the retard C structure, which should be re-named the “sometimes yes sometimes no
One device that always fascinated me was those moving LED signs, the ones with a bulb or two always burned out. I think I could now program one, but not on the Arduino. From what I’ve learned so far, there is an internal limit of 30,720 bytes. Then again, that may be a challenge I can meet, in my day, we were trained to write code as compactly as possible. RAM and core time was very expensive in the old days, you could’t do the C+ trick of keep adding more code until you found something that worked that one time.
My side project this week is to write the pseudo-code that would move a single letter across a small LED display. This is not as apparent as it sounds, does the letter move, or only a single row of LEDs? What is the minimum grid of LEDs? I don’t yet have an Arduino, but let’s see how close I make it to their solution. I plan to use an array with the letter “E” to begin. Will Arduino accept a two-dimensional array? Does everyone out there know what a two-dimensional array is?
This is one of those situations where I truly miss Canan, the green-eyed Turkish girl I met in computer school. Now, there was a gal that triumphed over barriers most other women can’t even imagine; by comparison other women’s biggest problem is primarily their own bad attitude. The Oprah sort, who think any damn good argument why they screwed everything up lets them off the hook. "I was young, I needed the money."
As long as there is a woman like Canan in this world, no other woman will ever convince me her problems are all men’s fault. (Their rotten choice in men, yes, but men, no. That stupid women’s theory that all men are alike cannot explain even a single instance of a person like John Lennon.) Canan is proof it is possible for women not to wallow in self-pity their entire lives.
Ah, but, Canan! Always willing to participate in new intellectual challenges for their own sake. She could actually face a problem without spouting off that her parents tried to marry her off to a 70 year old man. Take a lesson, gals. Canan had a rare curiosity about new things. All I’ve met since I got to Florida are women whose total life focus is their own immediate personal luxury, as in “How can you even think about the letter E when I’m in a bad mood?”
Canan would have been a welcome companion last year while I was toying with Morse code. She would have joined in just for the fun of it and today we’d both be receiving 60 wpm. With other women, you give up trying to explain learning is still important, like. The same other women who later in life make snarky complaints that you’ve got “all these things you can do for extra cash” [implying it is your fault they don’t]. Well, duh, again. The saddest thing about Canan was that I met her the same week I met the Reb.
