Today is my second anniversary of leaving Wilmington, NC. And that is the last time I’ll ever associate with working class women. No, she wasn’t my date, but did she con me into thinking she wanted to learn computers and get ahead in the world, same as myself. Instead, she wanted to live for free, watch TV dating shows and talk on the phone all day. Oh, and complain how bad she had it. Here’s the bus ticket, dated April 9, 2009. If it seems it was longer ago, that’s from comparing a sluggish lifestyle to the pace real people live.
What can I say? In a moment’s oversight, my complete computer files have been wiped out. Both the originals and the backup copies, gone. Every note, every document, every last piece of music. I was making backup copies and hit the wrong key. It’s not so much that it happens, but that they still make a computer where it can happen. Good thing I never lose more than three months of information. But for me that can be a lot of data.Also lost were all my Arduino programs (confusingly called “sketches”), but since I’m a real programmer, I can live with that. Maybe this is the incentive I need to find out if files really can be recovered from a drive with a deleted partition. I mean, I know the files are there because it would have taken hours to wipe them all out.
That kept me in all day and Dave-O came by. I could not figure out why he was going to McDonalds all the time, but it turns out he really does not know how to cook. So I talked him into a trip for a big box of frozen chicken and made up a huge meal with rice. The secret ingredient is Russian dressing, but to old boys like use, every sauce is “gravy”. You won’t believe how much it took to fill the guy up. There’s a guy with a food allowance who can’t cook it. Ha!
Another thing Dave-O cannot do is play guitar, though he tried again today. The man is totally tone deaf. I am partially tone deaf, have been all my life, but total is rare. Most people can tell when something isn’t resonating. In another oddity, as soon as he begins to strum his one beat, he loses all ability to count, always managing to get to five by end of any measure. You’d have to see it. He honestly cannot tell when he is off beat. But that did not stop us from playing rock music, know what I mean?
I didn’t say, but there are two ways to be learn the music trade. Sit down and train your musical ear, or take years and years of lessons with no guaranty of results. Yet, that isn’t strictly true. If you play the same thing over and over enough years, you will eventually get a credible version with the trade-off that you will play it exactly the same whether you want to or not. If you try to jam, it will sound like you’ve traded one standard rhythm for another. Most guitarists I know play that way, which explains why they always like the Zydeco version: it often represents their own best attempt at trying to sound original.
Lying low with this flu, at least it isn’t severe. I stayed in anyway and really tackled the transistor problem. By the way, all the videos were wiped out, too. The thing is, I’ve either got a batch of 20 bad transistors or of all the material I read, I picked the ones versions are wrong. I’ve isolated and tested every component and cannot get a transistor to work like the textbook.
My parts work the opposite, somehow drawing the collector current from the base. The matrix is at a standstill until I figure this one out. Also, somehow the transistor can tell if it is a chassis ground or a common ground. I’ve even considered a faulty bajillion (that’s vernacular for the breadboard, it has a bajillion holes). I decided to wire a pilot model of the matrix with the wire wrapping tool, learning that the component lead can’t be more than 5/8” and I hope they make some other color than blue so I can keep track. Each LED has to be hand-wired one at a time, you can’t do them in batches.
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