One year ago today: September 2013.
Five years ago today: September 2, 2009, a crazy
day at the shoemaker's.
Ten years ago today: September 2, 2004, Tokyo, 1923.
I decided not to attend the memoir writer's meeting. It was more interesting to pursue my own studies and take it easy in the coffee house up near Oakwood Plaza. It was a nice day for shopping, being overcast with a breeze. One item I've not seen before is water putty. Ring a bell? This product is not a water based putty, rather a powder you mix with water, hence the name. I've got it here, testing to see if it will seal the ends of sawn lumber against moisture when painted. That's about how exciting as it gets today.
Dang, it would not bury the staple and jammed and got me flustered. I was just incensed, took me two minutes to calm down. Guess what? When I went to the scooter, they switched my stapler with an old crappy one same color from the back room. Ha, ha, ha. Very funny guys. But I'm hardly in a position to admonish anyone who pulls a practical joke.
Here is what went on the remainder of the day. While I place restrictions on what is published here, Agt. M hit a car with our $1,200 prototype electric bike. A cop car. It's all patched up now, I adjourned the club meeting to McDonalds, the only place open around here after dark. He doesn't understand he could have been arrested. That is a moving vehicle accident.
The meeting was directed at what we can't do, essentially the technologies we did not pursue or found too expensive. Top of the list is joining or welding aluminum. Agt. M says it is easy, I say it is noisy and poisonous. The only safety gear that exists in the club is what I dictate to be there. I am constantly buying sets of drill bits and a month later all I have left are 11/64ths and such. So how come I don't care to have a red hot welding torch in the shed?
Furthermore, I am not quite convinced that welding has that great an advantage over some of the newer aluminum brazing techniques I've seen on youTube. This Super Alloy 5 flux shows one guy making solid joints with a propane torch. I have no wariness about propane. I'm okay with propane.
All of this ties into the meeting, as I am releasing club money to buy products that are not petroleum based. That explains the water putty. It is not greasy like wood putty. I also found it will pour into a mold, though we have no use for that presently. And I brought a demo can of acrylic paint that is water based. It costs a dollar more, from Minwax. Mind you, a half pint lasts me two years. (Wait, that's worded funny. What I mean is if a can of non-oil product costs a buck more, the club will pay the difference.) The fumes in the clubhouse were giving me a headache unless we left the door open. Can't be doing that in the summertime.
Of more pressing importance (I say) is that we still cannot produce circuit boards. Without on-board microcontrollers, I cannot justify the cost of welding equipment. I woefully regret we did not pursue circuit board etching all because of a few dollars and some bad instructions at the start. I have already used up all the club Unos (the small and familiar Arduino boards), as it seems each task requires a dedicated microcontroller. There has to be a way to get things multitasking, if only because the factory chips are $35 apiece. The circuit boards we could manufacture take the cost down to $7 each.
The remaining topic was the Arduino technology. It is almost a given that we will experience problems that are not mentioned in the textbooks. We've learned to regard this as a sign that we've gotten further than anyone else who has not encountered the problem. So here's one for you in layman's terms. I have a piece of information that I want to tell George, then I want to write down the same information, then I want a record that I told George and a record that I wrote it down. Follow that? There is an extra piece of info most people would not think of in that process, information that is not part of the data. Read it again. There are strong reasons why this situation is often encountered by a robot. It needs to look back into memory to see what worked before, or you still will be up late programming a workaround long after I reach Mars.
There is more to this than meets the ear. If a microcontroller or a really, really stupid person does not have a reliable memory circuit, the only option to solving a problem they've not seen before is to start inputting more and more information hoping to find an easy fix. No doubt you've seen these things in action, pre-conceived notions but no memory. At that point, things go seriously wrong as the programmer or person will start sifting the new data to find things that support their notions. Come to think of it, isn't that how committees operate?
Meanwhile, demo or record? I chose to demo the work and leave the data log until later. I showed Agt. M how I can walk directly between two sensors without being detected. He found that pretty amazing because he could not do it. I know the trick, see, I read the data, he just watches it scroll by.
So, not much else went on today. By 9:30PM we biked up the street for coffee and chicken sandwiches. Learning at this level is exhausting but doesn't always appear as fatigue that tells you to time to shut down. I know why serious college students are hungry all the time, or why I can drink eight cups of coffee in two hours while on non-study days one cup a day is plenty. We also downed 2.78 quarts of (expensive top-of-the-line) Dole pineapple juice each. Only those who experience deep-learning information overload will recognize how these appetite and behavior symptoms are related, so Ken and Patsie, you are safe. By quite a margin.
[Author's note: Dole pineapple has begun to add a different type of Vitamin A to the juice, which I dislike. We don't need anything but natural pineapple juice, which it is, but food-additive vitamins are mixed with cornstarch made from Frankencorn. That is definitely no good for you and I don't know why Dole would do such a thing. Also, you should only buy pineapple juice in the metal can, but once you open the can, store it into a glass container in the fridge. I know my pineapple juice.]
