I call this my Trump-the-Trump breakfast. Note what’s on the table and ask yourself, does Donald have it any better? Probably not considering he’s got all those deadlines to meet, you know, because when you inherit easy money, it constantly needs to be patrolled. Yes, that’s a [green onion] for breakfast, clears the palate and in some cases, the mind. The red sauce is Hungarian goulash paste. Add a Cussler novel and a real [non-Latino] espresso, and it don’t get no better. Retirement is going to suit me fine.
Then, I can’t find my safety glasses and work gloves, meaning I got called away in the middle of something and left them where I don’t know. It’s a cool day with prairie-bright skies and I’d like to get the yard spiffed up.Okay, now I again bring up that puzzling coincidence. Too many times, when I mention something in an original or novel perspective, six months or one year later, that something somewhere appears (resurfaces) under other circumstances (almost exactly six or twelve months). It can’t be somebody copying me because they wouldn’t wait such fixed and predictable time periods. The concurrence this time is curious but shy of blatant (meaning I can't figure it out, mostly):
1. Africa – after I mention it is larger than it appears on flat maps, a graphic showing silhouettes of other countries fitted inside an outline of Africa suddenly makes the rounds on the Internet.
2. Arduino – I grumble over the price and clumsiness of certain electronic parts, and last month the market gets flooded with cheap designs of exactly what I was talking about.
3. This third highly-convincing item has been removed so you can’t see it. Sorry.
But somebody is definitely following this blog for ideas. I wish they’d just contact me so we could work together. Whoever you are, I also get many ideas from reading. Pay me and you’ll never look back.
An important development is independent practice with the guitarist. Like musicians these guys are not as organized as at this end but we need to get that schedule set up soon, before the momentum wanes. That means no excitement for a few weeks, blogwise. But for those interested in human drama, nothing compares with musicianship except possibly women with expectations. There’ll be some nitty-gritty as the differences in experience begin to influence the music. The difference with this band is we are so close to playing.
The new guy is an avid fan of the Ventures so I’ll surprise him with some top notch bass playing like he’s never heard before. At best or at most, he’s expecting a faithful copy of the original whereas I dispense keen attention to [any interstitial] riffs he can’t play without being two places at once. That’s where I shine, well that and my complete lack of ego.
In still another development, Agt. M is back in town. That means an upswing in the number and complexity of projects. Priority is the 8,400 BTU air conditioner for my Florida room and he knows how to recharge regular units, something I still have to learn. Also, the drill press is coming over here.
I’m watching a grade B movie “Airplane Disaster” with weird-looking actors and a predictable plot. Kidnap the pilot’s family, a prisoner release demand, and kill the odd hostage when the lady president stalls for time. An off-duty agent on the plane sneaks into the cargo bay, starts beating up and killing skyjackers one by one. Bad guys are an Aryan brotherhood that robs banks and armories. I always wondered, though, if the cops are really the good guys, why do they need so much expensive equipment?
Later, Ray-B and I went to the beach to play guitars. That’s what we thought. Within minutes, an ugly beach ape pulled up in a wagon and told us to pack it in. Can’t play musical instruments for personal enjoyment even for free on their beach, but other than that, it’s a public area in a free country. We were on a bench along a side street 50 yards from the beach. There was an element of intimidation about the incident, in that it was so easy to read the motive of the rent-a-cop, named “Kershaw” or something like that. A big stupid tough stomping out any hint of talent because that’s competition Beta males can’t deal with. I swear, the guy acted like he thought the beach bunnies were looking at him. But, he shut us down, at least for now.
Taj Mahal (because it is in India)
Whistler Ski Resort (over-priced hick town)
USS Alabama (charges admission twice)
Colonia Tovar (it isn’t German anymore)
Clewiston (see tomorrow’s blog)
ADDENDUM
Thanks for the interest in my notes about electronics last day. Here’s more. But no, I can’t write a detailed account of the entire situation. You’d have to see the club minutes and it’s a private club, although you can read about the experiments. I mentioned Altoids because the metal box they come in is a favorite casing for electronics design. You can even buy the empty tins, shown here, but they cost more than the ones that contain the mints. I’ll consider them when the boxes have knockout plugs.
The newest Arduino, the “Leonardo” is, in my opinion a retrograde step. If replaces the ATMega chip with SMT (Surface Mount Technology) meaning the chip cannot be removed and placed on a clone board. The price is down, but still adds $25 to every project—and most don’t require all the outputs of A full-scale Arduino. I confess to finding ICs more fun to work with than Arduino code because for me code isn’t anything new or challenging.There is an unexplained increase in the number of companies offering electronic water flow meters. As expected, an entire new generation of Arduino add-ons has hit the market. We are behind due to money constraints, but that will soon be taken care of. The bright side is we did correctly predict the direction of things and made a wise choice to include the feedback displays in our robotic model. Looking at it another way, our planning department is already ahead of current thinking by including a feedback loop as well as on-board programming. When others decide tethered bots aren’t the future, we’ll have already been there, thinking-wise.
We may possess another advantage that isn’t yet on the textbooks. Arduino coders studied so far do not exhibit scalability, the option to add ever more components without having to recode. This was the highest level of coding taught at the school I attended in the early 90s. That was leading edge at that time. It’s telling that twenty years later others have still not gone even that far. I think that’s because it requires so much planning in advance.
Here’s another item you’ve never seen before. This is a zif socket. That stands for “zero insertion force” and the idea is to solve a problem. If you’ve even had to pry a chip out of a breadboard or socket, you know how easy it is to bend the pins. With this handy device, you drop the IC into the large holes shown here and press down the lever shown jutting up at top right. Flip the lever back down to release the grip. Pure genius.My conclusion of the “new” Ruby programming language is that it is yet another backward C-based piece of crap that does nothing to solve the horrid mess of things caused by the first generation. If Ruby is an advancement, try reading this snippet:
puts "In parent, term = #{ENV['TERM']}"
fork do
puts "Start child 1, term = #{ENV['TERM']}"
ENV['TERM'] = "ansi"
fork do
puts "Start child 2, term = #{ENV['TERM']}"
end
Process.wait
puts "End child 1, term = #{ENV['TERM']}"
end
Process.wait
puts "Back in parent, term = #{ENV['TERM']}"
Twelve lines of code to accomplish one simple thing that takes specialized training to even figure out what is going on. I count ten punctuation marks in the first sentence alone. Hardly a step forward, you Ruby geek-wads. Most people can’t even punctuate a sentence in English correctly and what direction do you take? All I can say to whoever created this code is. "Fork you."
Trivia. You know my dream of a search engine that ranks by the user, not the content? One major reason I have not started is because there are an estimated 4,000 other people attempting the same thing. Also, search engines are simple but they require huge disk storage which I do not have.
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