December 10, 2013

A magic show.
A hand-shadow show. (The action begins at 2:30 minutes.)
A helicopter hauling ass. This guy don’t waste no time.

           I’m partially back on my feet. I made the bakery but not Zumba. My carburetor is ready and my oil cap has arrived. This still being Florida, that’s too many things going right at the same time. Let’s wait until everything is done or in my possession before beginning the street-dance. I’m still living on chicken soup and oatmeal and grits. Right now Jello would be solid food.

           The carburetor is done and the oil plug has arrived. How coincidental, don’t you think, that the American system works at just ahead of the speed where the average customer is likely to complain? I must install this plug on the engine in the morning when it is light enough to see, a delay of two hours, and head directly to Miami without a test drive. Not the way I would have arranged things. There is a severe difference between a business cutting costs via efficiency and merely passing this type of hidden cost on to the consumer.
           It’s probably good this tummy-ache has caught up with me or I’d really be the scourge of the lazy. It is just past 8:00 PM and I’m turning in. California reports this flu is making the rounds at the schools, but now explain how I managed it just in time for my favorite home-cooked meal of the year. That’s home-cooked by a professional chef, an unbeatable combination. As California says, such a flu is a good way to lose weight.
           The club meeting was brief, maybe twenty minutes. We found a source of broken scooters whose only problem is reputedly electrical. But the word reputedly means I won’t release club money until we can make that determination ourselves. We would also require a place to store anything we repair, although selling it via Miguelito should be easy. Alas, we are going to lose the guy.

           Previously I mentioned his brain aneurism. He’s in denial, but the moment he gets out in the sun, his vision blurs. He can’t see his tools and it is evident he is working by feel most of the time. Same thing when he lifts anything heavy, you can instantly tell something is wrong. Nor is he ever going to quit.
           The carburetor looks spanking new. But that is one of my red scooter’s last chances. If this does not solve the low speed sputtering problem, the remaining option is to adjust the valves, and that is a butcher job that involves removing the front half of the machine, including the gasoline tank. I would likely only do that as a prelude to selling the scooter. I’d roughly break even on that deal.

ADDENDUM
           The Arduino is back in the picture temporarily. Those who’ve been here a while know that the Arduino got the robotics club underway, but only to the extent we learned some valuable lessons. Top of that list is that unless you intend to put together somebody else’s kit, you don’t have anything like the resources to build a useful robot. While the components are probably out there, the factories that design and build them have done the same wonderful job with compatibility and availability as ever. The worst aspect of the Arduino is the coding language, C+. More time spent finding punctuation errors than actual coding of logic, it is the language of idiots. When code does not work, the first thing to suspect is that it is written in C+.
           One of the pitfalls of C+ is that anybody can write a library. You’d think this an advantage until you see what “anybody” comes up with. Alas, all the useful things an Arduino can do involve the use of these custom libraries, which have to be learned one by one. Because this places an upper limit on what a programmer can retain in his head, you find they use the same few libraries all the time, so defects and defaults get propagated through the entire computer systems of the world.
           Another negative side effect of this is that it makes it uneconomical to use an expensive Arduino for any task that is intermittent or rarely used. It cannot, by itself, record anything. So if you are not there to witness something in real time, you miss it. The way around this is to give the Arduino some way to record events. That involves a library, and the one we’ve picked is called “Wire”. It uses the retarded “dot notation” with its contorted structure as in “supper.your.eat”, where supper is not food, but an instance of food, except you cannot point to it. You must point to a pointer that points to it. You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. And guess what language all Windows’ products use?
           This [the study of such a subject] is one of those small steps that can really open a can of worms. But we feel it is worth pursuing. The current plan is to connect some type of sensor and see if we can record the results over a period of at least a day. A barometer or something similar should fit the bill. The follow-up plan is to post those results in real time on the Internet, or in the alternative to make the results available. That last event is another quagmire, after twelve years I still cannot get a clear and concise set of instructions on how to connect a router to the Internet. A set of instructions that systematically solves every problem and works every time for every router.