[Author's note 2022: that last paragraph needs clarifying. At this time, the robot club was an informal community of interest and I'm referring to the local atmosphere. There were zero robot or programmin societies, but talk that NOVA university was going to begin a programming semester. In the end, it was cut and paste, no real programming, so we were ahead. And in the end, far enough ahead to realize that robotics was neither new nor cheap. But I can still do the programming part in my sleep.]
In a departure from norm, the RS prices are quite decent if you subtract what it costs to have these things shipped to Florida. I’ve been tipped off the RS Xmas sale starts tomorrow. Mark my words again, this Arduino is going to impact the world. Somebody from out of nowhere is going to invent the killer app that changes everything.
[Author's note 2022: in the end, the Arduino made very little difference. It requires novel and original thinking to make it do anything that has not been done before. Regrettably, that rarely happens in America any more. It did spawn a lot of copycat microcontrollers, but we are still waiting for a novelty, much less a breakthrough. The NOVA mindset is more likely to use the Arduino for remote control than for true robotics. It also requires time, which became a premium once I bought a house.]
There’s more. Guess what was in the mailbox when I returned? A couple of people who should have kept their word to me would be living for free as of now. It turns out I have now been resident in Washington State the required period. I am now officially a pioneer. Maybe I was a little hasty saying I’d never go to St. Augustine again. If it wasn’t so cold, I’d leave for Texas tomorrow morning for a month.
Ha, that means I did it! Anything I touch now will turn to gold given time. And I’m expecting more good news by December 3. One mustn’t think things just got good. They got good since a year ago, now they’re merely getting better and making a far bigger difference. He said as he dunked his morning biscotti.
I see that the Madoffs of China, the Wenhau family that bilked investors out of $1 billion, have been handed the death sentence. The same applies to family members who knew about the crime but kept quiet. Other people, implying employees had “their lives spared”. Wall Street, are you even listening? Those Chinese can be very progressive at making the punishment fit the crime.
Bingo was blah tonight but it did pay the bills. It’s been more of a tradition than a money-maker the last few months. I attribute the low volume to the national situation more than the drawing power of one tiny pub. Another character came by trying to ask the owners for $200 per show. More of these types will drift in as aging unemployed hippies dig out the old Telecaster. I fully comprehend these retro single acts will eventually flood the market by undercutting each other—and you, if you are dumb enough to remain a single.
My mention of the Beaufort wind scale last day sent me investigating. Sure enough, there was an empirical basis for his 12 categories. Listen up, this is your trivia today. Wind scale before Beaufort was like talking to my brother at forty below. Cold? You call this cold? Rather than truck with such nonsense, Beaufort counted the number of sails the captain would take down in high winds to prevent ripping. At scale six, half the sails were furled. At twelve, all sails were down, which also explains why there were no numbers for higher winds like hurricanes. Above twelve, the sails were gone anyway.
Also look up monster or rogue waves. Once you get past Wiki’s whining and begging for $5.00, it seems satellite images confirm waves up to 81 feet above the surrounding ocean occur three times per week. They suddenly appear even in calm seas. Nobody believed the sailors’ reports of these waves for 1,000 years, but we know who to blame for that. (Wave? You call that a wave?) It may explain why 200 super carrier ships have disappeared in the open ocean (as opposed to straits) since 1990. Isn’t 81 feet the height of a ten-story building?
