One year ago today: February 21, 2014, my dating club, etc.
Five years ago today: February 21, 2010, I've always hated HP.
MORNING
Expect an adventure, I said. And there almost was some. Read the fine print in the nearby picture, and you will see my motivation to get out to Miami today. Wow, a ride on a real B-17 for $75 bucks. Count me in. Try to imagine what I had planned. Fire up the batbike sidecar, breeze down to Miami, hop on a Flying Fortress, go wake up JZ, I mean, I love living in the US of A. Always something to do.
I thought it over. Nearly $500 for a half-hour airplane ride, in an unpressurized cabin with no heating. Maybe even riding in the bomb bay. I would have loved it. But not having that much cash on me, I balked. And in that short spance of time, the flights sold out.
So there I was, two counties over, disappointed as hell. The only thing left to do is salvage some kind of a good time out of the day. First, I’m up the $75 I did not spend on the flight, and that’s now the money I’ve decided to buy another camera with the money. All the famous camera brand names totally disappoint me. Also, the cheaper cameras (under $40) are all exhibiting the same defects. That cannot possibly be a fluke. They eat batteries, need perfect lighting, and begin to lose focus after a few weeks.
Before I go, a little background on the B-17. These were a design from the 1930s and were used for the bombing raids on German cities. If Germany had won the war, the people who led these raids would have been the people tried as war criminals. But, that's politics, not war. My degree is in military history, I studied the weapons and tactics, not the people and the arguments. There are only 8 of these airplanes still flying and I will probably regret I didn't spend the money to ride one today.
NOON
I actually managed to get JZ out of the house by 12:00. We headed south on Dixie to the most expensive Chinese food joint on the strip. Talk about a stuffing. This is a restaurant we patronize once every five years, like clockwork. See this terrible picture? That’s one of the last to be taken with my lousy camera. None of it was real Chinese food but I was buying so bring it on. Normally JZ and I don’t believe in doggie bags but this time we could not clear our plates.
I put on the classical radio, something [a radio station] we don’t get this far north, and I crash on the living room sofa. Considering I just had three days of food, I should have known I was going to fall fast asleep until 5:30PM. Man, I was in dreamland. Now don’t ever rely on JZ to wake you up. I sleep 7 hours and 31 minutes per day, that guy can sleep 13 hours a day. Every time you go pound on his door, you wake the guy up.
Not me, when I oversleep it does me no good. Thus, it’s a waste of life. Still, that concert is a big band from the 60s and 70s. I’m not a fan of big bands, but JZ is. So we decide to take our own vehicles and meet up at the casino. That is normally a wild-goose chase for us, but the place is not that big and I found him within twenty minutes.
AFTERNOON
We get there and Sweet is playing. That’s the band that had a hit with “Ballroom Blitz”. If they had other hits, I don’t think I know them. These guys were putting on an excellent show, the singer was able to mimic the notes the lead guitarist was cranking out. A nice effect, not unlike yodeling. But of course, I’m looking around for the big fancy band. Not some old Englishmen in glitter and glam.
What's curious is to see the huge proportion of Latinos in the audience. They don't understand the lyrics or the culture, but they dance to the beat. This is not stereotyping or conjecture, I speak Spanish. Once again, I did not see even one single young woman in that crowd of thousands. (Nor the usual groups of three young women, but you know what I mean.) Casinos are not the place for normal people to meet.
I’m saying Sweet is okay, but they are totally 1970s. These people have forgotten nothing but nor have they learned anything. Every move, every note, every costume down to the torn blue jeans was as unoriginal as yesterday’s Miami Herald. Come to think of it, it was as unoriginal as tomorrow’s Miami Herald, too.
This was prime time, and I’m not hearing the big band. So I ask JZ where he saw the advertising poster. Oh, he says, and leads me over to the blackjack tables. Sure enough, it doesn’t say 7:00PM, it says 1:00PM. That’s my buddy. Didn’t get on the train, didn’t get on the plane, and then he manages to get me to sleep entirely through a free Jefferson Starship concert.
I am not, at this point, going to ask if anything else could go wrong. I figure I still came out ahead today. Missing out on great things once in a while is infinitely better for me than missing small things all the time. That’s why you’ll hear me say I’d like to live twenty minutes out of town. Peaceful, and far enough away that you don’t go into town unless you need to.
EVENING
Agt. M can do something I can’t. He can mix and match components, like a screen off an old GPS and make it work with a game controller or a video camera. It’s a skill I don’t even follow, but he has made several controllers for the monster bike. Anyway, he comes up with this idea that instead of I buy another camera, use a cell phone. I didn’t know there were models you could just download photos off, and I thought the cheapest monthly contract on a smart phone was $45. Wait for news on that.
This battery pack has a long development history. For example, we found the best material for soldering the terminals together turned out to be that spool of welding wire that would not work on our brand of welder. The material has a high copper content. If you look closely, you can see the long parallel strips of this wire. Each of these cells is something like 1.5 volts, so any non-robotic types out there had best not be trying this at home.
When I say these things take a long time, remember there is no rule book for new experimentation. A lot of what is needed is discovered along the way, like that welding wire. So don’t necessarily associate invention with the final working product. It is really an ongoing set of discoveries, a good portion of which are accidental, expedient, cheap, or just plain handy. I like it because it represents a huge pool of skill that I can personally tell you is never taught in any school.
It should also give an indication of what you are up against when trying to find anything that is really new these days. I remind the reader I have not seen anything new in computers or electronics in forty years. No breakthroughs, at least not on the scale that shakes up the industry. Even 3D printers are not a new concept. No new components have been invented, no theoretically pure evolvement. I suggest even the advent of robots is more the result of human regression than any new technology. That’s right, Hector, you just keep on getting dumb at the rate you are, and you will be replaced.
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ADDENDUM
MSN, the news service intelligent people only see because MSN redirects you there when you close your Hotmail account. Boo and phooey, but what do you expect from MicroSoft? I can answer that—they are as truthful with their news as they are with their computer advertising. Example, today they headline with a man who survives a fall off a 4,000 foot cliff in Sri Lanka. The problem is, that is a misleading lie.
But it goes to show you that is how the millennium crowd like their news—fake headlines and spoonfed. What really happened is the guy fell over the cliff, but only 130 feet onto some tree branches. But that’s the sordid “Made you look!” mentality of news reporting these days.
Last Laugh
When you read it.
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