This is a diatom. To be more precise, it is the glass house (frustule) of a dead diatom. It turns out a lot of people did have to ask what a diatom is, although they could as easily have looked it up for themselves, know what I’m sayin’? I do not study diatom range, history, fossils, life cycle or anything about them that contains more than ten letters. Mainly, I just examine the skeletons because they are pretty.
For my long term readers, you likely know this is the time of year when I make plans for the future and that this year is unique. You get a super blog today, covering a dozen topics, maybe more. I have the day off, and I mean truly off, the first time in eleven years which I won’t get into. It is also quiet compared to last year when Wallace had a crowd over. Christmas is a better bet for entertaining, though, as every place in town has a free buffet on this day. Except the casinos, where it is $12.99 as they have their own version of Thanksgiving. Ahem.
That future is different now, significantly different. I qualify to go back to school but this time I would never have to worry about whether what I study would result in a job or career. Like a rich kid, I could just attend classes forever until some government department doesn’t dare not to hire me. I learned that disgusting trick in Canada.
If it is one thing I don’t explain enough, it is that I have already done 99% of the things [that I enjoy] in this life that don’t cost money. The other 1% is because there are no women left who feel the same way that don’t want my soul in return. I can never give enough examples and the explanation has to be repeated because the effect wears off. Take this blog for instance. When I have no money, like the past few months, it tends toward chitchat because without money, I cannot follow new or existing projects.
What do I mean by money? I mean the amounts of cash needed to keep life interesting beyond the fundamentals. When I’m progressing, the extra knowledge seeps into this blog, as you will find out today. Let me put a dollar figure on it, for even reading costs money for the books. Bicycling costs a little, too. This computer means a weekly trip to the laundry room to charge the batteries. What I do have is long-term cost records that show keeping my nose pointed in the right direction requires $7.35 per day. More is always nicer, but that is the minimum.
That works out to $224 per month and I should (if all goes well) have $247. Who knows, I may get that microscope and soldering iron sooner than I planned. I get frustrated myself when I can’t relate new academic material. Said amount is less than some people spend on beer, yet it has still been a lean and hungry quarter for me. One of the worst, and I’ll admit to being smug about my situation in the past if more people will admit to being that way right now. Remember, I once made twice as much as any of you, RofR excepted.
So where does this leisure money come from? Before, it was a job or anything I could pick up. It should not be long before my budget again allows for diversions. Finally. Hence all the extra planning and blogging you find today. The new scooter requires tags and tax, the same 6% tax I forgot to pay on the Taurus back in 1993. I was distracted being in California staying at the Torrey Pines, but forget I did, until I got towed last year. I had to borrow the $80 tax from Wallace and borrowing is something I am loathe to do.
I’ll sell the Taurus for the new fees, which is probably the correct destination for such money. Even this sequence of events shows the gradual improvement in finances, as before I would have had to sell the car at a loss before I could buy anything new. Remember what I said about the system causing poor people to make bad decisions. Trust me, keep two-month float of cash under your mattress and you’ll be amazed how smooth your life becomes. If I’ve had a secret, that was it. And the previous six months that float was gone, gone, gone. I think we all could tell.
It has be a long and difficult journey back to square one for me. By that I mean I am at the same position now [in many ways] as I was at 20. Broke all the time, going back to school, no car, latest girlfriend just left town, no new clothes, everybody around me giving up, no gigs, guitar player in the doldrums, no help from nobody, it is all too familiar. At least it was a solo full circle for me, not like I’m divorced and crying the blues over lost opportunities or blaming anyone else. Got that, Toots?
Totally ironic, for I correctly used those opportunities and still wound up here. I’m surrounded by people who think they are invulnerable. They may too quickly find out a lifetime of work prepares you for nothing once a single incident wipes out your life savings. (My total loss was far, far, far over the $22,000 in my savings bank.) People only think they know enough to survive. They’ll wind up like the peasant class who “protect” themselves by never having anything to lose. Living like that is no fun. Or wasn’t fun, mom and dad.
Now, on to my favorite activity: learning new things about facts, not people. I used the quiet time today to read up on face recognition. It was astounding how simple it works. But more intriguing (to me) was finding out how digital sensors pick out motion. Take two digital photographs a split second apart. Chances are any moving object won’t shift much in so little time. Then apply a filter that detects only those pixels which have changed. The scary part is that I was testing Arduino sketches at the time.
Why scary? Because it means that face recognition software can be put on a $12 chip. It is only 18 lines of code that does not have to “recognize” anything, it only has to match up some pixels from a file, maybe your file. The Arduino is a hobby device, dammit, but look what it can do!
The nearby photo shows it in action but you didn’t get any of this from me. In earlier years computer searches used databases that had been built up for years. Face recognition requires a whole new database to be set up. Once that happens, imagine the cybercrime when somebody with $20 worth of equipment can track your movements all day long. Or the authorities. Or your wife/boss/enemies.Now the thinking part as only I can do, around here lately anyway. Okay, Zuckerberg made billions by implementing Facebook. He stole his software and I would have too had I found it lying around, but I can create. So why don’t I code a new social networking media that matches faces to personality traits? Then you could not only list your compatibility preferences, you could then start scanning for the babe that had your favorite looks to match.
History shows us there is a stop-at-nothing demand for that combination. Find me another Reb and you can have my billions. Because with her again, in a year I’d have it all back. I could take her old photo, get a pixel map, and start fluffing through the Facebook hordes (by turning it into just another database) until I find a hit and reach for the stars. I’d give you a thousand bucks if I could do that. I’ll bet a lot of people would.
For now, I tread along, examining Arduino code. What I’m doing is backwards, learning the code before the hardware but I think this will pay off since the code is the hard part. The past week I’ve been book-learning about sensors, specifically the methods of converting sensors of one range to controllers of a different range or frequency. How does one get a sensor that measures 110 to 220 volts down to the input range of the Arduino, 0 to 5 volts?
And that is your trivia for today. The conversion is done by three methods: dividing, amplifying and shifting. I never knew that before. The voltage, I’ve learned, is the most common variable. Voltage is subjected to arithmetic (my wording) and I do know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Just you wait until the right equipment arrives.
