I’m still working off the food from that church banquet. Bachelors know where to find the real thing. Thanksgiving, my eye. There was even a motorcycle show. Some kid decided to show off by catwalking his dirt bike on the pedestrian walk. Then he made the identical mistake my brothers are known for—he looked to see who was looking. And smeared his kneecaps on the gravel sliding into the nearest palm tree. Take it from me, who knows a thing or two about showing off. You don’t ever let your audience distract you. My philosophy is you don’t show off unless you are good at it, but is that logical? One could argue that demonstrating one is good at something is not at all showing off. Take BB King. You wait until the end of the show before you lose concentration, or you fail. Just like that.
I’ve been neglecting music. Practice for my solo act, I mean. For me, music is not a solitary undertaking. It’s better when there’s company, but everybody I know is doing the Xmas thing already. Trent hasn’t checked in, nor Ray-B, both have families. The equipment is here, I just lack the gumption to rehearse unless it for a show. I have no show until I get that Fishman Solo and a new drum box. See JP, if you’d picked up the guitar when I said, you’d be in a band today.
The Keys last weekend are still a mystery to me. All five bands I saw had no lead players, exactly what I have in mind here. They had rhythm guitarists of fairly competent skill, but that is all that’s needed if the guitarist is willing to synch his chops to the band. Why does every place I travel have more and better rhythm guitarists than I’ve found here in six years? In the Keys, I did not see any solo backing-track guitar shows, which was great. Let me check something. Nope, “rhythmist” isn’t a word.
I’ll have to rewrite my movie search algorithm. It has been invaded by the East Indians. Isn’t it strange how these foreigners malign our society but then copy the worst parts of it? It’s like they just got rid of 8mm and now discovered camcorders. I watched a few for a couple minutes each and they are truly bad actors. All had soap-opera plots and embarrassingly bad camera work. Well, they haven’t invented anything useful in a thousand years, so why should their movies be any different? I shouldn’t say that, but I did. Tollywood. On the Internet. The one invented in America.
Except for a coffee at the bakery, I stayed put all day. Shown here is the perfect après-Thanksgiving Sunday brunch. Ah, relaxation without a care in the world. Works for me, this living well thing. Silver has bumped up a dollar but so what? I’m watching an action comedy “National Security”. Now why can’t these other nations of teeming humanity, somewhere in their vast populations, find performers like Martin Lawrence? I mean, there’s like 1.2 billion people in India alone and they can’t produce even one good actor? What, ahem, are people going to think? Later. “National Security” is a damn good movie, grossed $53 million. I never heard of it until today. A first-rate job of getting the maximum effects out of what was otherwise quite a low budget production. A few cars, an old warehouse, otherwise mostly abandoned property and street shots.
Alaine emailed to remind of her birthday party, now as much a tradition as Xmas used to be. I’m sweet on people whose birthdays are so close to Xmas in the first place, especially in the weeks preceding. You don’t get the same sense of it being your special day. Did you know, had I not been born premature, my 280 days landed right on December 25? My parents stated I was the only one of six that was planned, meaning they actually did that on purpose. Like myself, Alaine celebrates the following weekend so I don’t really actually know her birthdate.
ADDENDUM
I have a dream. That one day, some manufacturer is going to build a pushbutton switch that actually works with a breadboard. Shown here are the pieces of crap that have been sold for 40 years. When placed on a breadboard, the legs spring out in a few minutes. They never make good contact and even straightening the pins out does not prevent them from working their way loose. It’s shit like this, America.
The NOR gate is representative of a lot that is wrong with how the system teaches electronics. The wrong approach is to try to study a complicated chapter of diagrams until it is coming out your ears. Better plan: understand that the NOR gate is a great place to start, and learn the daylights out of that one single gate. It is simply a logic gate with two inputs and one output. As long as both the inputs are negative, the output will supply power. But if either input or both inputs go positive, the output shuts off the power. This is more complicated than a simple switch, but it is supposed to be.Another bad learning tool is truth tables. Why? Because you generally have to understand the circuit workings before the truth table makes any sense. The table is the end product of understanding, not the teaching aid. My way would be to say there are four ways that two inputs can be configured, and in a NOR gate three of them have the same result and one is different.
So we went ahead and built a demo model, using two transistors. We found a one-transistor plan, but I dislike such shortcuts because, like bad computer programming, it represents a goofy way of defining one thing as being the absence of another thing. We had this discussion in this blog many years ago, but that discussion stands. The lower a person’s intellect, the more they try to dichotomize everything. I’ll explain.
To dichotomize is to reduce everything to two “opposites”. Ask a dumb person what is the opposite of red, they’ll likely say blue. Duh. If you go further and ask them about something intangible, things really start going wonky. For example, Israel is not at war right now. To an idiot, the absence of war means they must be at peace. Double-duh. I think you get my point.
Applied to electronics, off is not the opposite of on. Turning off the light does not make the room dark. There may be an open window allowing sunlight, there may be another light on. The absence of light does not mean dark, but some people never get around to understanding that. In electronics, I use the two transistors because one turns on the light, the other turns on the dark. Oddly, this type of thing makes perfect sense in classical Chinese logic.
Hence, our happy working NOR gate. The next step, slated for 9:00 PM this evening, is to connect two NOR gates to simulate a flip-flop. This is a type of circuit that “remembers” whether it was on or off even when the condition that set it is removed. Yes, a type of latching behavior, and if this succeeds, quite an accomplishment for me. I honestly had no idea when I thought I’d learn a little about robots that I would find any fascination in these circuits, much less build some. There’s a touch of irony in all this.
