I was burning the midnight oil again, this time until 3:00 AM. One must not think this is work, it is my new hobby. It is like music, in that time spent on it is not deducted from your lifespan. You don’t work late. You read, think and calculate a little and before too long it is late.
The next project, shown here, is already breaking the bank. My budget does not allow for anything expensive and I don’t have enough matching LEDs for a 7x6 matrix. My only wholesale source is Hacktronics but I can’t afford to buy 500 right now. Yet it will cost me half as much to buy 5 spar packs from the Shack. These are management decisions. Hey, it is still a hell of a lot easier than dealing with people.I re-read every available source I have for Arduino commands, and not one of them mentions a multi-dimensional array. Every example is linear. There are at least two arrays here, allow me to differentiate between the two. The easy array is hooking up the components, I’ve already done a 3x3. That task is more tedious than complicated. But the software array to spell the (coincidentally) 43 letters, numbers, and punctuation, will require a very exact setup. If the Arduino is linear only, it can still be done, but what an onerous job, as the printing would then be controlled by the “digitalWrite” statement.
It is unwise to conclude that I am broke over these LEDs. I didn’t say that, I said they were over budget. Now if, like music, I was to suddenly make some money with the LEDs that would change everything. Let me explain something about success on a budget. The most I ever made at a regular job was $81,000 per year, and that was a long time ago. Yet I drove a Cadillac bought cash, took six overseas vacations per year, and lived in a house on the coast with two sunken living rooms. I had a private penthouse in Caracas.
I lived better than most millionaires who used to ask me how I did it when I didn’t even have a credit card. There is no magic, it is called planning. If I had to define the trick, I would say always have two dollars to spend in every situation where your adversaries have just one. They are in total richer, but they are locked in. They don’t own a credit card, it owns them. They don’t have cash where and when it counts.
Right now I could drop twice as much money as my opponents. I could buy a new car, or leave for Colorado, or show up in court while others are still chasing around trying to put together the financing. If I lived like everybody else, I’d be as broke as everybody else. If success was a matter of just counting the money, hell, I’ve been broke since my second heart attack. Yet I’m watching for that three bedroom on Las Olas. Just watching.
Take this one operation I know of. They are fixing up a mobile home that is going to cost them, in the end, more than they could sell it for. They’ve already sunk an estimated $26,710 into the place, if you include the cost of travel from Canada. No business sense whatsoever, for the few times they are here, they could have rented the best hotel in town. What are they thinking? Yet when I ran the place, it operated at a slight profit, maintenance was almost instant, and every bill was paid on time.
Then again, do consider their mentality. They have reached that Nirvana of old construction contractors. For every success, they claim the credit, and for every failure, they blame somebody else. This mentality is common among the lower orders. There was one beautiful mobile home I looked at over in Bamboo in December that had been abandoned for nine months. But the park manager cannot accept that he, and not the building, was taking the loss.
Therefore, instead of accepting my reasonable $3,000 cash offer, he jacked the price up to $7,050 to cover the $4050 back rent. I drove past y’day. The For Sale sign says $8,850. It is still vacant. Stupidity, folks, is not a secret weapon.
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