Last evening was one of the most draining club meetings yet, dragging on past four hours. As we approach the initial construction stages all kinds of technical problems happen along. Furthermore, the on-line forums are getting tedious as we have started to notice a lot of the experts are a bit too self-styled for my liking. A few examples will define my point of view. While we are still novices at robotics, we are well-informed about what we don’t know and can pick it out in others in a flash.
So, imagine what it is like to encounter an “expert” who has not solved any of the problems we know to be on the beginner’s agenda. One of these experts wanted to know why certain lines of code were present, to which I replied they were needed when the robot bumped into something. It took twenty minutes to convince the “expert” what we know for certain, that everything in the universe is sooner or later going to bump into something else. I dropped out of the chat. What was I supposed to do? Try to convince the guy why Einstein proved that nothing can ever stand still, relatively?
Another huge group on line are those who plainly must be lying because they have not solved the type of problem that our club knows to be a part of the learning process. M and I joked about how several times we had to run out to the yard with an unplugged glue gun to fix something before the glue cooled. A true professional would quickly understand that is because our extension cord wasn’t long enough. Instead, we got squid-brains who told us we must be doing it wrong.
The same goes for authors who publish videos that only show the finished product or write instructions that can’t be followed without resorting to external help. Like the Pakistani whose page keeps coming to the top of any search for a cell phone remote ringer. I want one because I can’t hear my cell ring in my pocket when riding the scooter, but that guy is no help at all.
I’ll tell you who is a posse of losers: guys who put backing tracks of their stupid taste in music thinking it will convince the world they are not only into electronics, but so kewl, too. I’m trying to figure out the missing components and on comes blasting some synthetic Paki-rock that sounds like singing class at the retard school.
A partly cloudy day found me doing the outdoor chores. I’m going to replace my scooter headlamp with a waterproof halogen kit. The new computer is going back to the shop for the fourth time, I’m afraid it is the chip itself, which means I will likely have to do a forced upgrade to Windows 7 and begin to relearn everything all over again. I’ve wired up and tested a turn signal warning light on the scooter because it is so easy to forget to hit the cancel button.
The sun came out just past noon, so for siesta I began reading an odd book called “The Statement”. The worn-out theme is the hunt for ex-Nazis which makes no distinction between justice and revenge. But this book does it nicely plus throws in a political theme not too well known outside of France. The Allies portrayed de Gaulle as a liberator, but France knows he ran to England and hid out doing nothing while taking all the credit.
What’s more, the French Resistance was really a communist-led guerilla force who were convinced that Stalin would roll right over Germany into France. They were prepared to take over the government, which was their real motive from the start. But what keeps me reading is the rarely published view of the Catholic church protecting Nazi fugitives on the run. They do it, but not many people understand why.
When you have separation of church and state, the church then has the opportunity (and if powerful enough, the option) to dispense its own justice. This is particularly true of the Catholic church where the heads of monasteries and convents have enough autonomy to act without permission from the Vatican, or even telling anyone for that matter. Myself, I note that most of the Nazis who persecuted Jews did so with complete legality at the time and once hostilities ended, many became outstanding citizens of the new communities. That includes the Nazi scientists who spearheaded the US space program. I will never champion ex post facto law.
Later in the evening, I put in some extra hours and believe I have the pseudo-code ready for the robot. It is seven main modules, two in the setup and five in the loop. Without connecting a single wire yet, I believe this robot will be able to navigate a maze just difficult enough to prove it is not acting either randomly or in a predetermined fashion. I designed the maze for that expressed purpose; it looks like the letter ‘T’ stacked on top of itself three times.
