There are times when old fashioned isn't bad. Here is a used 6-string bass with a massive price tag. But it's not as big as the neck on that puppy. If you call a guitar an axe, you can call this bass a snow shovel. No human hand can wrap around the diameter of that slab of hardwood. I wonder what school is advocating the use of these strange and unweildy battering rams? The regular bass already adequately overlaps the lower notes of a guitar, and getting a lower sound is a matter of tromping on your octaver. I have a hard time imagining who would play a bass like this.
I now have a better credit rating than the USA. It had to happen, these people that live on credit cards are just as dumb as the leaders they elect. The repurcussion of this one are not going to fade away easily. But, we all have better things to do than feel concerned for people who like to borrow money and play big shot. For example, PCBs, or printed circuit boards. A special Friday study session led to the same conclusion as last month--the club should acquire this technology. Without stating it is necessary, we should possess the means to produce these boards. Even if, in the future, we use a commercial service, it does not make sense to rely on the crumbling infrastructure to keep us supplied with anything we could make ourselves in a pinch. For $30-$50 it is worthwhile to learn this roughly 20-step process. What's more, it is in better keeping with our policy of self-reliance.
True, I did order an H-Bridge. But not until the circuitry had been studied for six hours and two working prototypes had been built and bench-tested. At the time the order was placed, the H-Bridge was completely analyzed and understood, like 500%. Self-reliance.
Watch for the newest credit rip-off. Car rental companies are charging "loss-of-use" fees if you return a car that needs repairs. The assumption is that they would have had the car rented out during the down time, but that is how idiots think. Also, a new type of on-line bidding (see Quibids) that charges the user for each bid is catching people used to bidding free on eBay. Some have been hit for hundreds of dollars. Of course, this type of stealing is thoroughly protected by American business law. Oh, and the recommended payback of the student loans now required to become a medical doctor is now $831 per month for 30 years. There's nothing like progress.
I’ve reviewed the jam session with the new keyboardist and I conclude it is worth a try. He’ll have to lose those auto-chords, learn to play question-answer fills and breaks, and is due for some lengthy practice without vocals to get his chops into shape. I’m asking about the wisdom of teaming up with someone who right now can’t play piano as well as myself. Neither am I overlooking an opportunity.
What’s this? Gillette, the razor blade people, have put in an order for 500 million RFID tags. Tags that are too expensive (30 cents each) to place on most products they sell. If you have a theory on that, I’d like to hear it. I was in the library again this morning, with all the people in there just to enjoy the ice-box air conditioning. I’ve read much of my $40 Arduino textbook seven times over, so I wanted a break to study RFID technology. I do not recommend this text because of the seriously shoddy errors, often at very important junctures in the code or explanations where Martian precision (my wording) is required.
RFID is an intriguing offshoot of electronics. Here’s some laymen’s info on how they work. The RFID “reader” is a small plate that sends out a beam at a specified frequency that matches the RFID “chip” to be read. My studies are the 125kHz range, or a carrier of 125,000 cycles per second and I’ve written to a supplier in Indonesia that I will make their American websites grammar-perfect if they will supply me with four readers and five thousand tags.
The newer RFID works at 2.45gHz, that's 2.45 billion with a “b” cycles per second. I read an excellent analogy of how RFID is similar to the Morse signaling system using sunlight and flashing mirrors. The carrier, in that instance sunlight, works at a far higher frequency than the dots and dashes. RFID is similar, in that the data exchange is very slow by comparison. It can work with AM or FM technology, where a binary 0 is two microseconds and a binary 1 is six microseconds, regardless of the carrier frequency separated by circuit “noise” during the balance of each sixteen microsecond clock pulse.
There, had enough? Now explain my $54 electricity bill this month. I used much more than that, recall how I installed a second A/C unit on the west wall? And I’ve been using it a lot since the hot spell began. I suspect the power company is again sending me average billings, not coming out and reading the meter. Once they do, I get a bill for $150 or something.
