Here’s a whole platter of food for thought. Ha-ha, that's the thoughts, not the food. Fooled ya! This is the packed Sunday parking lot for the French flea market on Atlantic Shores (the east entrance to the nearby casino). You can’t see it all, but there are more customers at the market than at the club. My guess is 350 cars, while the casino average is a slow 85-ish, maybe. What’s more, the Canadian crowd is steadier during the weekdays. Is therefore the Canadian economy doing better? Or is it just further behind the times?
The scooter pays for itself over again in this one day. It has been so productive, don’t even worry about the tiny costs I’ve had keeping it running. Even if I ashcan the thing, I come out ahead. This afternoon, I bought a Shwinn electric bicycle for $40. It had the electric motor (a small chain-driven motor connected to the rear axle) I priced at $280 in frustration some months ago. It has the same gear linkages as my famous Jamus and if it does not convert over, I still have the electric bike I can sell. This bargain could not have been found without the scooter so anyone who wants to tally things up knows the scooter has been the real champ for over a month now.The Arduino arrived. After weeks of anticipation and months of planning, it is here. Brand new and shiny in the box. I am finally now a research facility of one. With the extra time freed up, I cruised through the Grade B trailer courts to see what was available, and again conclude that this place was the best deal anyone could possibly have found.
[Author's note 2016-01-16: I'm saying here that the old double-wide was the best deal ever found in the area. It was an incredible bargain and I single-handedly both found it and got it for half-price at the rock bottom of the market. All of that effort went to waste because I trusted another person to go partners with it on me. His relations stepped in and convinced him it was his place and he could start acting the bully.
The original deal was we go halves on the place and then I buy it outright from him in a couple of years. Instead, the old fool wound up losing on it, and I lost also because it was the best deal ever. Part of the problem is he and his family did not have the brains between them to see it. Years later, I'm still looking for something comparable--but 300 miles away.]
Two bedrooms, tiled floors, two dining rooms, patio and a double-wide with a single lot rent. I mean “found” as a retirement democracy, not a Mussolini dictatorship with family relations who never fancied (or coveted) Florida until after all my hard work was done. There will probably never be, in this lifetime, another Florida place as perfect as this one, but only perfect as originally planned. Good luck one person trying to operate alone or by remote control. He tried it, and had the place for sale at a loss once he found out I had been the component making the system work.
I spent a leisurely morning learning more about components for I did not know the Arduino was here until later. In a package of 100 “assorted” capacitors, 65 are labeled “10”. That’s a ten with an underline, which also appears nowhere in the charts I’ve collected. I’ll assume three things independently. These tens are either the most commonly used, the cheapest, or the most useless. I spent two hours soldering three components and damaged several of the circuit board connections. This is far trickier than soldering leads back at the phone company and there has to be a better way. Meanwhile, I’m going to get some extra boards and keep practicing until I get it right.
A callout from last week phoned to say his computer was not working right. His description points to one factor: a teenage son who is into pornography, but the reality that it is possible all the symptoms could conceivably result from sheer innocence means. So no smug smiles when you run across the files. Always argue that on computers, everybody has reasonable doubt. Even when there hardly isn't any. When it comes to computers, a smoking gun is just another bit of circumstantial evidence.
But I’ll tell you how to narrow down the suspect list. Establish different log-on accounts. It is not generally known, although if you dig deep enough you’ll find it here; that viruses only attack the user who stumbled upon them, not the rest of the computer. At least at time of writing. It is therefore easy to snag somebody by giving them a separate account. Then again,I am dead against denying anybody information that they are already old enough to seek. If I had been prevented from finding correct facts, as my parents and the entire system tried to do, I would have never got past my teens without a shotgun wedding. Then there would be no blog, a catastrophe indeed.Here’s another thing you don’t see every day: a Coleman gas lantern apart for maintenance. When the light glows yellow, the generator has a coating of soot that causes the fuel to spit instead of spray. You can hear it. The soot also coats the inside of the globe and the porcelain finish on the hood, further diminishing your light. The guy at Pro Bass helped me install a generator for dual gas, but he tightened the nut (shown here) so much I have to buy a special wrench to remove it. You can also see how the soot has coated the flow tube and the mantle on the right. Um, if you try this yourself, be careful, okay?
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