MORNING
This is the problem of cellular reception along Federal (see photo). They built the cellular tower next to an electric substation. The interference must be phenomenal at peak hours. I know my cell phone will stack up incoming messages for days, then finally punch through all at once. I blame Virgin Mobile, but I’ve never had their service away from this particular tower. Just look at the “festoonage” of antennas clustered on that puppy. I count at least 32.
While we [the club] is not equipped troubleshoot relays, I can replace them. Careful here, I have no reason to suspect it is the relay, so by replace, I mean bypass. My plan is to leave the existing wiring in place, including the short. Rather than fiddle with the custom shaped casing of the scooter wiring harness, I bypass the single wire across the solenoid coil with a self-canceling switch. Of which the robot club has a plethora.
The idea is to hit this switch instead of the starter button. Saving about $300 in the process just in labor alone. Agt. M is on holidays, still on that cruise, so although I could use some help, I will proceed alone. If you don’t hear from me until later this afternoon, that means I was successful. Later, alligator.
NOON
This is my free sandwich for later. Here is the tale. When I finally got to the bakery (read below) the newborn and mother came in. Before we go any further, I wish to announce to the world that I was never that small. As I sit here, sprinkling pepper on my Baltic herring sandwich, I have also never bought any baby gear. In my life, ever.
I guess I did okay, since I now have this excellent sandwich at home. Now, let us return to the saga of the scooter repair. You don't want to hear about the baby, anyway. I told you I’d be away for a bit, and now I came home to complete this repair. Where to start?
Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a 29/64” drill bit on you, would you? I’m back and the answer is yes and no. Yes, I got the scooter starter bypassed with a switch. No, I don’t have the correct wiring to handle the full amperage that goes through the solenoid, so I installed a temporary until I can get some stranded. And I found out my entire supply of self-cancelling switches are normally closed. Advice: never buy normally closed switches unless you specifically need them and make a special order. The place I bought them is bankrupt and they [the switches] can’t be modified to normally open.
That reminds me of two more tales from the trailer court. When I first met Agt. M, he was baffled by switches that said NO, thinking it meant don’t use them. It means "normally open'. And Dan Umbach, a guy I worked with when I was twenty came to mind. He kept getting sick on the job. Turns out he was slowly poisoning himself by holding nails in his mouth. I have no idea why I remembered this. Back to the scooter.
I think rather than tackle that wiring harness (real rat’s nest), I will design and build a simple relay such as I have on the cPod camper. Which work just fine, and I can use much lighter components. The alternative is to wire in an ordinary light switch which works up to 125 Volts and any amps you got handy. What I have will last the weekend anyway (it didn't last, by the way), and that’s when the boss gets back from holidays at the scooter shop. On Monday.
He’s the one who can wheel and deal. I guessed the 250cc was a 1997, it’s a 1995. Back when they still built those things right. I went over it in some detail today, noting it has no plastic parts and it’s got one of those constant speed carburetors, the ones everybody (except me) thinks is a choke. It is actually a poor-man’s cruise control. Something you appreciate if you’ve ever held the throttle grip of a Goldwing open for 400+ miles straight out. I have.
Essentially, by setting the choke right, you can give it enough beans to run steady. It's a sliding switch on the left handlebar. I'd explain this to my critics, but it is above their pay grade.
AFTERNOON
I got to thinking. So here’s another idea that will go nowhere. Remember that extensive batch of Arduino material Fred donated to the club? How the previous owner thought to learn some robot stuff and leaped into a complicated first project, botched it, and gave up? Well, I took that project out and examined his mistakes. They make sense. He was trying to make a device that posted to the Internet on command.
This got me to thinking why he would do that. I dunno, but it does have a certain allure. Using the Internet without a computer, or at least a portable device that can’t be manipulated because it is not a computer. Hmmm, I know how to build such things and I could take apart what he messed up and repair it. I know two other things. One, how to connect computers with a crossover cable. Two, that 99% of the “experts” on the Internet cannot describe how IPS addressing works start to finish. Why has nobody put these together into a wireless concept?
In a sense, this has already been done. Any of those cameras that you can connect to the Internet and see on your phone or pad works on this principle. But, I ask, is there anyone among you who absolutely trusts such a device that you cannot examine the code yourself? Your cell phone can both track you and listen when it is turned off, you know. That didn’t happen by accident.
That’s why nobody is allowed to build a cell phone with an antenna that is receive-only until you answer it. That’s why I use a cell phone built before 2006. And I have a drawer full of extras. And extra SIM cards. It’s gone beyond where protecting your privacy is suspect to the situation where if you aren’t doing it, you are a sucker. Resistance is not just wise, it is patriotic. The lumpen proletariat only got so far accusing everybody else of being paranoid because they themselves were too lazy or unknowledgeable to undertake any defensive action themselves. Yes, I could name names.
And in a similar vein, when I took my last Morse code test, the Farnsworth button was accidentally checked. That means I will redo the test. It seemed so easy because Farnsworth with a method that increases the silent space between letters and words, the part that gives most amateurs the greatest difficulty. One would have no such advantage in the real world. The bad news is, even with Farnsworth, I miss around 30% of blanks. My results are still acceptable but with points of confusion. And I have a tendency to leave out obvious punctuation because I never thought the other guy should be sending them in the first place.
That reminds me about recently mentioning there are no PhDs among my critics. It seems I mentioned my test speed with Morse is ten words per minute. A certain few people think that is funny. Because they are too slope-headed to spot that I said words, not characters per minute. Those who think ten words per minute is no big deal should maybe go out and try it themselves. That will shut the buggers up for a while. But nothing ever shuts them up totally.
ADDENDUM
So, people are interested in blog statistics. I can talk about that a bit. For openers, Facebook and Twitter did not spell the death of blogs. Far from it. In fact in 2014, 60% of all Internet users now read blogs. They [blogs] have endured the test of time. My opinion is that unlike airhead texting, blogs require content.
Above all, I do not trust blog statistics. There are no controls or standards in that industry, they are free to report what they please and since no two of them agree, something funny is going on, you bet. They also do not distinguish users by length of time on a blog and click-counts can be manipulated. Advertising also distorts the true blog numbers. There are 353 million people in North America and a successful blog reaches 1% of them. I’ve always done way better than that.
Mind you, this blog is nowhere near the top. But we are close to the bottom end of the top. Here’s a statistic for you, if the top 10% of non-news blogs were lopped off, this one would be in the running. This blog kind of sits around the median, all told. Since we are not dealing with a bell curve here, that’s not bad for a work with a $0.00 promotion budget.
Newest trends in blogging include blog contests and blog meet-ups. I’ll pass. A blogstar is considered someone who makes a living writing blogs. Most such blogs concern lifestyle, parenting, food, and crafts. So I don’t have a clue how they do it. Live off a blog, that is. One area this blog shines is the number of “old” blogs that get read. Goes to show you, good information never wears out. My old (old as in written long ago) blogs get read seven times more than Fortune 500 companies.
Here's my blog contest. I’ll give $500 to anyone who guesses the original name of this blog. This is a time limited offer. By New Year's or nothing.
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