June 9, 2015

Yesteryear
One year ago today: June 9, 2014, on survivorship bias.
Five years ago today: June 9, 2010, cameras and Oprah.
Six years ago today: June 9, 2009, my game show idea.

MORNING
           It’s gone.
           The cottage has been delisted, but face it, the place is sold. It is likely somebody came along with a better offer. No big deal, I was looking for a place when I found that one. And these deals are being missed by an increasingly tiny margin. It is only a matter of time. There are, according to Zillow, some 1,115 places for sale in that area.

           Remember my report of 19 pages of foreclosure notices per week up there? Soon, I’ll have the “hard money” to buy one of those outright. And 47 are in my price range. Here is a picture of a foreclosure for around the same price I was prepared to pay for the cottage. This lacks the charm of the cottage, but it is nearer the St. Johns River, meaning it will keep its value.

           This next item, and I can’t make out if this is good news or bad news, is that because I have cash, I qualify for financing from several eager sources. And I mean eager as in call us and the money is yours. The good news is this guarantees I will eventually have a nice retirement home, the bad news is if I’d had this option a whole week ago, I’d have that home already. But now that I can, I’m ever more unlikely to spend any borrowed money. Such is life.
           I did what any disappointed person would do. I spent the morning programming a flight simulator. I’m attempting to make the model airplane activity more intuitive, realistic, and smooth. For instance, by using a sine function instead of a counter to rev the motor. It is one thing to design a control column that a human operator can operate, but quite another to do it electronically. To the beginner, the biggest challenge is learning how to think in steps of what the microchip can accomplish.

           I mean, think about it. What steps are needed to make a motor rev like a car would with the gas pedal? This is where the programming mind differs from the social or legal mind. When the code crashes, so does your airplane. Programming logic has to stay on track, most of real life doesn’t. I’m enjoying the creation of the code, not stating that it will ultimately work and be put to any use.
           Writing code is an absorbing process and C code makes it worse. Most maddening are the command lines that are exactly right and triple-triple-triple checked. But they still won’t work until in frustration, you type in the same line over again. Things like that relegate the Arduino, for most people, to nothing but a learning tool.

NOON

           “If your glass is half empty, get a smaller glass.” --Farm wisdom.

           Front page news today. The company with the new cholesterol drug is about to get approval. This is the stock I recommended long ago because the treatment has worked on me. It is estimated the prescription will cost the average patient $10,000 per year. Not only do I get it for free for life, but they pay me to take them. Told ya.

           For an intellectual challenge, I read deeper into programming in C code. It is such shapeless code that years later, I still have to continually go back to the manual to find out what the commands are. Why? Because the commands were named randomly by idiots. Nobody told them commands are supposed to be descriptive verbs.
           I happily spent the afternoon of working with servos. It was overdue, spending some serious time with this mechanism so critical to robotics. The servos are simple, the usage, well you can go a number of routes. All textbooks I’ve read are weak on the interface between the controls and the servos.

           I’ve reverted to my old good habit of having only calls to subroutines in the main loop of the program. I swear, the C language is designed to prevent such logical behavior. Hence, flying the airplane was easy—there are only three inputs: left, right, and rudder. Read the flight control setting and then get the servos to match that a few thousand times per second.
           That control is normally accomplished by a potentiometer. In this photo, you can clearly see the three potentiometers, or “pots” that I intend to use. Just behind them is the right flap servo in the bomb bay. The pots make an analog reading, which has to be translated to a digital signal. That signal is processed and output as a digital signal that operates the servos. Hence, this is a “fly by wire” contraption, in that there is no material link between the controls and the physical parts.

           For those interested, the analog reading is 10-bit, meaning a value between 0 and 1023. It does not matter if the pot is 5K or 50K, since the reading, if you measure it, is between 0 volts and 5 volts. These are the standard digital voltages in use worldwide. Thus, if your input voltage was 2.5 volts, the Arduino would sample it as a digital value of 512.
           The problem now is that the servos work on an 8-bit format. The value ranges from 0 to 255. Getting these two different values to communicate is called mapping. That’s where I’m at today. I’m about to connect the pots and see what goes wrong. With electronics, I suffer from the 50-50-90 rule. That means when I’m faced with a situation where there is a 50/50 chance of getting it right, I get it wrong 90% of the time.
           Question of the day: is it true Radio Shack gives out dead batteries free of charge? Get it? But, but, I don’t have a day job. And happy birthday, Magna Carta. Eight hundred years old on the 15th. However, I want to be first around here. The full title is “The Great Charter of Liberties”.

NIGHT
           I felt like going out for a drink. Maybe not as badly as some do on a daily basis, [name deleted], but I was in the mood. I went over to Jimbos II. Not buying the cottage means there is cash available and there are no advantages to scouting around this town for any quality women or anything. Did I just say that? What am I getting at here? Easy, I want to use some of the money to take a holiday, which pretty much describes my situation before the cottage came along.

           That raises the question of the unbuilt cPod, the motorcycle camper. That was also put on hold but the economics of that mode of travel are undeniable. It is still stripped to the frame in the back yard. So which comes first this month? The trip or the camper? I now know how cheaply it can be rebuilt. What to do?

           Looking at various alternatives, I’ve come up with lots of options. I could go to Texas. City-wise, I’ve never seen Charleston or Chicago. There is still the Smithsonian but I’d rather do that off-season. Besides, this is a mini-holiday. I can’t stray too far because of medical appointments and such. That’s my first world problem for this month—where to visit. I could always ride the train to Winter Haven.
           Last, while at the club, there was no juke box music so the television was on. They ran one of those incessant commercials about how if you put a trivial amount of money away, it compounds into a fortune by your retirement. Don’t you hate those azz-hats? They are touting a mathematical progression. Stupid hipsters. In real life, fees, taxes, and inflation make sure that at any realistic interest rate, you will never get ahead on that deal.
           Saving money does not work. As I said in 1980, there is no conceivable rate of interest that will ever work out in your favor. If it did, the system would collapse. Putting money in the bank is a guaranteed loss. Nor can you put a penny in the bank and let it ride until you own all the money in the world—there are laws against perpetuity. Besides, even if they didn't just print up more money to dilute your fortune, it would take around 700 years.


Last Laugh
Hard to believe.


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