One year ago today: March 20, 2014, reads like a rant & rave.
Five years ago today: March 20, 2010, I reject the iPad as a toy.
Ten years ago today: March 20, 2005, my best student.
MORNING
Yep, Agt. M is fine, he came over last evening with pizza. Which he knows I can’t eat, ha, ha. I had a slice and yep, pizza is addicting. What’s happening is the aluminum braising joints he made proved to be too brittle. They didn't "take". Folks, this is why I stay with steel, or more accurately, ferrous metals. Shown here, he is duplicating the process so I can observe any problems. Sure enough, we were using the wrong type of torch. Butane, shown here, does not quite heat the metal as hot as propane. It never gets hot enough.
Resolved and motion passed or whatever to solve that problem. The main goal is the bicycle rack to be welding directly onto the towing frame of the mobile home. My hope is that they steal the home and leave the bicycle. Seriously, three prongs to hold the wheels and bicycle frame in place should discourage the thieves. Florida thieves don’t like hard work.
As is customary now, the club reviewed an hour’s work on various options before deciding on the simplest form of bicycle rack. We also examined the tank tread and it is pretty unanimous that wood was a better idea to get started. And other than what contacts the ground, the rest of a vehicular robot is just a fancy box.
The trailer association will not allow me to put a metal grate across my doorway. I have a porch large enough that I would like to leave things out there once in a while, but the answer was a flat no. Gates and window grills make the place look too “South American”. They’ve got a point. There is a resistance to “Cuban” looking houses (bars on the windows) and I would not blame any buyer who has that attitude, nomsayn?
NOON
“The shortest distance between two points is under construction.” --Noeli Alioto
Okay, no skipping entries just because I don’t think anything happened. When nothing happens, guys like me are supposed to make it happen. If I could just find a gal with the same attitude again. They say the best way to predict the future is to make it happen. What I did was look up some statistics.
The shill is the guy the grabber hands off the loot to. So even if you catch the grabber, he will have nothing on him. Pickpockets love knapsacks and purses. One recent tactic at the beaches is to fake distress. People run into the water to help and lose their belongings.
This photo is addressing an age-old con. Many women use sex to distract men while cleaning out their wallets. I was pickpocketed once, in Delhi, India. Never felt a thing, but some kids returned my travel documents. I could not reward them, however, without revealing to anyone watching where my real wallet was. I had to thank them only. When traveling, I always carry a fake wallet with $5 in it. You don’t want a pickpocket incident to turn into a mugging.
In other stats, there are still more businesses failing that starting, an overall decline that has serious consequences for the country. But so what, no one person in a thousand has any idea how close to the brink we are. What I did was look closer at that diminishing number of new business startups. A greater proportion are now single proprietorships, that is fewer partnerships. This makes sense, now that the system has perfected the process of turning business partners on one another.
The ratio of failures in the first 18 months remains the same, around 70%. One stat that amuses me is the average startup fee. It has dropped to $15,000 since the advent of the computer. When I got out of college, the startup was $200,000. You had to invest enough to discourage the competition. I know, it sucked, but that's how it worked back then. Everybody borrowed money to start a business, making the banker an unwelcome partner in every deal. But if you started with less, you would get plowed under by the competition due to what economists call “ease of market entry”.
You had to use expensive start-ups as a barrier to just anyone seeing your success and doing the old copy-cat. If I was going to start a business, I would do something cheap and easy, such as supply real robot parts in S. Florida. All the electronics supply stores proved inadequate. Often the stock the carried was completely wrong for beginners.
I reconciled the books and I’m out $338, but it’s one of those situations where I don’t think I should say anything. Unless you want to hear about all the fun I had vacuuming the place, there isn’t even any trivia to report. I’m going down to the club at 6:00PM to design a shelf for the tool shed. The last owner put the back wall right up against the property next door, so I can’t drive any anchors through the wall. All has to be braced internally, so I just found a use for the leftover ¾” plywood from the original cPod.
EVENING
Okay, lesson learned. Everybody had a great time this evening. And I don’t mind saying so because I like a spontaneous situation as much as anybody. Part of the scenario is that somehow I thought this was Thursday. That happens, you know, when you get too old. You could trace this back to the bakery staff trading shifts with Friday, that threw me off. If you think I should know better, well up yours, too.
What do I mean by everyone? Well, Billie-Bill was there in fine form, with a trained band that did little but accentuate his famous guitar licks. I told you before, the guy is good. But once a guitarist experiences his magnificent splendor, he is forever unable to play ordinary rhythm again. Heidi was there, so was the drummer and the vocalist and the bassist. It was a guitarist wonderland.
And Trent made an appearance. Quite the surprise since I know he’s got items to deal with that can totally preoccupy. It’s glad he made it to the old stomping grounds. I introduced him to the movers and shakers present, but it was so noisy in there that none of this will be on the exam. The pub is kind of neat, since it has the character of the old Jimbos and the atmosphere missing from the Triple B.
As far as that ambience goes, there is a definite difference when the crew is present. Notice, I did not specify who is on the crew. Only the difference.
ADDENDUM
Agt. M was fascinated by my redneck radio. This is the kit from Radio Shack I used to practice my initial soldering. Then it grew, the box is from the scroll saw, the antenna from a broken weather radio, etc. The sound is terrible but outside on a clear night like this, the reception is solid across the entire spectrum. That’s Agt. M pointing at the speaker, which I will not allow anyone to replace. I like the tinny sound just the way it is. The tinnier the audio, the better NPR sounds.
Agt. M still can’t believe it works. The knob on the front is the lid of a toothpaste tube and you can see the battery wires dangling out the notch in the cabinet. Why an old radio kit? Well, this is destined to be modified so that it will sweep for Morse code. The code will always get through.
Speaking of Morse, Agt. M cannot grasp the system. He heard long ago that is was binary and it isn’t. He also heard the letters all had the same number of dots or dashes. You know, I’ve met so many people who have been told that. And like M, it impedes their ability to learn or follow it. Some symbols and punctuation marks take up so six units. Their ear breaks it into shorter letters. Now listen up because this isn't in the book and the "experts" won't tell you this. Each code sender "groups" their words in a characteristic way and part of the trick to receiving is to listen for that pattern right away.
To elaborate, while I don’t recall ever having had that problem with it, as long as you pick up how the guy sending “accents” his word-groups, you follow better. And computerized code gives me little difficulty at all except the spaces between words--when a computer is sending, there is no "accent".
Butthisdoesnotseemtomatteralotwhenyoujustwanttoknowwhatisgoingon.
What amuses me is how Agt. M and others are astounded by demos of my code-receiving, pecking it out sometimes with only my left hand while drinking coffee. The explanation is easy, I’ve been able to type so long that I never bothered learning to write code out by hand.
What they see appears to be a combination of individually tricky skills. When you type out the code, you learn to type “between” the Morse digits so you can hear better. The computer keys make a slight noise, when all this is blended together I guess it could seem nearly impossible to someone who hasn’t mastered the components. Just don’t tell them that I slow the code down to the lowest possible speed (5 wpm). At which speed I can 100% flawlessly and unfailingly follow any transmission, including cipher and foreign languages that use Roman characters.
And I’m by no means an expert.
Last Laugh
