This is a pastry, kind of sweet. With powdered sugar. I forget the name but not the price tag of $1.50. I’ll stick with my own bakery, although it was okay as far as trying something new. Remember those brass pins I found last day? Well, they sure do solder easy. That solves my cheap terminating pin problem, see below below. I stopped in to chat with the barber, it’s a tradition that’s fading as the franchises take over. I swear, that man is going to buy a motorcycle and head for Georgia.
Beautiful day. I took the scooter for a ten mile drive with not a cloud in the sky. Everybody else had the same idea. Don’t those people have to go work for a living or something? Here’s a little trivia because you are not supposed to know. How much does the gas station pay for the gas out of the tanker truck? Right now today it is $2.8106. Want to figure out how much the gas station makes? Subtract that and the tax, which is not longer marked on the pump but available on-line. Silver, always a favorite, with prices now hovering under $24, has disappeared in small quantities. There is no silver left to be had at that price. The low premium bars sell out quickly, leaving only high markup brands—and the only bars available have a $4 bar charge. That prices silver back up at $28 per ounce, which is what it cost last February. I’ve long felt this is nothing more than gouging tactic when prices otherwise drop, stimulating demand. Other stores just close up when there is a rush.
This triggers my alternate plan, which I don’t like but damned if I’ll pay a 16.6% premium where it should be 5% max. Plus, I have no place here to keep cash so it has to be stored miles away, where even I have time getting it when I want it. I looked at other metals, like the taunted palladium and platinum, but have no idea how to figure those out. They are not a “monetary” metal. But if they double in price they sure get that way fast around here.
There are always disparities in prices. Silver always costs more than any price you can find on-line. All prices are meaningless on days like today when there is nothing left for sale but “silver with a story”. My suspicion still rests in Europe as the place that will give birth to a currency collapse. The system over there ensures anybody with money is a lying, cheating scoundrel at best. Recently the silver market has been see-sawing for months as the European big money tries squeezing out another 2008 (where silver fell to $9 and shot up to $50).
If you ever think to become a silver or gold dealer, get a copy of the dealer “replacement” prices. Frightening. That is the reason I never became a dealer, I mean a licensed dealer with a store downtown. There is about $6 trillion worth of gold in the world. With silver, only about $22 billion is available, and it is owned several times over. How can that be? Silver certificates (called ETF for Exchange Traded Funds). Like money, they don’t stop the printing press just because the value is gone.
From a supply perspective, silver is actually much more rare than gold. If you decided to invest today, you’d find all the gold in the correct size and quantity you desire. When I hear that worn out analogy that all the gold in the world would fit in a barn, I wonder how many barns it would take to hold all the money.
Google has removed the internal search from Blogger. It’s one of those scummy moves you just don’t think anyone would do. Because it was an original feature, there is no index to this blog. Didn’t need one. I would have a rough time determining if something is repeated. Repeats are necessary in a work of any size, but I did try to keep it at a minimum. For example, did I ever list the ingredients in my favorite root beer? Not the A&W artificial flavor swill, but the real deal. They are, in the correct order:
Anise
Licorice
Vanilla
Cinnamon
Clove
Wintergreen (or mint if you can find it)
Sweet Birch (Oil from crushed leaves)
Molasses
Nutmeg
Pimento Berry (A type of Allspice)
Balsam Oil
Oil of Cassia (“Chinese Cinnamon”)
In properly brewed root beer, you can actually taste each of the individual ingredients very momentarily. Also, the aroma is much fuller as the light oils present start to evaporate as soon as you open the bottle. The warmth of your hand does the same, and that is why root beer mugs first had handles. The last place I had a real root beer, which MUST come in a single serve glass bottle, was at the Sentient Bean, in Savannah, Georgia.
ADDENDUM
Success. The ROM works—that is but one of three major elements of my project. (“Major” tending to mean the physically larger items that require hand work, and more importantly, brain work.) I eventually had to triple-test each diode and build in many self-checks, but I’ve got the major part of my design now working. This is the plan of having a switch display a decimal number.
All ten switches (when they arrive) are connected to a single one-digit display by a total of eight wires. When you hit one of the switches, the ROM determines which digit to display. Anyone who thinks this is easy has missed the point. This is a difficult undertaking and that is why I built the ROM.
What did I learn? Quite a lot including that you cannot connect two diodes in parallel. Or worded better, I learned not to connect them. If you do, the diodes don’t act like regular components which split the current in proportion to their internal resistance. Instead, the electricity spots which diode has the path of least resistance and ignores the other.
Don’t suppose I’m neglecting the other electronics. As an example here is the soldered brass pin I mentioned. A lot of hobby sites suggest you use brass thumb tacks for this, but I find the pins are far easier to work with. You don’t have to pound them in, they puncture the substrate to the solder side, and remove easier when correcting a mistake. The second photo is the mistake. My first attempt to build the seven-segment display featured last day. The error was actually a short that fried two of the segments, making it [more economical] to start over again. Price-wise, this error cost less than $3. Time-wise, an expensive half-day.I wrote y’day that I was working with my notebook handy and some read that the wrong way. It is a real notebook, not a computer. Show me somebody with a computer and I’ll show you somebody not getting any work done. I own two notebook computers. But I do my thinking on planning on paper. It would be foolish to conclude I'm old-fashioned on this. I tried computers for years [before most of you even thought of owning one] and I went back to sounder principles. To get some work done.
Perf board. That has to be one of the most useless inventions in the field of electronics. There is nothing to hold the components in place, unless some product exists I’ve never heard of. I’m referring to “dry” perf board, which has no metal clads to solder to the board itself, so each design is a labor-intensive flip the board over for every component.
The few on-line videos do not distinguish between dry and clad boards, show only trivial small projects, and edit out the relentless back-and-forth. Sneaky bastards. Once again I say thanks for nothing to the “experts” who are all over the suffering place. Why does it not surprise me that so many generations of electronics geeks have wrestled with perf board in blind acceptance? Why? I ask again despite very well knowing the answer. Forty years along and not one of you can invent a better product. They say twist the wires with your fingers--if you like sore fingers with little puncture holes. And if you’ve ever used a wrapping tool you won’t likely use it again unless you have to. Dry perf board. A fortune awaits the inventor who solves this problem. I [somewhat] solve matters by gluing the perf board to a sheet of real estate sign. That’s those lawn signs that have paper on both sides and a foam material in the middle. It holds the pieces but you had better craft a tool to poke the holes or the component leads rarely go directly through, causing mystical shorts inside the foam.
With my system, by pure and unplanned coincidence, the paper is flame retardant and the foam is a great insulator, so it is easy to solder without scorching. I’ve already thought of perf board on both sides, but not only is that stuff a bad design, it is expensive. Remember to paint over any exposed wiring later with fingernail polish.
Uh, I meant clear fingernail polish, Justin.
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