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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

November 14, 2012

           This is how exciting things are when I’m broke. I built a spool holder for my 22ga wire from some scrap 1x4. The metal disk is just a counterweight for the glue to dry. True, I’m not really broke because I’m saving up for something special, but “broke” has better appeal when you’re watching your ratings. As well, I drilled tapcon holes into the scooter cargo rack to mount the new trunk. Miguelito at the shop (new character in the ongoing drama) says his bike has dropped twice and contrary to expectation (that the box would cause damage), the box saved his side panels. How about that?
           Fun? Not really, this limited activity tuckered me out. I lifted nothing, just worked the battery drill and saw, carried a few pieces around. And floored myself so bad I required a two hour siesta. Sorry to bore but blog rules say the non-ordinary gets reported. When I’m 92, I’ll look back on it and laugh.
           For even more thrills, I gooped that green slime into the rear scooter tire, the new one that’s always had a slow leak, and took it the recommended one mile at 40 mph, which found me at the Hallandale public library on Federal, the one awarded the noisiest library award right here—and I see they still hold the title.
           Today’s standard bearers were the scruffy street bum who couldn’t grasp that the staff did not know where he was “supposed to get off the number 28 bus”. Honorable mention to the three Polish men arguing for a quarter-hour where to put their coin in the Xerox machine. For you fans of cultural assimilation, about twenty innocent bystanders now know from context what “Schlock-trrroffee” means. Hey, at least the Poles figured out it was a coin slot. Runners up include the Latino lady whose undoubtedly important cell phone convo consisted of repeating, “Si, si, si, claro”, ninety-six times in six minutes. Either you like diversity, or you don’t like diversity, I’m sayin’.
           For those who wonder at the keyword paragraph toward the end of some posts, these are there to test the keywords that bring this blog up on Google. For example, the top draw in the past 24 hours was “andrea johnson” mentioned here once as the klutz who raided Gibson guitars, explaining later the business was importing wood "legally". That's legally, not illegally. This is why I can’t work on large teams. It becomes too difficult to figure out how such ignorant people even get up in the morning.
           Lottery winners. They sure are not trusting the government or any pie the government has a finger in. To minimize taxes, a lottery winner who was confident of receiving his twenty annual payments would spread it out. But of the last hundred million in winnings of the Florida Lotto, every last winner took the money and got out of Dodge. The stats are the lower prize winners ($4 to $8 million) take a 72% cash payout, to the bigger winners (around $20 million) who settle for 68%. This insecurity about the future has raked the Feds in $30 million in windfall taxes, so they are guilty of the same. Grab the money now while it will still buy something.

ADDENDUM
           The first club meeting with the new tech is slated for Saturday at the Barnes & Noble coffeeshop. New people are tough on clubs because there is always a spread of capabilities. I say “always” instead of “sometimes” because sometimes only happens in non-cerebral non-intellectual non-academic type settings. There is always danger of a boredom factor since basics have to be repeated to find who does what best.
           My proposal is to design and build a plug-in chip tester. I normally propose a project to keep the conversations focused. This tester will cover the entire discipline from concept to printed circuit board and provide a useful tool if successful. The chips most used by me have eight pins and I’ve noticed each pin has a narrow number of things it can do. A clock signal, digital on/off, input/output, that type of thing. And most of the pins have a “normal configuration”. Why not build a board with eight pins that could be configured to those states. Then one could test the chip without having to custom wire up each test.
           I misread what the new guy said about his shop, so it turns out we still do not have a work area or clubhouse to meet in. Hence, the Barn. Naturally, we’ll want to find out what he knows about antennas, for those who know that we never did get one of our own to test successfully. Or even get anyone to give use an answer about how to test it, so for all we know it was working but we didn’t know the frequency.
           Immediately I ran into design troubles with my circuit, and it stems from my ingrained experience that electricity is either off or on, when in fact, it follows the path of least resistance. Thus, I get still confused by circuits that divide the voltage (remember our good old voltage dividers?) which is a two-minute concept. Here’s a pull up resistor (see diagram). Under what circumstances will the LED go on? What confuses me is the pin can also be switched off and on. Hmm, I’m getting a lot better at drawing diagrams.

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