Here’s something I invented. This isn’t the final form, but an intermediate stage to show more detail. It is a resistor chart that lets you look up values by matching the color patterns. No more tedious memory work and mental commas. You got a brown-green-yellow and it is 150,000Ω. Easy as pie. If you flip the chart over you can do a reverse lookup. I’ve submitted this to Hacktronics for publication as an original work. If anyone has done it before, they’ve kept it a total secret on-line.
The questions on everybody’s lips are what’s happening with the scooter and the robotics club? First, the scooter. It never did adapt to American grade fuel. I’m pointing the finger at that 10% ethanol content nobody asked for. Even with the highest octane commonly available (93), there is no carburetor setting good across the operating range. One must add octane booster at ten cents per gallon to get both an even idle and a smooth run. But the scooter remains so vastly economical compared to a car that this cost is written off. Other than that, whenever bulbs and such broke, they were replaced with superior (and expensive) American parts and the small problems have tapered off. Like my cars, the scooter leads a spoiled life.
Robitics is progressing but slowly. The easy gains of early times are over, we are knuckling down to the tricky parts. We already own parts we do not know how to connect and it is hardly surprising that components often arrive without special harnesses or adapters to make them work. Hardly surprising, that is, considering the complete morons they must have designing this stuff. Despite this gronk impediment, we are at the level of being able to “hardwire” items on the bench that we cannot find elsewhere. It is crude but we know the specs down to the individual transistor.
As examples, the most recent order included some male pins but no female sockets. The stepper motors had a ten-tooth gear on the shaft which fits nothing we own and the wiring ran to a plastic plug we have no way of connecting. On the positive side, we are confident all these setbacks will be overcome, our dislike of electrical designers will increase, and we are gradually accumulating the correct tools to do some mighty fancy work these days.
The rulebook says I must mention the Wall Street protestors as today’s most unusual happening. Let me state I find these people pitiful because they are trying to protest all at once each tiny evil they let slide over the past 40 years while they tried to grub and borrow their way to riches. Now they don’t like banks—after they allowed credit agencies full control of their daily lives. Now they protest corporate theft—after their own pensions went sour. Now they’re against lending policies—after their own house lost value.
Personally, I have no problem if all of them wind up on the skids. I doubt the bank even knows whether I’ve ever owned a house or a car. As I’ve stated before, I draw a thick line between people suffering and people getting exactly what they deserve. When one does not read, pain becomes the alternative learning method. And no, you can’t “start” reading after a ten-year, or even a five-year, lapse. You’ll never recover the lost mass of information needed to inter-relate to what’s changed in all that time.
I forget who wrote it, but he said the people who understand evolution accept the theory, it’s the people who can’t understand evolution it that reject it. The same is true of the way people who don’t read look at the world. Being unread, they form opinions that are borderline retarded. Like the Jews stole Israel from the Arabs. Or that contracts have to be in writing. (Try telling the Judge your oath wasn’t binding because you only spoke it.) Dull, stupid, unread, thick-headed, stubborn wasters of life, that’s what such people are.
At any rate, they can occupy Wall Street all they want. The damage is done, they are faceless masses destined to die in obscurity without ever having made a lick of difference to the world. They lived obsessed with outward appearances, calling down others who protested when the time was right. Let’s be cool hippies let the poor Mexicans over the border. Ha, now the Mexicans got the job they’ll need to survive their own retirement. To even think they can set things right by marching around and making noise now is disgraceful.
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