I stayed home over this, but I had to find out for myself. It was this close to me going out tonight to a seminar about the planets being discovered around nearby stars. As in 42 light-years nearby. Promptly at sunset, the temperature fell below motorcycle comfort zone. And to even get me to consider going out on a Friday, my minimum standards are something along the lines of soothing luxury and cash incentives. I was on a callout, so I’ve got the money. But why waste it shivering at a stop light?And what a callout. There’s a new problem with the 2012 Kaspersky anti-virus that is causing a system crash. I couldn’t find it, but it is related to Internet Explorer and it is truly sorry how many people still use that piece of junk. I tried everything, restorals, HKEY codes, reinstalls, and all I could ascertain is a lot of people are having the same problem. The computer either bluescreens or displays a popup saying it will close in 45 seconds. How happy I’ll be the day the big old sheriff clamps a padlock on Redmond, WA.
How’s my electronics, now that focus is swinging back away from hardware? I need to learn to design circuits. I learned breadboards and I can learn circuit layout and what better way than CAD (engineering) programs? I'm about to find out. Working the angle that the software engineering field is dominated by the unimaginative, we’ve concluded that learning any one application is approxitudely the same as any other. Hence, we’ve [arbitrarily] chosen ExpressPCB as our pilot computer assisted design (CAD). And we instantly ran into idiot engineering and poor software design.
The components are listed by type rather than name, duh. You can't find a resistor unless you look under "passive components". The maddening part is this crapola feature called “Netlist errors”. It keeps flasing annoyingingly incomprehensible messages. But, I’ll persist and if there is a diagram earlier in this blog, then I succeeded. Just bear in mind, this is Friday and I was no mood to sink past my hip waders into “engineer think”.
Ha, got an indirect compliment and vote of confidence from a source that had no intention of doing so. From a cross-time zone call this morning. That’s got me smiling. Here’s the goodies, but no names as the guy is still on my side. He saw my solo bass act and figured, “I can do that”. He flopped. Here’s some FAQs on bass soloing:
Q: How come nobody could tell what song I was playing?
A: You were trying to comp on the bass. Every song sounded alike.
Q: Why did I get a little off time after almost every verse and chorus?
A: Bass passing notes are played differently than guitar scales.
Q: Why are the best bass lines right when I try to sing?
A: The two parts are usually performed by different people.
Q: What happened to the crowd during my instrumentals?
A: You lost them trying to play the bass line through the lead break.
Q: Why did I keep missing notes?
A: Bass doesn’t provide a convenient triad to kickstart your singing. You have to know your stuff.
And here are most of the remaining answers: Because you tried to adapt your anemic guitar list to the bass. Because most of the best and most adaptable songs are already on my list and you’d look like a fool copying me. Because you were talking when you should have been listening. Because playing lead riffs on the bass sucks. Because bass players can’t sing.
That last item is probably the most important. I keep hearing how so and so is a great singing bass player, but I hate to break your bubble and tell you most of them are faking. All you have to do is look closely. Even Claypool and McCartney knew better than to play complicated bass lines while singing. Or at least record the parts separately in a studio. Lynott and Lee were masters at rapid-fire single bass notes between words, but they didn’t fool me.
What you heard me do was actually play the bass and sing at the same time. The bass lines are carefully chosen and arranged so I don’t back off when the lyrics start, and the breaks are generally quite different than the original so as to keep up the momentum. All songs are fast and familiar. And all follow the rules I’ve spelled out so many times before.
Later. Some learning is fun, the rest is no fun at all. As an individual, I like learning difficult things, but I mean when the matter itself if difficult. Not when the way it is arranged or presented is plain ornery. Fun would be like Einstein and the thought experiment in the elevator. I wish I had that much intellect. The other extreme is this CAD program. I produced a circuit layout, shown here, but at the price of complete mental exhaustion by midnight. And it is far from ready.
I understood the attention to detail required before I began six hours ago. And that led to a big disappointment. Look at the diagram again. It is basic shapes and lines, something computers have been doing for over 30 years. No big deal, ExpressPCB.
Computer Assisted Design is a lie. I could have done it better and faster with paper and crayons. The “library” of symbols you can place on the board is basically a list of inventory ExpressPCB is trying to unload this year.
The symbols generally have to be customized before you can use them, which involves the wearisome task of ungrouping. All that is assisted is the drawing because the design is still a painstaking drudge. For example, some of the components shown require special sized through-holes (the little round donut dots) and thicker traces (the lines). This stupid program could not even make that primitive association. It means we cannot produce this circuit without doing their job, that is, going back to the datasheets and looking up the specs one by one.
I’ll get better at it once I become familiar with where things are hiding and learn that lines and wires are different although ExpressPCB makes them look identical, duh. Their tutorials cover only the stuff you already know, like how to open a program, how to drag and drop, that type of thing. The software cannot even automatically space the components to their actual dimensions. Contemporary programming gibberish. The only thing they do efficiently is oversell and underdeliver. Fifth generation, ha. They have not even caught up to the 70s.
Orton's law of survival:
Make your living from your personality if you can. If you can't do that, make your living from selling your body. But if you are truly damned, make your living from your brain.
