You saw it here first. This is the bare bones robot test bench, under assembly. Some of the parts are just lying there, so don’t try to decipher the pattern. Shown are the locomotion (drive) and the vector (steering) motors. The “chip” at the left of center, I built that. It is the H-bridge that controls both speed and direction on the motors, although I would eventually like to use step motors for steering. The cooling fins are for the chip which gets too hot to touch. The breadboard has no jumpers yet. I’ll go on to explain how the difficulty building this is no longer the learning, but finding the parts.
Most Americans have never lived anywhere else, so they don’t know when our economy exhibits Third World behavior. They just think it’s a sign of the current recession or something temporary. Today I tried to buy a set of special drill bits. This may be another item not available in Florida. A lot can be inferred by what businesses are selling. Florida has definitely become a gronk state since I arrived here in 1999. Nobody sells printed circuit boards, but they got used cars and over ripe mangoes. They got life insurance and credit repair, but no integrated circuits. It’s become like Mexico City.Once the market pares itself down to short-term survival products, things become geared to where there is no ready potential for anybody who wants to strive for anything better. I’m getting the same tale repeatedly, “We stopped stocking that five years ago.” This is more serious than it appears, for once the system decays too far, it goes into arrears, it cannot fix itself. We may have to order the phenolic paper from Nevada via a distributor in Nova Scotia, Canada.
But there are dozens of places that will design and etch the plates for you. This is another warning signal, and one that was predicted by Adolf Hitler. He said people in democracies will eventually specialize to the point they wind up forming companies that charge each other out of existence for things that that people ought to do for themselves. This is because large businesses have the buying power to crowd even individual consumers out of the DIY market by making the retail parts so expensive that doing it yourself actually costs more. Our goal is to learn the skill, so it will cost us twice as much per board. That price difference is what Hitler was talking about.
What the hey, as long as we have the Circus Maximus to keep the proles entertained. On the return leg of my search I heard a roar in the sky and saw a stealth bomber heading northwest. Must be a football game downtown. Fifteen years after it was built, the stealth protected our way of life by bombing the snot out of Kosovo, which is in Michigan, I think. The bombers cost $2 billion each and we have 20 of them. This allows our military to provide simultaneous air cover for baseball, hockey and the Rose Bowl parade. Each aircraft has a life cycle that will cost $25 billion. That really sucks considering the true enemy of our nation all along was Martha Stewart.
In the end, I put 44 miles on the scooter and could not find half of my shopping list. I’m not spending $7 a pair on safety glasses at Home Depot, so I’ll look again in the morning. If it is this mild again tomorrow, I may take another leisure trip on the scooter. Why not, there’s no traffic on the roads. The bomber burned up all their gas for a month.
Today is a curious anniversary for me. I’ve had the same mailing address for 32 years. All the snoops who wonder why I never get any mail can chew on that. I’ve met a lot of paranoids in my life who don’t feel safe unless they know where other people get mail and from whom. The phone company was full of such head-cases. But of course, they think the other person is the problem. They have to think that, don’t you see? That’s a long time, 32 years. I’ve only known my best friend for 29 years. Let me clarify that, I’ve had many best friends, but only one that I have been in regular and uninterrupted contact with for so long is Marion, now living in Colorado. We’re both a long way from home. I have known one other person for 32 years running, but he’s a business acquaintance I see once every five years.
I’ve also been playing in a band since this month when I was 13, when I started a group from nothing in the face of fearsome opposition from my family and small-town circumstances. I went through long periods of not playing, up to six years at a time, but that was due to factors like a steady girlfriend, shift work, traveling, and lack of incentive. That changed in Florida, however, to lack of decent musicians to team up with. I never learned to sing until November two years back, not because I didn’t think it important. Besides, everybody knows bass players can’t sing and besides, singing was always somebody else’s job. What I can’t figure out is why most people consider the singer to be the leader of the band. It just isn’t so in most cases. Singers are a dime a dozen.
I took a few hours to listen to modern rock. It seems to have stopped evolving around twenty years ago. The tunes all sound the same, with much the same dispirited lyrics, like they were computer generated. In all that time, maybe fifty songs stuck with me, the rest I don’t remember because they are so bland. Worse, they sound like they were made with Garage Band or other layering software. I mean it does not sound live, and live is always better. Listening to the top ten county list isn’t much better.
Take the new Chili Peppers tune, “Rain Dance Maggie”. It drags along in spite of a too-busy bass line that sounds like lead guitar scale practice, but at least it’s rock. Some spastic in the background keeps beating on a cowbell. This is not anywhere near the same caliber of music they put out so few years back. Lady Antebellum’s “Just A Kiss” isn’t even country music. Doesn’t anybody produce fast music any more? Is the whole generation in a funk? I’m not a fan of feel-good music either, but today’s slow music is so depressing.
I hear there’s only one thing more pathetic than an old man starting to learn robots, and that is an old man who is not starting to learn robots.
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