Being a hot autumn day starting early, I worked on part of the “gambling” circuit. This is the chip that “rolls” down to a stop. You may recall this from a few months back when we failed to get it to count fast enough and later figured that is because of it flashing 984 million times per second. And we are not sure about that. If you can see a video here, then both the experiment and the upload were successful. If you see a still picture, Google messed us up again.
I decided to repair guitar cables and threw out $50. Yep, a buck a foot and you know the drill. If you can’t find the break, you cut the cable in to halves, a.k.a. the binary search. I was down to eighths, which are not much good except as patch cables before I found the short. That, and two bad phono jacks, I wound up throwing the whole lot out. That was one of those expensive PA cables from the original Jimbos show (2006). Even the made in America cables are now cheap-ass.In another instance, I built a series of 5V power supplies (the club standard) and there’s a bad batch of those on the market. The units I construct are constant voltage and done right, yet they consistently produce 4.98V. It appears a small difference, but I pay top dollar for good components.
For an example of the country music I don’t play, listen to McGraw’s “Yeah Truck”. That is rock and roll with an edge of metal, but it is not country. Today I begin shopping for a new drum box for stage work, fully knowing that no adequate model exists. I have a plan for that, but my level of electronics is not up to the task. I’d like to use an existing drum box and design an interface. Country has changed to roughly what rock music was when I was young.
Speaking of changes, first let me say I was born well after WWII. If I talk about that era, it is not from memory. But I saw the effects of that war as I grew up. That’s why I have so little empathy for people with credit problems. Did you know that prior to that war, banks would only put up a maximum ten-year mortgage—and you had to come up with a 50% down payment. Ah, I see most of you didn’t know that. Most Americans, as around 85% lived in conditions that today would be considered unendurable poverty.
Then along came the government, subsidizing soldiers to the extent of thirty-year mortgages with 5% down and 3% interest rates. If I recall, vets could buy a house with a dollar down. No matter how you slice it, that is welfare. The millions who claim they represent the standalone American ideal family were nothing of the kind. This brand of government “free money” destabilized the housing market, and it is only right those who took the bait should suffer the consequences. And I mean suffer both individually and collectively because that’s how they got into such debt.
The significance of this house picture is that the agent turned it upside down to catch the reader's eye. The problem is, to reader's like myself, this looks like a reflection in a pool. And people buying real estate probably don't need reminding that a third of the buyers before them have wound up with mortgages that are under water.My challenge is that transistor clock. Here is a video of the creation process, describing the thousands of steps needed for the prototype. This design is well beyond me, but I understand the concept. The guy took the 60Hz from the wall socket and divided it into hours and minutes, then converted to binary coded decimal and ran some 7-segment display diodes. I have all that equipment around here. But in the absence of any good instructions, I’ll be looking for the kit. I mean, I grasp how he used the 60Hz, but try to find any details on how to do it yourself.
Wow, I just closed the books for September and I am broke. I had to remind myself I just drove 5,620 miles before I asked how I managed to spend so much. For starters, the return trip used 85 gallons of high test gasoline. That’s terrible mileage, but no way to fix that dragging brake pad on the road. Yep, I got $38 left and the electric bill is most of that. I think I’ll lie low for a week, kind of read a lot.
ADDENDUM
For the first time in my life, I learned today of a child, William Sidis, whose parents were the opposite of mine. They began the child’s education at a few months and by 18 months he was reading the daily newspaper. He learned six languages by age five and at eleven, was admitted to Harvard. He owned a complete set of streetcar transfers and gave up studying law when he found it didn’t make sense. And he was a libertarian (sometimes a proper noun Libertarian).
Before any obvious wisecracks, let me point out a few things. One, Sidis was completely encouraged by his parents and environment is the single largest determinant of childhood genius. I would have been severely punished for doing what he did. Two, the languages he studied were all Aryan based (Russian, German, French). I never “studied” the completely unrelated languages of Arabic, Siamese, and Spanish. Three, there is the matter of life accomplishment, he doesn’t seem to, considering his abilities, have done anything out of the ordinary with it.
For instance, he wrote only material most people don’t understand, such as treatises on the Fourth Dimension. He never had to devote a single day of his existence to the mind-numbing drudgery of earning a living, which is known to lower the IQ. My complete set of bus transfers was not peridomophilia, but rather had the utterly practical motive of riding the transit system free instead of paying $60 per month—and I rode free for nine years.
Last, there is no record of him developing any new hobbies or completely new fields of interest after becoming an adult. He never composed music or learned electronics or counted to a million. And as far as Libertarianism, I am of the opinion anyone who takes a serious look at the state would realize government exists only by coercion and that is fundamentally wrong for any society. It is the sheeple who need to be led around that impose their politics upon the free.
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