Here’s an historic house, Florida style from back in the days when Florida had any. This belonged to Joseph Young, the imaginative real estate surveyor who bought ten round-shaped acres downtown for $1,750 in the 1920s and promptly renamed it “Young Circle”. The same park now boasts 500 drug-related arrests per year. Here’s his house, which in accordance with American public law, has reputedly been repossessed several times for unpaid property taxes.
Although Joe had not yet learned about World War II, the city is still growing, albeit at 1% per year. Could it be that there is no vacant land left? To his credit, it is now the twelfth largest city in Florida.Another round of good news, though mainly just welcome confirmations. The results of my May medicals are in. Provided I can stifle my urges to run the Boston Marathon, deep-sea dive, and take that $250,000 annual stock broker’s job (still an open offer if I want it), I won’t be dying any year soon. At least not of a bad heart. Or what’s left of it after the Reb left.
They say, somewhat more scientifically than I, that folks who don’t adapt die. This “they” being the seventeen prosperous and well-rested doctors on my payroll plus the throngs of green-uniformed staff at Memorial who always smile and hum “Happy Days” whenever I arrive.
But adapt from what? One’s chosen lifestyle, that’s what. It doesn’t matter if you are a vegetarian, two-pack a day huffer, or fry your eggs in bacon grease, when something goes wrong, you have to change whatever went before, the operative word being “whatever”. I miss my old life of philanderin’, Chinese food, county-wide walks and wild sex twenty-one times a week. It’s easier to take if you subscribe to the theory that as men reach middle age or older, it is natural for them to crave less and less Chinese food. I’ve heard tell of this phenomenon.
Chalk up another Florida eight hours on Integrated Circuits. It’s all theory, since there is no place to buy them without crossing the border into the USA. This type of study slows everything for we have no idea what is practical or important though it certainly keeps one out of the summer sun. The question was raised, “Why can’t we use relays instead of transistors to control the H-bridge?” I undertook to learn the answer because we could, I suppose, do what we do without digital components.
One, relays take a lot of power which we can’t afford. Two, relays themselves are bulky and expensive. Three, relays contain a coil that can flyback worse than the motor. Four, you cannot turn a relay on 10 million times per second. During this extra study, we took a long look at shift registers which apparently can operate 100 million times per second. We have no equipment to match that kind of performance, not even the rate which I can consume sweet & sour chicken balls. Our motors are dependent on Pulse Width Modulation and transistors are the best choice for that, far and away.
Additionally, electricity is not electronics. It is difficult to change performance parameters without rewiring the whole dang thing from the ground up, the analog parallel dating women at your workplace. When digital is used, the change is initiated by altering the code. Said control is also many times more accurate and code takes your mind off Chinese food.
While there is an abundance of easy electronics projects on-line, most are repetitious. I personally have no need for 50 versions of how to build a water level sensor or a cricket chirp sound device. What I did find curious is the large number of people whose advanced code begins to address the same problems I find with the C+ language, namely lack of intellectual structure, anal retentive abuse of punctuation marks, inconsistent command formats, and that sure sign of mouth-breathers, dot notation.
In a separate occurrence, Laura the Karaoke lady texted me she was back in town. Considering I never knew she left, I dropped in and sang a couple of my favorites early last evening. The front row was packed with black ladies who were total country fans, unusual as it was not a country bar. There was also a tall blonde babe in sequined jeans, the kind you don’t see around here. A smooth tightie, more burger than bun.
As I got to leaving, that blonde called out my name in disappointment I wasn’t staying. Wha? I have no idea who she was but A) I was broke and had to leave, and B) something like that is not wandering around unattached. When I say tall, I’d say she was 5 foot 8 and wearing spikes. The kind I like to take to the Hong Kong Kitchen.
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