One year ago today: June 7, 2014, on cider vinegar.
Five years ago today: June 7, 2010, dimensions in centimeters.
Six years ago today: June 7, 2009, no perfect scores.
MORNING
Unless the day turns around, you get mostly long-winded philosophy today. See that picture? When you read the following, do not get the impression I was ever Joe Average, just slogging in my time for that weekly paycheck. I had the best job that could be had with only a college education and was one of the best at what I did. I quit because even that, like this road, went nowhere.
[Author's note 2016-06-01: this picture cannot possibly be in Ft. Lauderdale. True, it is uninhabited, useless, and goes nowhere, but there aren't any parking meters.]
We talked mostly circumstances rather than music. We have a lot of common direction there, such as our preference to play in a band where we don’t have to front the whole show by ourselves. I call it babysitting. All the more interesting is because my background and experience seem to be precisely what happens to him at the same stage in life. (He’s 25 years younger than me.)
We also have tremendous collective experiences with our careers and he is going along remarkably the same path I did with women. It is not imagination that all the good ones are gone. You begin to really notice around age 35. At 40 there is nothing out there except the hope of getting a really young girlfriend. At 50, forget it. Every woman I dated when I was over 50, or even befriended, eventually stole something from me.
This is why I can be a wellspring of information and good advice—and back it up with real experience and examples. Older musician? Don’t buy a condo, don’t date women with kids (even adult kids) pay your taxes so you’ll get a pension, etc. I know too many musicians who think they are beating the system by not filing tax returns. They’ll be sorry.
Anyway, I filled him in on my information and that I’ll have a room for rent if move north. The problem with a travelling musician is if you don’t have a home base, you never make the right career moves—and you cannot keep on the move forever. Yet you don’t want a place that you leave uninhabited for months at a time while you are on the road. If he takes the room, that’s ideal. But he’s got an advantage I never had. Real talent. I don’t, I can only play because I work hard at it.
We also discussed the futility of our former careers. There were parallels up to the point where I needed the job and he didn’t. He was able to quit while there was still enough time to pursue something else. I had to stick with mine and essential squandered my youth. How can I say that when clearly I did not waste any time? Because back then, I believed in the system.
Yes, I was working for a living although I knew working was not the answer. But let me define where I was wrong. Lots of people worked the same job, but my mistake was thinking that I’d prevail, that I’d succeed at it. Why? Because I did not smoke, or drink, or gamble, or take drugs, or pay child support, or go to stripper bars, or do any of an endless list of vices. I didn’t even watch television, known to be the major waste of life. I obeyed the laws, wore my seatbelt, went to evening school, paid my bills on time, and obeyed the commandments.
I figured, over time, if nothing else, I’d be the only one left standing. I was wrong. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have built a cabin in the woods in Colorado and told the world to go you-know-what. The world is designed to cost you a lot of money just to stand still and the best you can hope for in return for a good life is to wind up right back where you started. Please figure that out sooner than I did.
And even then, you’ll still have to listen to the bullshitters who say that is some kind of reward in itself. The dickheads who say things like that usually inherited their house.
It is coincidence that Ray-B and I were talking exactly two years ago over the same topics.
NOON
“Even crime wouldn’t pay if the government ran it.” --Texas logic.
The club meeting is canceled due to the heat. I sat down and finally went over the specs on servo motors. The failed pen drawing servos used music waves, not PWM (pulse width modulation) and I dismantled that project for parts. That’s when I realized my entire mint box of very fine screws collected over the years has gone missing. In the process, I found lots of other gear I’d lost track of, which was neat.
It involves extracting some 4,100 files. The “environment” just mentioned is like a little word processor that specializes in the Arduino programming language. It spots spelling mistakes and saves the files created in the correct format for uploading to your microcontroller.
Nearby you should see a picture of the final stages of the Arduino extract. Newcomers, do not get discouraged. The instructions are written funny but they work if you follow them. The entire set up process actually works many times better than it used to.
Be advised this program works with a serial communications link and you must use the one the system chooses by itself. Often this can only be found by the old DOS method of examining your COM ports, unplugging the new device, and watching which port goes away. It’s been this way ever since the early 1980s when IBM got into the market. Thanks to them, bad programmers now outnumber good programmers by around 12 to 1.
Note I don’t say installing the programs. Good, I dislike installs as you never know what else is being put on your computer, but it is rarely only what you expect. Most Arduino are executable files which you should only get from a trusted source. Hence, you would not touch anything from north of the Mason-Dixon. They’re all carpetbaggers--Hell knows what they would put on your computer and call it national security.
Here’s trivia. One of the biggest carriers of herpes are those self-serve mints near the café cash register. Since its inception so long ago, the NSA has not caught a single terrorist. You’re right, McDonald’s fries taste different—they contain beef flavoring. History buffs know that Louis XVI was captured trying to run away from France. But did you know how? He tried to pay for something with a coin bearing his own image.
AFTERNOON
I’ve not often had such a fun and relaxing afternoon. I’ve had them more thrilling and a lot racier, but this was tops for taking it easy. Remember this little aircraft frame I built to find out about monocoque construction? This is what it looks like now.
