Christmas was relatively quiet this year, we’ll get to that. First take a look at this red sports car, the make of which I do not know or care to learn. Some guy, maybe 20 years old, was circling A1A and Collins (the two main roads parallel to Miami beach. This type of bozo is one reason not to live in that area. The car itself attracted little attention, so he kept revving it constantly and changing gears. That made a characteristic roaring sound up and down the lane. He's playing the song of his people.
I was behind him for around 25 blocks and got to notice the behavior of the pedestrians toward the car. Alas I could not video the action but very few people paid any attention to the car and none paid attention to the driver. Maybe one person in fifty even looked, and most of the time is was heavy-set middle-aged men. Probably less than ten women even glanced over, and most of those didn’t see the car, rather they smelled the money.Another cold snap, so I reviewed Arduino code. That C+ language has got to be the worst thing that ever happened to the programming community. It is a complete departure from the concept that the code itself should not be more challenging than what is being accomplished. It has no coding advantages over even simple BASIC, yet C+ is touted to be an advanced language. Horse hockey.
Sure enough, Zuckerberg, the FaceBook guy, was named Time’s Man of the Year. My question remains not how he did it, but where did he learn how to code it? I’ve never gotten a straight answer out of any college on that one, yet I know that is where he at least must have been exposed to the Internet coding procedures. Time makes an analogy that his “empire” is the third largest in the world with 550 million subjects and more personal information about them than any existing government. (Google was soon to surpass Facebook as the largest collector or personal and private citizen information and behavior tracking.)
I salvaged the piezo igniter out of one of those long stem butane lighters. I inadvertently pressed it and my guitar pickup clicked from almost sixteen feet away. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately hooked up my volt meter and dang if that thing doesn’t put out 1,000 volts. To be sure, I pinched the wire and let it shock me (don’t worry, the amperage is tiny). Wow, that bit. I must look into that further.
Now Christmas Eve. I drove the coast down to Gables Estates and despite being two hours late, I was the first one there. I got a book and read in the back yard until JZ showed up, looking very poorly. Of course, I would say that about anybody who shows up for Xmas dinner not wearing a tie. The crowd was smaller this year, with mainly close family. The kids are all grown up or growing up, the youngest [children in the group] still got the most camera time. The outdoor table was mostly middle eastern foods, including ground nuts and smoked eggplant (baba gnoosh?).
As usual, everyone ran short of memory cards. We used my 2 gigabyte Sandisk and all the good scenes were captured, just no extras this year. Unusual footage would be me signing carols along with Mary-Jo and the grandkids. My voice made a good impression and when asked why I didn’t sing last year, I was telling the truth. Last year, I couldn’t sing.
Christmas dinner was chicken shish-kebab, lamb, rice and all the fixin’s. A nice touch was the yogurt sauce, which seemed to go with just about everything. After the traditional speech and prayers, the rest of the evening was gifts and good-byes. For me, the real treat is that I get to borrow books and there is surely a great collection over there. Today I chose “The Life-Giving Sea”, by David Bellamy. JZ and his son grew up together in Coral Gables.
May I clear something up while we’re talking childhood. I was not raised in Texas, I was only born there. I don’t directly know or remember anyone from Texas as lad, but I can’t say that for sure because I’ve never been back long enough to ask around. I grew up in the northwest, never living in but usually within driving distance of Seattle, Washington.
Among my gifts this year were home made jam and a web camera. To me, cameras are a gadget and I see this one becoming my “scooter-cam”. I’ll be testing it while waiting for my Arduino to arrive. I heard webcams are battery-hungry.
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