Five years ago today: June 1, 2009, I hate shift work.
Seattle grade rain kept me under the roof all day, giving me time to work on a steerable robot. Trust me, read up a bit on anything to do with robots because just leaping in with common sense will cause problems down the line. The two-wheel drive concept on paper doesn’t reveal the problem of weakness in the half-axle arrangement. I still haven’t got it right, but caught it early in the build, so again, read first, build later.
Like anywhere in life, those with deep pockets can always push a project through. But robots are a nearly fantastic study in how wrong that path can be. You see useless but impressive robots and battling robots long before anything practical emerges. Mind you, just once I would love to build something with the same money others have to burn, but until then, it is better to think and substitute. I’ve become adept at cutting corners because otherwise the cost will kick you in the backside.
For example, I had to surrender the concept of one chip, one task. Now, at the expense of speed, I have learned to program a single Arduino to operate all the chores that support the sensors. I’m trying now to see if I can get a single servo (that’s the motor on top of the Jenga with the colored wires) to both point the sonar and steer. A second servo is the alternative and we are not NASA over here. Note to the beady-eyed. Yes, those are printer parts and that touch of blue paint reveals the wood is camper pod surplus.
Since the rain sputtered all daylight hours, I also rigged up the backup computer with three hard drives. I’ve been putting that off for a long time because of the difficulty of keeping track of everything in triplicate. Most precious are my countless music files. The blog files are there, but not a priority any more as the Internet will preserve them for me. A review of my backup retirement plans from 30 years ago reveal some faults I could not have known about. One, cross-border currency controls, and two, the rise of crime in every area I had considered as a cheap place to live. Like Belize or Panama.
This morning found me at breakfast in the Senor Café, where their sell-out crowds are making life difficult for everyone. The staff and the cooks cannot keep up with the demand, not even close. The success is a combination of location and service, something they wisely know would not be easy to duplicate by opening another place. And the original staff is still there ten years later. I remember when an empanada and coffee were 65 cents each. Now it has tripled. I’m also impressed by the number of Anglos who eat there, usually they shun Latino places.
So it boils down to style. She is educated (a lawyer), talented, tall (six foot), blonde (sort of), green-eyed, born rich, and all the other things I appreciate in a woman. She’s as tough on liberals as I am on guitar players and like me, she moves in the circles of what she writes about. She reads Dave Barry, is anti-immigration, dislikes noisy queers, and correctly identified the University of Ottawa as “bush league”, so what’s not to like about her? I detect a streak of higher loneliness in her writing, but hey, like her I haven’t met anyone either. She’s in her mid-fifties now, the only reason she isn’t my girlfriend is that she hasn’t asked me out yet. What? You don’t think I’d be dumb enough to ask first, do you? Because then you don’t know how the world works after 50 years old. Neither do I, but hey, it’s my blog.
I also took the time to watch a documentary on the Kokoda trail battles in WWII. This is where the Japanese army attempted to take Port Moresby overland in Papua New Guinea after their sea invasion was thwarted in the Coral Sea. The American general, McArthur, made the usual total ass of himself. The American troops dropped their rifles and ran when the Japs let loose a single tray of machine gun bullets. The battle was fought and won by Australians, some of them gang-pressed militia who were told they were going to Samoa to watch dancing girls.
Now I’ll tell you how it really works. It doesn’t. The box is a fake, and you can buy up all manner of these “inventions” from Prank Pack. There are such gems as the iArm, the shower coffee-maker, and (my favorite) bacon-scented dryer sheets. If you have the time, this site is a good visit, as the products (all fakes) have some damn amazing slide shows.
ADDENDUM
Totally concerned with music topics.
Today ends the annual budget review and the new band, the five-piece, is a less than break-even proposition. More has been expended keeping it together than we’ve made in the entire year of the venture. The potential is there and I’m essentially riding on that. Other than the seemingly random tunes that get hacked at rehearsal, this band lacks any direction. And no, a smattering of pre-1969 English near-hits and their US knockoffs does not count. Direct expenses have climbed to 51.7%, combined expenses are over 100%. Put simply, this band is costing me money.
Let me say a little more about downtown. A number of new clubs have opened up and I was not surprised to see there were no local musicians working there. I visited all five clubs on the strip that did not have reggae, rap, or blues and found zero local personalities. They do that to themselves by all being clones, you know.
This photo is a country band playing “Moonshines” but their set-list was heavy on the country rock. I vaguely thought the bassist I recognized but he does not live around here. Um, the lady in the pink top is not in the band. She’s a drunk on stage who mistakenly thought she could play a tambourine.
No doubt about it, the plan I had for the more “wangy-twangy” country music would have us playing there steady. I talked to the staff and a couple regular patrons. They did not recognize half the tunes the band played. The keyboardist at far left was remarkable. Overall, this was a good band but it should be split into two bands. Next, I visited the Irish place across the road. Loud, but not a good meeting place as the crowd was middle-aged couples though I did see troops of off-duty nurses, the ones who, for reasons, do not have boyfriends to take them out.
The clubs themselves don’t contribute to a relaxed-but-entertaining atmosphere. For example, there is not an adult alive in American that does not know what a bottle of Budweiser is. Unless they have some fanatical reason for denying they know, I should add. So when I ask for a bottle of Bud, everyone knows what I am expecting. So why do these rough-shaven bartenders go full-retard and hand me something like this?
Edgar’s place, some call it the Octopus, was crowded full of the regular men, mostly local househusbands spending the grocery money. The two females present were barmaids, the music was recorded but I did get there early. On the return leg from Nova last week, I stopped at Shenanigan’s on Park Road. Total messy, slobbering male sports fan clientele, noisy, rowdy, bellering at the TV.
All this points to the conclusions I drew long ago. That post-recession music in this town would quickly degenerate into a few weekend gigs, all drinking establishments, and very little differentiation in ambience except along ethnic, racial, or cultural lines. The majority of bands play identical sets and 80% of them go without regular work. It is that 80% that is the competition because they flood the entry level positions. The only spot downtown I could imagine my five-piece working is Whisky Tango, who mainly hire circuit bands that make us look like great-grandfathers. Same with the clientele. I am more likely to watch the crowd than the band and it was plain nobody was paying attention to the music except a few men, who at best seemed familiar with maybe half the songs.
Circuit bands around here go through agencies in Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm. These places charge a stiff sign-up fee that is more than the band can expect to make back on several gigs. The demand is there, but these agencies all cater to what used to work, which in turn lessens the incentive for bands to play anything different than the other bands. While there are appearing ever more ads for starting country bands, the ads specify only modern country, which strongly resembles old rock and roll with an added layer of fiddle and steel.
And all evening, I did not see one single attractive woman. Not one. Certainly none that looked like Ann Coulter. Poor Ann, I can tell how fed up she is with all those politicians and journalists she's been dating. I could take her away from all that.
[Author's note 2019: my enthusiasm for Ann faded when she began attacking Donald Trump for not keeping his campaign promises, instead of attacking the entrenched liberal bureaucracy that was blocking him from doing so.]