This is no Nova kit with copied code, it is the real deal. This is all original construction from scratch. Yes, all the flaps and rudders are fully functional. No, Hector, that doesn't mean they move a bit. They respond to commands to the fourth plus and eighth of a degree (slightly over 1/4 of a degree). That's precision beyond any human pilot's capability. Right now the flaps respond to pre-programmed microcontroller commands, but the option is built in for flight controls. And, they respond in unison.
As a reminder, this project was not meant to fly. It is only to demonstrate mastery of servo motors from a programming standpoint. But yes, with a powerful enough motor, it would be a fully flyable and controllable aircraft.
Right now it “flies” by following commands from pushbuttons, not shown. If I get motivated to rig up three potentiometers, it would be a simple affair to duplicate a joystick and pedal controls. Because the flaps and rudder work, if I put it on a tilt table, it would be a fairly decent simulator. In this photo, the front flaps are removed for maintenance. The cheapest flight trainer ever built.
If you let me stress one point, it would be that this "toy" represents far, far more than can be seen from looking. It is not assembled from a remote control kit, it is not mechanical or hydraulic. Rather it is 100% controlled by program code and in that sense it qualifies as a drone. I did not use code examples (there aren't any for anything this complicated) and the core parts of the algorithm are fast-running machine language. I've said many a time once I know I can build something, the likelihood of it being built drops. This was an exception. And now I know I could build an airplane if I had to.
And there's your demo that I am an old coder from the 70s. The code is slick and for me, quite easy. No challenge for me, it is even self-documenting and I built in the capability for some sound later. I just don't know the physical part of wiring it up yet. This item was a major accomplishment. Give me the money and I'll ensure your kid wins the next science fair.
EVENING
Let me tell you what is screwed up. Priority post or priority mail, that “service” from the post office. It’s typical of your contrived bad deal. It is expensive and offers no convenience at the receiving end. It is certainly not any faster than first class. It appears someone has to be at home to sign for the package and what the hell good is that? Screw you, post office.
If you go to the web page, it is all a sucker deal for the sender. Try to find out what happens at the receiving end? Then go wait on your doorstep for “2 to 3 business” days for it to arrive. It’s either that, or go stand in line later at the downtown post office. Oh, and be prepared to show ID. Rough luck if the letter is addressed to your business. It is all just another example of how the post office gets everything wrong because they will not get with the program.
Their advertising is all about how easy it is for the sender. Who cares about that? It’s about delivery and getting your mail. People complain about that, not about sending the damn letter. As usual, USPS and Canada Post get that backwards. You could, I suppose, waste an equivalent amount of time actually tracking the letter on line and adapting your schedule to the estimated delivery time. But how this is a savings or an improvement escapes me. Allow me to say it again, screw you, post office.
Go check the websites yourself. If is all about how the service works for them. Not a word about the shit that goes down if you are not at home when the letter arrives. The advertising is all about how wonderful they do things—yeah, to hoodwink the $25 out of the sender, who is often clueless about what happens after that and thinks he’s helping. Or how about that video of the model getting her package at the door from the grinning postman? Whoever designed priority post was one stupid bastard.
And I just found out you cannot use the Priority Post tracking service if you disable tracking cookies. Change that from screw you to Fuck You, post office.
ADDENDUM
I overheard an interesting matter last evening. This man argued in court that he could not be convicted of any crime because a jury of his peers was chosen from people registered to vote. I didn’t catch the whole matter but he seemed to know what he was talking about. The minute people register to vote, their status changes according to the Constitution and they cannot be unbiased.
What caught my attention is that the judge tried to power trip on him and he gave it right back. He knew the exact limits of the judge’s power and was very well versed on what the judge could not do. I lost all respect when the judge tried psycho-babble on him and he exposed it. When the judge saw that he was not intimidated by threats of contempt, she walked out.
And he declared the case therefore dismissed. Again, he seemed to know what was going on and an awful lot about what the judge was not permitted to do. One of those limits seems to be using a charge of contempt as a threat. I did not know that a judge cannot use it that way. But my history auto-deletes every ten minutes, so the trail is lost.
Next was a documentary on the start of WWII, still clinging to the disinformation that Germany “invaded” the neutral countries of Belgium and Holland. This is far from true. The French and British had both declared war on Germany and were essentially hiding behind those “neutral” countries, building up forces and enforcing a naval blockade. What was Germany supposed to do? The English claimed to be respecting neutrality knowing they were giving the Germans no choice but to attack. Hitler did not want to fight England, that is a documented fact. Britain's entire war aim in the last century was to preserve its empire and stop Germany from becoming a rival.
Furthermore, the British and French had every intention of advancing into those same “neutral” countries the instant Germany attacked. Like Denmark, they were in the way, so define “invasion”. In those circumstances, neutrality is no longer the issue. Germany could not let the Allies cower behind those borders while strangling the German economy. But to imply German invaded them as deliberate objectives toward conquest is skirting the real issues. German has about as much use for Holland as Texas does for Vermont.
