January 19, 2015

MORNING
           Hey, wait up for me. I stepped on a piece of glass last evening. Just a chip, but right in the soft and tender spot, left foot. I recall breaking a dish over there last year and it finally snuck up on me. So get ready for a day of bookwork. This is the one place it is okay to read all day and get nothing else done. Compare that to farm living. I’m also learning more about gear tolerances, actually learning the whole process is a tradeoff in that gears will never be all that efficient. Time for somebody to invent a completely new alternative. Don’t look at me.

           You want to see how the pawl gear thing turned out. I will say that it works, but it is no work of art. It’s more an immeasurable learning experience as making the parts demands a degree of handiness not found around here a year ago.
           In fact, and allow me to point out, this tiny gear is further than the entire meet-up at Nova ever managed between them in all of 2014. So there—and I don’t care they haven’t called back in two months. I’m not missing a thing. As Trent put it, they were the type that clap when the airplane lands.
           Blog rules say every basic learning experience is notable, so here is what I found during this project:
           As usual, the instructions were not clear where clarity was most important. Which axle spins, which axle is attached? Both work equally fine. But you discover later one of the arrangements will cause the wheel to slightly drag against a screw head. The design source, like many woodworking plans, tends to overestimate your shop skills. Over here, we have tiny saws and jeweler’s drill-bits specifically designed to work on miniscule robotic parts, meaning we have tools to compensate for lack of skill. Most people don’t. The instruction to “cut a round wheel” is enough to stop most beginners. The main design flaw is the driving pawl lever.
           It has to perfectly engage the driven notch on each wheel rotation and this design cannot be honed to the correct tolerance without fatally weakening the throat. My guess is the designer built the thing using accumulated years of experience, then went back afterwards and wrote the instructions. That does not work. Couple that with the natural tendency of web posters to not publish their own mistakes and you explain the dismal quality of most Internet instructions. The contraption could be made to work with a slightly larger and slightly relocated drive pawl wheel.
           I’m glad you liked this little description. Gain without the pain.

NOON
           I’m still hobbling along, but I’ve got to get out for coffee. But first, here is a picture of lunch. That’s it, no spuds, no greens, this marinated chicken quarter is my full calorie allotment. I watched a few documentaries on the future of humankind, usually disaster scenarios of having to leave the Earth and relocate. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

           Leave this planet behind for those who want to reshape it for themselves without actually doing the hard work part. There are labels for such people, though I’m hardly printing any of them here. They are bent on redistributing the wealth - yours, that is. The biggest laugh was the programs concerning moving “the race” to another solar system. Laugh, because they presumed everybody on the planet would be taken along.
           I would like to hear why anyone even thinking of leaving on a journey would not automatically leave Patsie and Theresa behind. So they could make friends with Ken. So, that got me to thinking. If I was in charge, which ten groups would I disqualify outright? In any order:

                      Welfare cases
                      Ethiopians
                      MicroSoft
                      Liberals
                      Telemarketers
                      Druggies
                      Single mothers
                      C+ coders
                      Bureaucrats
                      Queers

           I accept there is a terrific amount of overlap in those categories and we would still need to dump a lot of human baggage. So no queuing up yet, all you “exotic” dancers and Torontonians. I would also have to leave behind all Asians, Latinos, and Africans, because by their own admissions, they are already the perfect and superior races who are being held back by the Caucasians. So by request, guys, here is your big chance. Show us how it’s done!
           The homeless would have to stay, since the 10% of us would vacate the best houses, instantly solving their problem, right? (To those who say the problem runs deeper than no housing, that’s why we are leaving behind the liberals.) And we have not even got to the fatties. I would also have to abandon behind all tax collectors, DMV employees, airport security people, and DC lobbyists. Out of sheer concern over what might happen to their sorry asses personal safety once the spaceship got past Pluto.
           Man, that was good chicken.

AFTERNOON
           I drove up to Cooper City to pick up supplies, that’s the big trip of the day. There’s a chill in the air, so I stopped for coffee at Neilus. They don’t pre-heat the cups, henceforth the coffee is tepid by the time you add the creamer. For the next 72 minutes, I tried to power-read “Far From The Madding Crowd”. This is one of those “paregmenon-wealthy milieus” much beloved by ninth grade lit teachers. But I got only to page 11 and concluded, like “Moby Dick”, it was cruel to assign such reading at a grade school level.

           For openers, the book was written in 1895, before the advent of motion pictures. I can follow the need to render the image in the reader’s mind. The young reader quickly loses traction when looking at the stars becomes a “nocturnal reconnoiter”. I’ve already seen several passages from this book that have passed into everyday usage but nobody naturally speaks like that. As one sentence in the first chapter says, these things are “oftener read of than seen”.
           I had intended to see the 5:50PM movie “Boyhood” which rates an 8.5. Seeing it is featured all this week, I decided to do some chores instead. Number one is to get our stealth hit (“The Debbie I Knew”) off the Boss and onto the Tascam. Meaning I have to relearn the Boss which I have not touched in five months because of its finicky memory disk system. The Tascam has the superior tard-card (SD memory) system. No, Hector, that’s not SanDisk, it stands for “secure data”. Probably so-named because there is nothing secure about it.
           Two hours later, I’m still at it. Each element on the Boss has to be exported individually in real time, so I’m trying to re-record each track via the headphone jack. We need those original tracks for the oldest reason in the music recording trade—the mojo. The best time to capture the moment is the earliest track. Studio repetition ruins the sound by sterilizing it. You know, like they sterilize other things. Yet I’ve seen recording sessions go over and over a track to “get it perfect” until the spirit is trampled and everybody but the composer is sick of it. Well, and the studio, which is charging by the hour and loves perfectionists.

EVENING
           I’ve stopped copying the Boss tracks. When placed side by side with the Tascam, it [Boss] is the inferior product. While the quality on both is more than acceptable, the Boss exhibits a “personality”, something you don’t want on a recording. Or at least you should avoid—especially as my ear detects a distinct “indie” sound. The Boss will not record dry, there is always a little bit of reverb. To confirm this, I did a search on bad reviews and that turned out to be the most common complaint. Here are the contenders, side by side.

           Agt. M was over so I have a second opinion on that. It is going to be easier to re-do the tracks. I have all the settings on file somewhere around here, as in a measure-by-measure tab of exactly what each piece is playing. The Tascam is also more intuitive with identical knobs for each feature. The Boss has sliders and those twirly things that take re-getting used to each time.
           I don’t like the place, yet we are starting to patronize the donut shop. It’s a non-intellectual atmosphere. Full of clueless old guys pretending to look serious on their laptops. Guys, wearing headphones on a computer is like asking for your salad dressing on the side. It’s stupid and it’s even stupider if you think it impresses anyone.
           Since you’ve read so much, here’s a confession. This “Madding” book is too much investment in time for so little plot. So I found the free movie on-line and unsurprisingly, it is over three hours long. I’ve watched up to the point where the sleaze-box has rejected the good guys, Farmer Gabriel and Billie Boldwood, and latches on to a toy soldier. That’s enough for now, but I think we can see where this is going.
           I’m afraid I disappoint both the author and the movie producer. You see, I identify with the soldier. Why? Because she never fooled me for a second, that’s why. I learned early not to bother with women who hesitate.


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