One year ago today: August 12, 2013, birthday of the cPod.
Five years ago today: August 12, 2009, a quiet day.
Ten years ago today: August 12, 2004, strawberries?
Here’s the Cadillac ranch along Route 66. I never realized so many folks didn’t know what I meant last day. The colors are spray graffiti. I have never seen this place, again, because Route 66 has been obliterated from modern road maps and GPS. Maybe it’s a copyright thing. Like Elvis, did you know you cannot publish pictures of Elvis over 200 pounds? What you are seeing is impersonators. Tennessee enacted a law basically aimed at declaring a dead celebrities photos to be the property of his estate. And his daughter, Priscilla, will not give permission for such photos to be used.
OOPS! Repeat photo. It is impossible to maintain a blog of this size without some unintentional repetition. The counter on this timer at time of printing (2014y 08m 13d 21h 31m 20.2s) was $17,682,856,577,163. The reason I use this national debt counter is because this one at time goes down, showing a more accurate total than the "scare counters" which only go up. Also, as far as is known, mine is the only representation that shows the total at the time the notice was posted.
I took a close look at some of the guitar robots. Indeed, they are designed with the wrong purpose in mind, but you get that with engineers. If you want to know about music, the last person you ask is a guitar player or you’ll be knee-deep in bullshit before you reach the door. I’m not referring to the ”robot tuners” but to an actual mechanism that strums the guitar in accompaniment. What’s out there is inadequate.
To even conceive of a guitar strummer, you get into a dozen disciplines, such as right down to the maximum rate a servo motor can move 60° (also known as the slew rate). Did you know 7 out of 10 people who try to learn the guitar give up? Put another way, only 3 out of 10 people have the mental defect that makes guitar players think they are gods. Here is a Russian effort focused on picking a tune. The few videos available show the presence of solenoids and relays, all of which emit clicking noises that seem to be suppressed somehow.
This device, the Robotar may not be on the market yet (if not, you saw it here first), but it is designed for strumming. It must be controlled by a foot pedal which moves to the next chord of a pre-programmed sequence. This has advantages for me—I often linger on a chord if I get a positive crowd response. Anyway, the strumming part is well within the ability of a microcontroller, in fact, I’d have to be blind not to spot that Arduino Mega smack dab in the middle of this photo.
Here’s a bogus documentary on Hitler’s supership. It typifies the nonsense ladled out daily on the Internet. Idiotic claims such as this single ship could take on the entire British navy and the usual claptrap that the in 1943 the outcome of the war “hung in the balance”. The fact is, while the glut of money from the first war was still being counted, the US did every last thing it possibly could to get into the conflict. War is good for business.
The Pro Bass Shop is a great but expensive source of robot parts, but the only available 200 lb. test line comes in a $60 spool. Did you know they have a bar in there? Fully licensed, but you can go there for just a cup of coffee and they don’t mind if you fall asleep for twenty minutes. Er, I mean, so I’ve heard. And if you go over to the lumber section at Home Depot, you find a few racks of “hangers”, odd shaped pieces of metal used for anchoring lumber. These make excellent robot hardware.
I was up there buying strip lighting. Inside the pod, anything that juts out from the sidewalls stands to get broken off. The nature of the design means sooner or later every part of every wall gets in the way of a foot or an elbow. The lights supplied with the solar panels are vulnerable to such damage and they are essentially impossible to replace.
Here is what you might see if you visit Graceland and see some of Elvis’ jumpsuits. Around the same time, my girlfriends used to wear jumpsuits.
ADDENDUM
First off, house prices are indeed rising, so forget about the place I was going to buy. While those prices have not changed much, the expectation of it has made negotiation just impossible. And here is the unusual photo of the day, from Dan Lewis. The product is not the grommet, rather that is the name of the shop. For when you must have what you never heard of.
What’s this, the post office lost another $2,000,000,000 this quarter? That, of course, has nothing to do with the reputation they lost all those years of insisting on delivering junk mail. So you’ll know, they tend to “lose” the same amount they are socking away for their own retirement funds. That’s correct, although they can hide behind a law that says they must put money away. Think of it as just a precursor of the massive pension fund defaults that are looming over middle-class America.
Hey, and what did I tell you about Robin Williams in 1981? The guy’s on something and one day he’s going to come down. Hard. Yes, he was a great entertainer in the sense that so were Bob Denver and Eddie Albert, but you won’t catch me paying good money to see any other roles they tried to play.
Mork was 63, which isn’t that old, and “suffering from depression”. Add it up if you want, but I already have the answer. I don’t identify with depressed billionaires. He always had the option of forming a robot club like I did when I couldn’t find one. And don't talk to me about depression. Ten years ago I was broke and had twelve weeks to live--but did you see me crying about it?
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