This is a laser pickup assembly, showing the moveable lens at center. See the four little copper studs around the outer edge? The magnetically move the lens around. I was hoping to get a shot of the tiny flexible wires holding it in place, but the new camera I was using does not have capability to get any closer than this.
It was a little cooler, still enough to drive me indoors all day at the shop. There is plenty of trouble brewing with the rent, the landlady delivered some documents. But upon reading them, I’m sure she got them off the Internet or typed them up herself. Either way, she is presenting increasingly desperate behavior. The time to speculate in real estate is not when you are 73.I posted a couple more articles on FireHow, but time has shown it is hardly worth the effort. I’ll flesh it out with increasingly simple topics to reach my quota. Then, if they don’t start paying a decent rate, I’ll start looking around for other places to post the same 100 items.
I’ve also notice that some newcomers seem able to get multiple hits on their articles within a short time after posting. They are up to something. Their articles are so amateur and generic, I suspect it is a group of around 15 people who agree to click on each other’s posts as they prowl the Internet for similar sites.
I have time, unwanted time, to experiment, so I put a new camera through the paces. Rarely have I found such a uselessly complicated contraption. The Kodak EasyShare CX4310. It has a few good features as in hopelessly few against the troubles of the bad ones. For example, it has an internal memory should you forget to replace the memory card and it can play back a slide show via a video port. But the LCD times out after 4 minutes and is difficult to get back, prompting you to turn the camera off and back on. You don’t want to do this much.
Because the camera resets, or more accurately, forgets any special settings when it is turned off or times out. When I turn the flash off, I want it to stay off. Same with the macro, which is even stranger because it turns itself off after every shot. It isn’t really a macro, as you can only get to around six inches close and the quality is quite poor at that range. Worst feature – a shutter button that has several functions, one of which seems to turn off the LCD viewing screen after each shot. There is also an unacceptable shutter delay. These idiosyncrasies make the camera an overall bad choice.
Yet, it does have three separate power supplies. Batteries, a USB cable and a DC in. I’ll keep it for parts and see if I can match it up with an Arduino to override some of the annoyances. It also has a docking port and comes with a 100-page user’s manual.
I stayed home and watched a TV movie, “The Client”. I like the courtroom scenes. Afterward, a documentary on Oprah Winfrey revealed she got received a $1,000 scholarship to start college. Hey, I’d hardly call that poverty, at least not in the sense that I knew it. That’s why I suspect claims by people who say they are self-made. I’ll tell you what real poverty is when it comes to scholarships.
Poverty can be delegated. In my environment, you did not date to even ask about scholarships. Nor dare to apply for any, because you would inevitably receive some letter or phone call about it, which could be a painful and dangerous experience. Remember, punishment back then was instant, and even mentioning a scholarship would be akin to declaring, “Say, I don’t like it much around here. I don’t trust you people, so I’m asking some strangers for help. And I have enough spare time on my hands to write applications.”
Suffice to say that was not a good plan and, no, I'm not exaggerating. You have nothing to do but fill out forms full of lies suggesting things aren't already perfect? Out you go, immediately to work clearing farm land by hand 35 miles from town. At by age 18, when you left never to return, you had no idea how scholarships even worked. That, and every other gainful thing in life had to be learned from scratch on a zero budget. Oprah’s claims of early poverty really disappoints me when I hear the facts like the cool thousand. She seems to have forgotten that much money represented a tremendous head start most of the rest of us could hardly have dreamed of at that time. That's like $10,000 today.
Then, it was a documentary. One can draw only so many conclusions from TV. For instance, why spend tons of money to become a lawyer? Why do the police need so much evidence? What’s with these expensive crime labs? All they [the police] need to do is watch CSI for every lesson they’ll ever need on how to trick people into incriminating themselves.
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