January 25, 2014

           And JZ isn’t answering his phone. Do I have to drive down there? Naw, the problem is that I usually call in the morning and he leaves his cell out in the truck. Contented, wealthy, educated men don’t like to be awoken by telephones any more than I do. Yep, it is still that same old truck that took us to Naples years ago. The one that was supposed to be replaced how many times by now? My incoming calls are the opposite, arriving at night due to my strong ties with the west coast. And sorry if I missed any, the guitar player moved my phone and recharger out of his way and if I don’t see it on my way out, I forget it.

           What’s this? You tell me. At bingo last evening some people got all animated over this screen and asked me to take a picture. If you know what it represents, you know more than me. I get it, the money part, but to me this doesn’t even look like a matching set. Now, the lady playing the machine, that was a matching set.
           I learned lots today and some of it was not that encouraging. How about I tell it and you think it through on your own. The music Jag and I are learning is not as alien to him as when we first ran over it. There is a much greater back and forth as we have the benefits of incorporating “mistakes” into the act. He can’t follow the ending of “Six Days On The Road” so we incorporated the timing error. This follows my cardinal rule of as little as possible of two musicians playing exactly the same thing. There has been good progress, but we are not ready. His college is taking priority and he doesn’t have the time to really learn this material as fast as we had hoped. Practice is now back to once per week until he can follow up.
           I discovered to my surprise that no, not all students these days know about hacking, programming, cracking codes, and defeating disk security. I also presumed anyone raised around computers of the Internet generation would know all about the best sites, where all the free stuff and goodies reside, and have a complete network of pals conversant on the newest apps. Wrong. By comparison, I’m the walking encyclopedia. I lent the guy some books on C++, Javascript, and will take another look at DOS myself. I suspect today’s colleges have no idea what they are neglecting by not teaching DOS.

           Here is my driveway. Does it resemble your driveway? I can tell you I love to step out in the morning to this sight. Not the best or newest and not much shining chrome, but some of the best transportation on a budget most people will ever see. But let me list what’s wrong. The scooter is still stalling at times. The ebike (shown here with a load for the dumpster) has completely worn out the new battery in less than a year. And the batbike still has no tonneau cover, just that blue tarp. I can afford the cover, but not the cost of shipping it from the Ukraine.
           More reading found me up at the old Thrift, Dickens old shop. (They have not heard from him either in five years.) That thrift has a good selection of medical and pseudo-medical texts. I want more information on living with high blood pressure. I no longer have it, but I also take daily medication to curb the symptoms. I’d rather change my lifestyle than take chemicals. I already know the best thing to eat in a restaurant is nothing. Except for a few chowder houses on the coast, I know of no restaurant that doesn’t order in pre-processed food by the truckload from the farm-factory. I read some articles on influenza and found them easy to follow from having read JZ’s texts on phlebotomy. I impressed myself.
           Next meeting was with Agent M and the electronics club. In years now we have not come up with a single product we could market on the Internet. We have been surviving on membership dues which amounts to gasoline to the meetings and coffee. Not that we’ve tried everything but it stands to reason we have always been on the lookout for some way to bolster the club revenues. I’ll tell you in a second how this all ties together but if I move to Palm Beach County, the club will fold unless we find something that sells.
           I brought up the topic of Jag’s college courses, which involve the study of electronics. He soldered his first circuit up this week and I was very interested in reading his textbooks. Problem, the course not only has no textbooks, they read instructions of a monitor using a system he cannot access from home. He may very well have learned more useful material from the parts and pieces I gave him off my workbench. That includes a small breadboard, capacitors, resistors, LEDs, jumper wires, a soldering iron and theory on what to look for first and what nonsense parts can be safely ignored.
           As an example of what to ignore, don’t bother memorizing color codes. But if you do, black, brown, red, and orange are 0, 1, 2, 3 and that’s most of what you need. People who say otherwise are apes. It’s dipsticks like that who hope such useless clutter will be on the final exam. The fact is, you will probably never deal with resistors except at your shop bench, and you just hang a color chart on the wall. If they say not, inform them that there is a new invention that puts color codes at your fingertips and it is called “The Internet”.
           So, what is the connection? If we extrapolate the conditions of the rest of the class, they also have no kits or hands-on either. It’s just a thought, but I did point out long ago that the “learning” kits offered for sale are terrible from the word go, designed around some idiot engineer’s approach to teaching. None of them stress the importance of designing your own circuits as early as possible after learning what the components can do. I get the impression that what soldering they taught was as if it was a separate optional procedure. No, it is something you teach on day one.
           It turns out I am not the only one who hesitated with 3D printers. While the technology was fascinating, the reality is not. Not one of the big printer manufacturers has offered even one product, for as Epson put it, not that many people need to print a plastic figure. My objection was that there is no easy way to create or acquire that figure. And the results were pretty crude in any case. While one hopes Epson, with their degenerate marketing policy, does not take the lead, they say that it will be another five years before commercial grade printers appear. The three printers you stay away from are Hewlett-Packard, Brother, and Epson—in that order. The perpetrators of the billion-dollar ink-cartridge scam.