One year ago today: September 15, 2013,
Five years ago today: September 15, 2009, jammin' with Genie.
Ten years ago today: Septebmer 15, 2004, remember the lock & key?
What a surprise. I found in my closet a great little shirt I must have forgotten. Perky, and fits me great. It's a perfect go-downtown shirt, so guess where I'm going. The original picture went missing, so here is a generic blue shirt. I like blue shirts. Either I'm getting senile or the shirt looks like one I threw out a couple years ago and I bought a replacement on a lark. How to celebrate? Well, it says here I can have Chinese food once per month. And it has been much longer than that. A quiet morning, just me and my nice, quiet, uncomplicated navigational tables.
I think that because identical twins run in families, but fraternal twins do not. And I asked the question why the ratio of first-born fraternals is different than identicals. The operative concept here is first-born. Why are the ratios not the same?
I applied Occam's razor. I now conclude that the rule saying woman cannot become pregnant by more than one man at a time is not valid. At least not anywhere near as valid as the woman involved would have you believe. Guys, watch your wife like a hawk between the time she tells you she's pregnant and she starts to show. Something not on the DNA charts is definitely going on all too often during that stretch. Maybe plenty of time for a final spree?
[Author's note 2015-09-15: Folks, this is no joke, I really mean it. I am convinced there is no such thing as fraternal twins from the same father. Anybody who understands DNA will know this. I have no strict "scientific" proof so I won't make the medical journals. But somebody will talk sooner or later. When your wife gets pregnant the first time, she'll tell you. Too many men "back off" at the news and that is her opportunity and incentive to screw all her old boyfriends. Unsavory as some find it, that is a far better explanation for frats than some amateur DNA mumbo-jumbo.]
Next I took it upon myself to replace all the bolts on my little robotics project with the smallest units that suffice. Beware all beginners, working with really tiny bolts and screws requires more skill and patience than you think, no matter what you think, unless you are already a watchmaker. However, the results are very pretty, impressive actually. And this unit, if you recall, is to show Nova how it's done. I'm also persuaded on the value of "exterior tooth" washers for all machine
We are learning fast which products to avoid and when to buy matching sets [of hardware, like spar packs of machine screws that include the bolts) at higher prices. Face it, by the time a Joe like me starts getting picky how things look, great progress has been made. And I should write the book, "The Drill Press as a Sanding, Shaping, and Milling Tool". The robot project is 90% done, but the sneaky people from Radio Shack and MakerBot don't tell you the complicated parts until the very end. For example, all the calibration files are WAV and won't work if converted to MP3.
I'm understandably glad to have chosen robotics as a hobby, although I am far away from ever actually building one. It's the spinoffs I like most, even right down to learning which blunted old screwdrivers can be sharpened or ground back to usefulness.
NOON and BEYOND
Ta-da! Here is my very first "robot picture". Yes, Nova, you can now say you know somebody who built a working prototype, no thanks to you. This is the photo drawn by the robot arm I put together over the last two weeks. I followed a Radio Shack template of dubious utility and worked out the rest on my own. That is the top secret Nova-thingee I've been on for a while.
And this project will drive you ga-ga. The skimpy directions have plainly not been tested to find what goes wrong in the field, the real world acid test is missing. At Radio Shack, that is, not here. Their documentation is incomplete. What do you do when their calibration program obviously does not calibrate? You are stuck, axle-deep.
Hint: connect an Arduino, which is not part of this project, and send a 2.0ms high (5.0V 50% duty cycle) signal at 50mHz and it will return the servos to the center position. You can then mark the spot with a crayon and continue. Why, Radio Shack, isn't that precisely what everyone would have done? Just so you don't have to mention it in the directions, I mean.
To those with insatiable curiosity, this picture is the result of a sound wave. When I connected the plugs, a video started playing by itself in the back ground. (Don't you just love the way youTube does that?) So really, really technically speaking this is a visual representation, dare I say "voice-print", of the Boer War. Well, more of a "sound-track-print".
Why, you can even sort of see the line of Tommies with their backs to the mountain. And the line of attacking Zulus. Just kidding, this diagram is entirely random except for the smooth arcs, which are a system reset. Just you watch, in 47 days somebody will notice the picture is upside down.
Getting back to my "perky" blue shirt, I scootered up to Ft. Lauderdale for happy hour with Trent and withing the half-hour, we were chatting up a playboy bunny. What? You want the details? Gee, okay, we only talked to her for crying out loud. West of Andrews just across the tracks is a little pub strip called Hammershee(?).
I arrived first and so picked an little outdoor cantina. I had brought the robot arm along to show Trent, it was unobtrusively set off to one side. But the server, an oriental lady, spotted it instantly and began asking questions. My experience is 99% of servers would not even know they were seeing something new and different, much less know to ask.
Let me tell you, within seconds I was enchanted. Moments later Trent arrived and before we knew it she had us sipping YingLing lager. She was half-Chinese, she had worked the clubs but got tired of serving "massively drunk people at five in the morning". I identify with any decision to work less and get ahead more. Indeed, she said she was working there to relax, but I would not be surprised to find out she owns the joint. Not my type, but talk about precocious . In return, she picked up that we were not locals and we were old friends within minutes.
Trent and I caught up on times, he's been out of the loop nearly a year. He's much less stressed, you see it instantly. We talked music, which in this case is the band, always a fascinating topic to musicians once you get past the music appreciation 101 level. We did not talk military, politics, or money, but then again, we have no reason to. The club had an excellent guitar player show up, so we stayed on a little longer than we normally would.
ADDENDUM
Shame on you MicroSoft, making the cookie directory invisible to searches. That nasty Softonics virus got into my system again, likely while I was looking for the Java Runtime application. MicroSoft are real pencil-dicks about building systems that are easy to infect. They dance around like it is not their fault what you download, but they will not build a reset button that makes it easy to find virus hiding spots.
So you know, this is the MicroSoft roaming directory which serves no real purpose except an incubation room, in this case the softonics virus is the one 776 bytes long starting with KXG.
I never could understand why the government allows these virus companies to stay in business. Even if bastards like softonics could claim they are just advertisers, it is false advertising. They are destroying people's private property with their viruses. And because they piggyback legitimate downloads, that's like bait and switch. You didn't want the virus. But forget the millions of dollars lost to virus attacks, the government has real issues to deal with like, well, like, um, you know what I mean, I think.
[Author's note: I know as little about Softonics as the next guy. They are a private company (S.A. means "Societe Anonimo") in Spain (Barcelona) with offices in Asia and New York, which right there pretty much tells you about their corporate ethics. They say they are advertisers. Now I don't know if they are the ones behind the downloads that butcher your computer memory, but if not, they are certainly not leading the charge to clean up their image. They have completely infiltrated MicroSoft, often releasing intrusion software the same day as Microsoft announces a hot fix.]
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