July 19, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: July 19, 2013, wow,
did I say all that in one day?
Five years ago today: July 19, 2009, chick photos.
Ten years ago today: July 19, 2004.

DAYTIME
           A quiet day, I’m tuckered out from the gig. That’s a first for me. Either that, or it has been so many years since I played a Friday gig. This left me home and relaxing and I have a little game for you to play. I’m searching for a trip this month with the cPod and one of the likely spots I found by examining satellite photos. That’s the game, for you to guess where and why. I’ve located an empty stretch of road between Payne Way and Poseidon Avenue. Nothing but oil tanks on the south side. You have four days to figure it out, or just return here. If I make it, that’s another trip of a lifetime for me.

           Sad to hear that Johnny Winters passed away in Switzerland. I never got that much into his music as I found it to be “commercialized” Blues. Plus, I was never a fan of the repetitious Blues and for all his great licks, his playing was colossally repetitious. He was from Beaumont, Texas, I saw some ads about it when I drove through there last November. He’ll be missed but it is impossible for me to identify with someone who was recording albums at an age when I was standing in the ditch hitchhiking to find work.

           Tired not being the same as sleepy, I studied more celestial navigation. This time I read the intermediate book with more intensity. This may seem odd, but it is a learning strategy that works for me when all else fails. I mean, everybody has something like that, don’t they, Hector? It also works for music. You go over the part you can’t get so many times that you finally force youself to understand it so you don’t have to go over it even one more time.
           The beginner’s navigation, which I now understand to be the Sight Reduction method, will find your location to within 45 to 60 miles, with the average being skewed to 55 miles. I do not yet have a set of the tables nor a current almanac, so many of the sets of directions are wildly confusing. The intermediate level appears to be an extra series of tiny corrections and extrapolations that further hone your chances of fixing your position. This enters the area of statistical estimation, my realm, so I’m finding this tier of learning actually easier than some of the beginner’s books.

           There are references to the “Hillaire”(?) method, about how complicated it is. So I took a look and it is not that bad for me. I’d be looking up different tables, I’ll get back to that in a second. There are also some nearly intoxicating formulas involved, but the major obstacle is that the figures look strange to the untrained eye. Back to the tables, in the sight reduction books, you are looking up familiar degrees and minutes. But with Hillaire, it is strings of unfamiliar decimal numbers. That’s what really is the likely cause for errors because it is asking for trouble.

           Next, I reviewed the series of relays built for the cPod last year. At the time I admitted I was using a lot of guesswork. Reason: I was not replacing a broken relay where I’d just match up the wires. Nor was I using power from the vehicle battery to drive the cPod lights. What’s more, I separate the brake and tail lights to have two sets of brake lights. Today I reviewed that guesswork and amazed myself how lucky I got. Here’s a snap of the original test bed, at the end of today’s post there is a photo of the product once installed. Big difference.
           I have also decided to mount the brake lights on the side, rather than the back of the cPod. This is the so-called elephant ear configuration. This brought me to a quest to find one of the most secret prices in America. Have you ever heard of a CNC cutter? These are the machines which use super heated air (plasma) to cut out designs from pieces of sheet metal.

           Every robot builder sooner or later notices these things, if only because they are so similar to a 2D printer. A couple of stepper motors glides the cutting torch over the surface. Apparently the torch is interchangeable with a router or various types of saw. Of course, anything you design and cut will be copied by the Chinese and priced to flood you out of business.
           Often called “plasmacam”, these devices appear to be sold only by high-pressure sales. The prices are not listed on eBay, the home sites, or even the few sites that appear on a search of used or for sale plasma cutters. The scam is always overpriced product, where they won’t tell you the price until they “know what motivates you”. The biggest advertiser refuses to even send you the 17 minute demo disk unless you give them enough information to determine your net worth in advance.
           I’ll unmask them for you. The machines begin at the basic price of $18,101.83 for the table and the software. The cutter is extra, I’ve seen used ones for sale between $13,500 and $88,650, but there is reason to believe an ordinary cutting torch can be employed. Notice early that CAD design experience is required and all the demos show a world class expert clicking away at lightning speed. As Arnold would say, “Diss iss bool-shitt.”

NIGHTTIME
           I got home late and hungry, so many thanks to the unsung hero who invented chip dip. I first tasted it around age 12, not sure what it was. Actually, I’m still not sure. Onion soup mix and sour cream? I can sort of imagine the invention process. “Yuck, George, you mixed what together? Who’d you suppose is going to eat that goop?”
           I first saw at one of my older sister’s after-school parties. There always seemed to be money found for her to invite six or eight of her school chums over for snacks and soda, yet I had to beg for pennies. But I was only twelve and had not yet clued in I was the black sheep of the family. I did not yet understand the hell I was putting the family through with my embarrassingly high school marks, my insistence on learning music, you can only imagine what that was like for a pack of peasants whose pastime to this day is farting contests.

           And there was the chip dip. Store bought. It became symbolic, you know. I was allowed one bottle of soda per month, but my older sister had store bought chip dip.
           Fast forward to earlier this evening. One of the gals in the audience was on the chipper side. (Isn’t that such a nice word, “chipper”?) So I chatted her up. It was okay for a few minutes until she decided to inform me that snorting up was the most wonderful thing in the world. On that happy note, I ignored all the jerks who would say I’m too picky, and went up the road to sing some Karaoke.
          That’s right, I must be looking in the wrong places. You know how I tend to look in places where there are women, but somehow those are the wrong places. At least that’s what is said by people who, you know, eat a little too much store bought chip dip.
           When I got home, some kind soul had left a complete squirrel-cage assembly on my doorstep. Some nice person has donated the entire turbine assembly. (It eventually became a designer waste basket.) Thanks, but rigging up that kind of gear is tricky. I have a trip in mind for the sidecar and cannot divert any resources to any other task at this point. And travel I will, as this was a very successful weekend. $$$$. In the entertainment field, you get paid what you are worth.

ADDENDUM
           Here’s the installed electronics suite, as promised from above. You see it is a far more elaborate setup, and it is mounted vertically to save space. The relays are marked for right, left, and tail lights. The fourth unmarked relay is for the separate brake lights, now mounted high on the trailer chassis. So even the blind can see them. The reason it seems difficult is the complicated battery bypass system.

           I’ll clarify that. Honda batteries are not very strong. By installing diodes, I’ve arranged that the motorcycle only supplies the weak “off-on” signal to operate the relay. After that, power is drawn from the solar panels to illuminate the lights, saving a huge strain on the expensive Honda battery.


           If you look closely between the two white barrier strips at the very bottom of the panel, you can see the three fat, black diodes. The power from the Honda can only operate the electronics if the trailer battery goes dead. (These are repeat photos from this time last year.)
           That is the trailer battery I got on sale (Walmart, in Oklahoma, I think) and if I didn’t already say, it is the best battery I’ve ever owned. It is a marine design that is meant to be deep discharged and still come back. Note your car battery can’t do this very often before it won’t hold a charge. Nevertheless, I have separately installed a safety mechanism that prevents the marine battery from dropping below 11.8 volts, about 2.8 volts above its design threshold. Why take chances on holidays?
           This is why I felt lucky. I was not sure of the design. It did work first time tested, but that was more due to coincidence than confidence. The panel was left exposed so I could get to it and bypass the bypass if anything went wrong out on the road. The new panel will be encased it its own waterproof carapace at about half the size of what you see here. I had toyed with indicator lights, but the clicking of the relays is loud enough from outside the cPod that we do not require any other self-test.