I’ll barely mention robots for the next short while because I am at the stage where every step is a major problem that has to be conquered. I confess being tempted to quit and have actually thrown books against the wall, not a metaphor. What went before seems easy by comparison of trying to bring all the knowledge together in a workable unit. I no longer believe these high school clubs could possibly be building anything from the ground up, including the code. They must be following directions or examples to a degree that I have rejected as a needed part of the true learning process.I left a message with Erin, the backup, backup guitarist and my former student from 2009. My conclusions over the recent failure of the keyboardist show that I have not been exerting enough leadership. More than a normal degree of that is necessary to find good performing musicians in Florida and I’ve been allowing people who are not in a band to behave as if they were. I know Charlie Daniels didn’t create his own groups, but he has the reputation of being a bassist that finally threw all the deadbeats out the door and put his own group together. That’s legend, not fact. But I need some sort of guideline.
Erin has the right stuff; she went from living room to stage in six weeks. That is the average amount of time I’ve wasted with so-called professional musicians. In Erin’s case, I was giving lessons, but she is the rare type I don’t mind teaching. The difference from 2009 is that back then I was unable to sing. Trust me, the ability to sing cuts down the horsh you have to put up with by a factor of at least 10,000.
The bottom line here is that except for my own protégés (Jag and Erin), most musicians I’ve auditioned since 2006 have deliberately over-rated their own ability to play simple tunes. Everything rests on the how efficiently a guitarist can learn to play a new three chord song start to finish, and then play it consistently that way forever after, something akin to the level of a trained chimpanzee.
Yet, every guitarist, and now one keyboardist, so far has shown no real aptitude for this most basic of all band skills. Instead, their words about their competence have ranged from outright lies to borderline delusion. To a one, they have tried to cover up the fact they can’t do it, usually by quoting some minor successes they have had in the past. Like I’m going t fall for that. My original Florida guitarist did not learn a single new tune in six years before I got rid of him.
At the other extreme, the few musicians I know that can play a tune completely through have their own solo careers, conveniently sidestepping the task of starting a band. Don’t worry, I have devoted considerable thought to doing the same and I would have saved a lot of effort already if I’d gone that route the instant I discovered I could sing. Let’s not rule anything out but do recall, I have an affinity for duos in the first place, for soloing is a dry lifestyle at best.
If you notice a huge increase in spelling errors lately, blame MicroSoft again. They have hidden the autocomplete command in Word 2007 and I have not yet found it. Their on-line help is the sick joke it ever was and keeps telling me to open the “Tools” menu. There is no such menu in this version. I see once again I will have to find the time to put up with the Retards from Redmond. My kingdom for a real word processor, since all the thousands of blogs you can read here represent only six years of my total records. Six years is nothing. “The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates.
Get this, a printer that writes on window glass. It involves a print head hanging by notched cables from the ceiling and drawing images by motors that control the nozzle position. Easier shown than described, look at Der Kritzler .
IMAX is showing dull movies on this, the one weekend I like to check it out. More dinosaur and nature films that don’t tell you anything you didn’t learn in grade school. But I did find a WT5011BSR, this is a seven-segment LED. It is the one I was looking for instead of the junk people sold me, yet they can’t be blamed themselves because they had no clue either. It has the pins along the top and bottom, so it can be operated correctly on a standard breadboard without the nest of extra wiring I had to devise for my experiments. Talk about learning the hard way. Or just talk about learning.
Again you have it, not a single word in any of the dozens of publications I studied about LEDS with all their directions and illustrations, that this different and specialized piece of gear was required or even existed. Maybe you recall me crabbing that their diagrams were all wrong. Yes and no. These authors consistently failed to warn us the part they were using was not sold by electronics shops. An on-line search shows the only places that stock this component are in Russia. And that, North America, is why you are losing the race so badly.
