One year ago today: June 25, 2014, LEAP, meat glue, and PING))).
Five years ago today: June 25, 2010, remember erasable printer paper?
Six years ago today: June 25, 2009, success for $250,000.
MORNING
Nothing spells Third World like how long it takes to get anything done in Florida. I’ll spare you the details, but I am going to spend the remainder of the day inside with a good book. And that book is “Murder On The Orient Express”. Yep, I’m just getting around to it now. I have not even seen the movie, 1974 wasn’t it? No laziness or anything, but this type of literature would never have held my attention in my younger days.
She always insisted I call her Aggie. Well, I mean she would have if we’d ever met. I’m dusty and weary from six hours of chasing around so let me dive into the novel. I’ve got a hardcover version. And I can report that used book prices have tripled in the past year.
Food. When I was a kid, there were plenty of jokes about anchovy paste. So I thought I’d grab a tube and see what the fuss was about. I bought it up at the Doris Italian market, so for good measure I got an extra for Gabe, the barber. My conclusion? It’s pretty hard to figure out where one would eat this material. It tastes like leftover anchovies ground into paste with an extra helping of salt.
You can make anchovy toasts up to four days in advance, stored at room temp although I would not try that with any seafood. There’s a pasta dish called farfelle. However, dear readers, I caution anyone who looks up recipes on-line these days to beware of membership sites and dot-coms like “Yummly” and “finecooking”. All such sites download spyware and tracking ware onto your computer. The bad guys know that people have an unjustified trust in recipe offers.
NOON
“If the Aborigine crafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would flunk it.” ~Stanley Garn (He’s the guy who divided Pacific Islanders into three categories: Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian.)
I took a tea break late afternoon and clicked on a link about famous persons who died this year. John Lennon’s first wife (Cynthia Powell), Ellie-Mae Clampett (Donna Douglas), BB King. And I was stunned to see the numbers who died before the age of 62, the age I have always felt as just the beginning of old age. Part of my reaction is that these people are invariably rich and have access to the finest medical facilities. In most cases, cause of death was not specified, but a common theme was complications from other conditions, like diabetes.
So I made a pot of tea and picked up another book, “Corpus Delicti”. I believe it is about that original case where a person was not just declared dead without a corpse, but also found a murder suspect. I can’t remember [if I read this or first heard about this story], this was fifty years ago or so. I’ll tell you after I read a bit.
A close examination of my control column joystick shows that I actually need four axes to react to three dimensional steering. Odd as that appears, the reasoning is to have the joystick present a natural feel to the operator. I got this concept from driving the sidecar. It takes a while to get used to the rig turning without having to lean toward that side.
Watching carefully when people used the joystick, I noticed they would lean when turning. This is different than the sensation from behind a car steering wheel. Try it yourself. Adopt the position of holding on to the steering wheel of a car. Now imagine it is an airplane instead and turn, Aha, you leaned, didn’t you? And that requires a fourth axis. Not only does the "steering" need to lean, so does the whole assembly or there is a disjoint in the “feel” of the control column if the bass stays horizontal.
My theory is that the occupant feels that one side of the vehicle has to move faster to make a turn and leans to compensate.
EVENING
I was right and I was wrong about Agatha’s book. Yes, the characters are far too stereotyped for me, but I appreciate in the days before the cinema, a goodly helping of that was necessary. But the writing is superb, approaching perfection in those untaught areas of which I place much value. Such as sentence structure and balance within each paragraph. Either she is one precise proofreader or she brought in the hired help.
This is a view of the night sky taken toward the north pole. You’ve seen these time lapse photos as amusing, but I find they stretch the imagination of those who try to understand them. While navigation, such as I studied it, looked outward, I would not like to have a stab and looking inward from the point of view of the stars. There is a name for the condition many people have who cannot imagine what things look like from any other point of view, and I don’t have it. This is a new challenge, not the same as before.
Celestial navigation has ceased to hold my interest, but I am reading a book on locating objects in the night sky. While the old routine of memorizing key stars in the constellations is first choice, I know there must be a mathematic model and I hope to find it. While studying navigation I rapidly picked up that a lot of the terms were words used in describing the night sky. Hence, it did not take me long to decide the correct approach is a book on telescopes. Let’s see how that progresses, or maybe not. I’m guessing.
And I’ve been burned for some small dollars. As I’ve got along with electronics, I’ve made mistakes. But I don’t sell them to somebody else. Around half the components I bought up in North Palm Beach last week have design flaws. For example, the PWM (pulse with modulation) chips are adjustable in frequency only, not duty cycle. And there is something wrong with the oscilloscope probe. I suspect I’ve been sold some repackaged customer returns.
Last Laugh
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