One year ago today: June 24, 2014, remember “monkey parking”?
Five years ago today: June 24, 2010, on firing army generals.
Six years ago today: June 24, 2009, gnarly work habits.
MORNING
An evening at home means I got something done, and this time it was a new saddlebag cover for my Goldwing. The left side lid was damaged a while back and I’ve given up trying to find a factory replacement. So I traced out what I needed and went to work with the bandsaw. It will look distinctive, since the lids will be flat and secured by padlocks, but not so many will notice. There may be a few that point out these lids are the same color as my old camper. Ignore them, they’ll go away.
In a similar vein, taking butter off my diet also removed several healthy items that I found did not taste well without the slather. Prime example is buckwheat (groats). I’ve been experimenting with sauces instead and I’ve come up with some good ones. It is tricky to find good premixes without GMOs any more. Even Knorr has gone downhill with that.
And I the only one who finds English sauces very gravy-like and bland? Show of hands? Whew, thanks. I thought it was me. If one uses them as a base for something better, they are not bad. But after you add three more ingredients, is it English any more. Typical example is English beef gravy. It has no fat. It has beef flavoring, but it is like dining on thin soup made from an Oxo cube.
There, the food component of the blog, ever popular and surprisingly so because I do not often provide recipes. Watch for this upcoming Thursday as I may on a lark decide to drop in at Nova and see the old gang, who between them have not invested in a battery, much less built anything like a robot. At one of the last meetings before the printer disappeared, I suggested each meeting include an 8 to 10 minute mini-lecture on some topic researched by the members own initiative, and it was a popular idea.
When I think of it, I was going to give a presentation on smoothing capacitors. The common presentation of capacitors is a voltage storage in timing circuits, but in practice, they are far more often used to iron out uneven electrical currents. Think of it as the plumbing in an old dorm. When the guys on the ground floor flush the toilets, the showers upstairs get hot. Same thing with DC electrical circuits. Capacitors can prevent that, but must be carefully matched to system requirements.
And I’m in the mood for learning more about that. See you after coffee.
NOON
“Make someone’s day by paying the toll for the person in the car behind you.” --Texas hospitality.
Of course, the question on everybody’s lips is how did my redneck fire-extinguisher tire-bead bottle work. Like a charm, boys, like a charm. First time, too. I drove and phoned around to discover that the puncture is too large for a plug. The solution is to put a tube of which I was leery because that involves cutting off the existing tubeless valve stem. Shown here is the inflated tire, proof of concept.
Not ten minutes before this, he was putting slabs of sour crème on bread like I used to. That’s over at the Romanian seamstress shop, where I’ll have to get some sewing lessons. I mean, I can already fix shoes.
Meanwhile, this successful tire inflation saves me a $60 tow so I’m over to the club for a brewski. As I was about to leave, JZ calls with more good news. And announces we are going fishing. I’ve always wanted to know how to prepare a fish for cooking, so I may just finally get the chance. I’m mighty disappointed that we didn’t make Naples last Saturday. I even went and got a haircut in anticipation of meeting a rich widow who kept her figure.
AFTERNOON
Okay, it’s 6:30PM and I haven’t made it out the door yet. Just after Agt. M left, I picked up part of a dismantled camera, probably a Kodak. I was looking for the self-focus mechanism and connected some voltage. Sure enough, I heard a servo motor. It must be tiny. I spent two hours trying to get at it. The noise is that hum heard when the lens telescopes out of the case when you turn on the juice. The motor is somehow built into the lens casing. Fancy that.
EVENING
This “lens motor” became an object of fascination last evening. The humming sound was not the lens, yet it moves. (Galileo apparently never said that, “Yet it moves.”) It was magnetic but did not rotate. When it dawned on me what it was, things got easier. It is the lens-based image stabilization mechanism. And quite the little gadget.
It turns out very difficult to find any pictures of this lens mechanism and I have no provision to take such a detailed photo of what I’ve got here. Maybe it is time to get that tablet camera. But I did find this interesting demo photo, where the picture changes when a mouse is rolled over the original. (The code won't copy, so you have to go to that link and scroll down to the image of the pillow, then roll your mouse over the imgage.)
I’m speculating on how that was done. The code is hidden, but it is just a mouse-over command that somehow places the imported image in the identical location. It’s always been a challenge finding out what new features can be included in this blog. Since Google took over, most of the good ones, like embedded video, were disabled.
So you’ll know it if you ever see one, in this photo, the yellow arrow is pointing to the mechanism. If you squint, you can see the three pivot points. I don’t yet know if it is spring or magnet suspended, but the lens tends to stay put when the camera is jiggled. I wonder if expensive units have both this lens and a plate combination.
ADDENDUM
It is not widely known that in 1980, I examined the possibility of living on a lifeboat. It seemed to me, in those tender years, an option to get away from “the man”. The very spirit of freedom, moving your own personal pirate ship from place to place. Boy, was I wrong. First off, the boat price was three times what you’d pay on land for the same accommodation. I did not know about mooring fees and marine laws and restrictions on where one could anchor.
That was also about the time I became aware of the “Hippie Writer”. This is the hypocrite (why does “hypocrite” have to be such a nice-sounding word?) who writes about Utopia but fails to tell you what it costs—and more importantly, where he got the money to do so. Is this important? Of course it is. Nobody can take a motorcycle or a houseboat a thousand miles and be unaware of the costs. And that is precisely the information most readers need.
I lived in the hippie era and saw first-hand that most of people rejecting materialism only did so after daddy paid the rent, the food, the phone, and the car insurance. I have a theory why that is. It goes like this. They know that their lifestyle costs more money than they are capable of earning, but don’t want to admit they get it for free. They understand the reader or listener quickly recognizes when somebody doesn’t have the balls to make their own money and take pains to avoid that discussion.
I’ve also referred to this as the “Pierre Berton” syndrome. He was a Canadian journalist who came by campus touting some travel book about how Canada was full of wonderful natural beauty if people would only open their eyes to go see it. But when the first American in the audience asked him what his annual income was, the best he could say was, “None of your damn business.”
And that’s what I mean by “Hippie Writer”.
[Author’s note: Berton, that’s “Berton” with an “e”, died around ten years ago and was lauded as one of Canada’s most prolific writers. Said status was partly achieved because his writing was not “weighted down with footnotes or deep probes into his sources”.
That has a familiar ring to it.
Much has been made of his birth in a cabin in the Yukon. Some cabin, you should see it. What’s missing is what happened during the gap between his joining boy scouts at age 12 and then, miraculously without ever having had a job or any means of support, he emerges at 22 with a university degree in history and lands a job as a newspaper editor when all the older staff was conscripted for the war.
That’s a pretty amazing ten years to leave off the record, Little Pierre.
Moments later, I spotted the other issue. If he was born in 1920, that makes him 21 when the war started. If I am not mistaken, the draft targets men between 18 and 24. So what does the story mean when saying the "older" men were "called up". Good old Pete was prime draft age himself. I could be wrong, but the official account is beginning to reek to high heaven.]
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