My best customer this week left for Israel. He delivered a stack of tapes for me to work on, but that means no income from that source until July. By coincidence, however, doggie wigs may be back in the picture. I have it from a reliable source that not much has happened in that business since I left 18 months ago due to high blood pressure symptoms. They need some new cost figures for the larger dog wigs so the Indonesian factory can work back to a cost price. I’ll consider it if there is direct bus service.I then read the latest in natural food diets to find out sweet breads are now verboten. I rarely eat donuts and gooey bread, but they mean even ordinary sweet buns. Like I have with my coffee. They recommend more fish. I already eat fish three times a week. What do they want? No wonder I suspect dieticians are the real makers of baloney.
Another colossal downpour trapped me in the library for two hours. Having recently read about metal crystals, I was attracted by a book on jet engines turbine blades. If the data is correct, the most powerful fighter jet engine today has 39,000 pounds of thrust. That is less than ten times the German Me262 (Jumo) that flew back in 1942 with 4,000 pounds of thrust. I find that revealing.
Library also means you get some trivia. The average person who circumnavigates the world by sailboat averages 250 miles per day. The route takes them south of Australia and New Zealand. The sailing process is largely automated, allowing up to six hours sleep at a time. No wonder sailing is so popular with the DMV staff.
Driving past on the freeways, I’ve often wondered why those white fiberglass radar domes were mostly the same size. Turns out they house Doppler radar and that is the 38 foot diameter best suited for the device. I don’t know the wavelength, but it is a microwave length and it bounces off raindrops. That’s how they know what direction the rain is moving. That’s rain, not snow.
Another area of research was the copyright protection of wma files. These are the MicroSoft answer to MP3, except they can be rendered unplayable unless you have a purchased copy. They only require 64kb per second or recording time, or half what is required by an MP3 of the same length. So, this wma format is worth investigating although using it is another matter. FYI, wav files require 1,400 kb per second.
Looking for a speaker crossover in one of Fred’s catalogs, I discover the laser I took apart last week is called a “laser pickup assembly”. And the better ones sell for $15. Not bad, considering the technology was unimaginable not that long ago.
Some fan mail directed me to the Craigslist musician posts, where I see there are several bass players who share my sentiments about guitarists. In fact, one of them quoted my May 10 blog concerning “guitaritis”, including a link to that page. Somebody, probably a guitarist, posted some words about how hard it is to find a good bass player.
His use of the word “good” was not wise. I am not surprised that most guitarists don’t have a clue what is good or why they keep meeting bad bass players. It works like this way. To a guitarist, a good bass player is the one who plays what the guitar player wants, which means that bassist was formerly a guitar player, who are known to make the absolute worst bass players. It’s a vicious circle of their own making.
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