Is this photo a duplicate? Well tough. This is the 1998 Mazda responsible for a lengthy discussion with JP this morning. See the BatBike? Yeah, JP, it don’t got no Quizno’s delivery sign on top, har-dee-har-har. Seriously, the truck has to be replaced. We were on the phone an hour hammering out the situation, which I will summarize.
Straight off, my broken shoulder has put everything eight weeks behind schedule. This painful condition created just enough interlude that the people we were going to visit moved back to California, the house is still not sold, and the truck started leaking water from we don’t know where and can’t find it. It was me that put down my foot that the holiday must take place and now we may have to scramble to be ready.This shot makes the truck look much nicer that it really is. The replacement will be used, probably in the five year age range. But what to buy? Another model of this ¾ size takes precedent, so don’t be expecting a Silverado with dualies. This "Mazda" type and size of truck has proven it best for how we work. The options are same as before. Power everything, automatic, A/C. I am again looking at a tow-trailer that could either tow the sidecar or be towed by it. These things don’t come cheap. JP will not ride in the sidecar.
I think every history and science channel has to do a documentary on pyramids and Stonehenge. They’re all wrong, all of them. Their explanations and theories don’t follow the money. Stonehenge was a summer camp for the pampered offspring of the early royals. It’s all a money thing and it always is. Some say it is religion, but if religion isn’t a money thing my name is Meyer. And that’s my theory.
Now if I was going to make a documentary video, there are a few things I would do before beginning. First, I would learn to speak properly-accented English. It’s like, important. Then, I would invest in a lapel microphone and learn how to set sound levels (at 89 decibels). And get a camera tripod, some people have never heard of a tripod. If you use advertisements, they go at the end, after the video is finished. Hint to the geek-nerds: indie-rap and hindu-disco are NEVER going to get you any women, know what I’m sayin’?
Remember ham radio, with all that licensing they required? Well, the on-line version is worse, they require registration even to eavesdrop. The Internet versions are more tightly controlled. You must establish an account just to listen. If you have any ancient ham equipment lying around, it might be a plan to hide it away in the barn. There is an old wive’s tale that using a police scanner is illegal. (You may use one in your house, but not necessarily anywhere else.)
Now that I’m satisfied along with most that wine-tasting is bogus, it was natural I’d take a look at perfumes. It is an equally hilarious marketing scheme, the squirt and flirt. I’m sure I would like fine wine and a great-smelling perfume, nor did I say these products were bad. I said something different: that [it is the] wine-tasting and perfume-smelling [that} is some kind of joke. I admire the chateaux of the clever merchants and their search for the right ingredients. But I can’t help but laugh at the customers. Said one, “This perfume centers me.”
Having myself actually spent years in lecture halls, I’m familiar with how the rich come to prefer the expensive over the good. It is the wise professor who redefines the elements that take longest to learn as being the most desirable. Think about that. The richer the student, the longer he can stay in school. Think about that again. The less wealthy students eventually have to go get jobs, and voila, ballet is now “classier” than line-dancing. Stay in university long enough and even you’ll like Modern Art.
Much later, I’ve made a plan to replace the [red] scooter motor, but it involves me pushing the thing for 9/8ths of a mile tomorrow. No big deal, I have all day. I could say, in this era where no amount of hard work or study will get you ahead, “Doesn’t everybody?”
The scooter [as designed] means the entire frame has to be stripped to swap out the engine. I stopped in at [My] Buddy’s [Place] to think about it. This is the joint where my show died two weeks ago. It is still the Monday type of rock music I played for 27 years, so I stuck around to listen. The house band was comping [I hate comping], but some of the original groups showed true talent. Nothing, no matter how great, will ever go platinum along Dixie, but being there was fun tonight.
What was I even doing there? As I biked home from swinging the scooter deal, I pulled in to do some intense study on flip-flops. I have to study, I hear the gasp. I know what some are thinking, that if I didn’t have Alzheimer’s so bad, I’d get this material lickety-split. If I had properly exercised my brain cells memorizing sports scores and celebrity pregnancies instead of formulas, it is certain I’d be at least as smart and important as readers who don’t like this blog. That's what I get for having mush for brains.
ADDENDUM
Once again I find myself less impressed by the transistor count on computer ads. In a moment I’ll be writing about circuits with eight or more transistors each that do what the layman thinks of as the job of a single transistor . Yet these are not anything fancy. They are called logic gates, and since each design has its advantages, there would be no gain in quoting the number of gates instead of transistors. I’m just less impressed than I used to be. Is what I’m sayin’.
Was I up late? Yes, I figured even if I cannot find or figure any application of the flip-flop circuits joined together, I should make a valiant effort to understand the theory. The status is I have not yet built single flip-flop circuit board, although I have a working breadboard model. What I have is an SR (for “set-reset”) flip-flop of no practical use. It was easiest to wire up.
However, it is not the easiest to use. Keeping in mind there is a good chance I’m wrong on all these counts, the easiest to use seems to be a D flip-flop. This is a clocked circuit, meaning it needs a 5 volt off-on pulse to operate. Clocks complicate things for me. What threw me initially is that I thought this clock signal had to be a steady beat. With all the experts in this land, I wonder where I would ever get an odd idea like a clock signal being a steady beat?
To understand it, I left my window open and watched the curtains in the breeze. Then I tapped out a beat with a drumstick and thought backwards. The drumstick is the data, not the clock. Whenever the curtain blew out the window instead of in, I noted the position of the drumstick, and marked down the patterns in groups of eight. What I don’t know is what coordinates the two signals—noticing how often a signal was ignored, it was not the high or low that made logic, but the change from one to the other. Hmmm.
The degrees I have in computer science do not assist in this study. For that matter, it makes things worse, although in some cases I can better fathom early errors. Want an example? Okay, the flip-flop, being a memory circuit, could have garbage in it when you power up. It is customary to issue a “clear” command, which my flip-flop diagrams say turns all the memory cells to zero. Yet zero is not a “clear” in computer science. Zero is a number, and a rather important number at that. Those engineers mean “null” and are saying “clear”.
The potential for miscommunication is huge. The scientist is accused of over-thinking the problem. The technician is accused of abusing still another ordinary word. And if we wrote each other’s exams, we’d flunk. These realms of the theoretical form my background in programming. A true “clear” would be neither one nor zero. What I’m actually learning here is why so few people have a handle on both sides of this electronics coin.
