Still facing a lot to catching up, I already have some callouts that make this month a winner. The scooter battery went dead, which is the second replacement already. So I ordered the heaviest duty 18ah (amp-hour) lead acid vibration-resistant ATV model for $160. No need to Mickey Mouse any more, although that is usually the last thing said before something major goes wrong.
West Palm is listing 505 foreclosures for sale, which hints that the turning point may have been reached. Banks have been holding back these properties, feeding them out in dribbles to keep prices high. This morning I found five times as many ads. Pretty please, let this be the long-anticipated break in the logjam. Here’s a place asking $61k that sold for $254k in April, 2006 and it is currently rented out for $1,460 per month. E24 is going to check it out, make sure it isn’t near the hood. I put in a crusty ad that would only appeal to a desperate seller with a great property.It’s been a while since I examined the job market as well. One glance shows the vast bulk of the “middle-class” unemployed are the cube workers who thought the bash would last forever. Those faceless masses whose jobs were sold down the river years ago. Their skill set amounts to following the rule book, ducking responsibility, and two-finger typing. I worked 15 years in a union, so grant that I know a lazy prick when I see one. The type who have not read a textbook in 30 years, but love television comedy. Time to take a peek what is out there. Check back in a while, it is a complicated undertaking.
Here’s an open letter to Mr. & Mrs. Shopper. I buy my cheap plastic Chinese crap at Walmart. What I don’t buy there is processed Chinese food or medicine and feed it to my family or my pets. People who do that have a long way to go to qualify for my sympathy. Um, let me guess, you “saved” money by putting that stuff on your Visa card for air miles.
Next, says the contemporary surveys, I don’t make a good mate because I “crave” attention. It would seem women with the same “condition” are faithful since they are “only kidding” and “aren’t serious”. Where have we heard this before? (“I only want to resist temptation, not discourage it altogether.”— Mae West.) Indiscriminate flirting is the major reason I am not today married to several women I won’t name, such as Judy Minty. How can you trust a babe who is always laying tracks?
Much as I need a hundred items, watch shortly for a high-speed run down to see JP in a day or two. It is strange he is unable to follow my lead and drop everything. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to go to Colorado. JZ! We are up there, we can’t be pretending good times might materialize. Let’s get out there, and so what if the family has to pay somebody else for the deliveries? If they squawk it costs more, raise your prices.
Non-electronics buffs can skip this section. The lucky chip (integrated circuit) chosen for investigation is the 4026. It houses two different internal arrangements; we are interested only in the half called a VCO. Voltage controlled oscillator. As the name implies once you figure it, this chip produces a sharp digital (clock) signal that varies with the voltage. As the voltage gets less, the rate of flash slows up. Stay with me here any gamblers out there—for if I was a gambler this is the type of chip I would investigate. Two days ago we looked at random numbers. So heads up!
If my brain is still in gear, one of the items that stumped me was counting the estimated 984 million cycles per second on my first circuit, and I possessed nothing that could measure that realm. But I tried using chips that divided by ten until I’d used up everything in town. I now have more, thanks to Boulder, CO. This chip or something similar must be the heart of all gambling machines that slow down gradually, like roulette wheels or slot machines (the electronic models).
Here’s where to follow the logic. To get the chip to gradually slow down and stop, we need to couple it to a declining voltage. And the resistor-capacitor pair on the first circuit is ideal. There is only a one chance in 984 million of releasing the button at a point of guessing which of ten LEDs will remain lit—but so you know, it is in the end entirely predictable. I intend to replace the resistor-capacitor pair with adjustable components to investigate the effect—and to map the behavior of any used pins. There is nothing new about doing this.
√ Mae West is also the person who said, “Keep a diary, and one day it will keep you.”
√ Then there was Emo Philips, “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.”
[Author's note 2017: nobody knew on September 24, 2012 the above clip would become a meme.]
ADDENDUM
You know what’s replaced the Space Shuttle for a waste of good money? That International Space Station. It’s a ho-hum white elephant derived from 1950s comic book themes. If you read the mission goals there is hardly a thing there not done before, and even NASA is stretching things to explain what good the experiments are. Mission 34 (the current one) is studying circadian rhythms, which “might help” factory shift workers. You know what would help those workers? Part of the $10,000 per pound spent launching foreigners up there, who hail from countries that steal American jobs and harbor terrorists.
I note that in March 2012, Wikipedia finally published an obscure paragraph that agrees with view of the Shuttle since 1981. Wiki casually mentions the Apollo program may have “evolved into manned missions to other planets”. The waste of the low Earth orbit junkmobiles is monstrous. They are planning a round of robots to deliver supplies to the station in 2017. Hey, spend the 180 days flying to Mars. The experiments could be done on the journey to keep the crew occupied.
The station, first projected to cost $17 billion, has already eaten up $100 billion. That’s the same cost as Apollo in today’s money, but the Apollo program actually accomplished something. For the record, another $49 billion was paid for by other countries including Canada, Russia, and Japan. Yet this clunker is only 217 miles up there and doing “experiments” where the money should be properly spent on exploration. They could orbit for a hundred years and discover zilch.
I admit to a predilection for robots, but I understand the public wants manned missions. Humans are infinitely more productive but I sometimes think the ability to make snap decisions is over-rated. Although I believe taxation should be based on consumption (and no, I don’t care if that hurts some people), I would pay extra for a Mars round trip in my lifetime. The way NASA is ignoring taxpayers, I’ll be lucky to see a robot return.
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