One year ago today: November 22, 2014, the end of Tobacco Road.
Five years ago today: November 22, 2010, at the Pro Bass Shop.
Nine years ago today: November 22, 2006, you’re fired!
Random years ago today: November 22, 2012, weak, salty, lemonade.
MORNING
Somebody is forming a tribute group in Ft. Lauderdale for a band I’ve never heard of. The Smith-Morrissey Band? Nope, I draw a blank on that one. I searched and found an article about a court case where Morrissey, presumably the singer, was sued for treating the rest of the and as “mere session musicians as readily replaceable as parts of a lawn mower”. Now that, I’ve heard of—a lawyer who has obviously never tried to replace parts on a lawnmower. Anyway, I’ll give their music a listen.
But remember Cuban rule number one. If you see a white guy sitting at the otherwise empty counter working the crossword puzzle, take the chair right next to him. Then start with your fidgeting and gross body sounds, particularly sucking in your snot. People love it when you do that. Keep it up, then act surprised and insulted when he gets up and moves to the other end of the counter. You win. Get that semi-retard “Wa’d I do?” look on your stupid face. None of this happened this morning, but it could have, you know.
If you are reading this late (as in a day or two late), it’s the Frenchies. Not only have they knocked out the free service, the motel up the road has unplugged their equipment. I can see it, but they’ve yanked the antenna wire late last evening.
I fed birds and worked on my saw handle. True, I could have just bought a new saw, but that is hardly the point. And I got to listen to NPR, which featured a fat broad fashion designer, a New Yorker who hijacked his own city bus and drove to Miami (can’t blame him), and a litany of Liberals saying anybody who lifts a hand or even a finger to defend himself or his family against Muslim terrorist attack has “become full of bigotry and hatred”.
NOON
Agt M walked over this afternoon, and, shooing away the small birds, went over these non-polar capacitors. They apparently do the same job, but are much larger than a polarized of similar performance. Yeah, and he’s thrown his shoulder out over-playing tennis again. What good is a club vice-president who can’t lift heavy objects I need moved around? He was mightily impressed by the cPod. It should be travel-ready by end of the week, no promises.
What’s this, somebody walked into the IRS and gave them two million to pay the national debt. Yeah, for about ten seconds. Just long enough for the bankers to write their Xmas bonuses. But this is the IRS, not the bankers. Or did I just repeat myself.
national debt
JZ called and he wants to get out of town for the day as well. Okay, let’s have some suggestions. Where would you go in Florida with a truck and a budget of $120? Not the Keys, I want to see something besides seven hours of backed up two-lane traffic. And not Naples. There is nothing in Naples. Well, maybe there is, but I don’t want to spend time looking for where they hid it.
NIGHT
I stepped out to the club by 8:30PM. There was an obvious woman there had her eye on me, but I held back. That was wise. She put on a good show for an hour, during which I walked over and told her I “saw her” so she could relax and quit posturing. After another hour I walked out and left her there. Beware of easy prey, yet to get that far, she must have reminded me of someone. But who? I really, honestly, don’t know that many skanks.
It is the tail end of a convoy heading down the boulevard, three chartered busses with a police escort clearing the intersections. I am so totally against this behavior in America that you don’t know. Nobody deserves special treatment at public expense. I suspect it was politicians, which makes me twice as angry.
Politicians should have to eat with the troops until they improve everybody’s lot, not just create their own little comfort zones. I was hoping a bomb would go off and I’d have the only pictures, you know, do a Zapruder. That is how much I don’t like those who inconvenience the public. If you want the road to yourself, go build your own.
She wasn’t all that pretty, anyway.
ADDENDUM
My “battery discharger” article from last day got a rise because it seemed complicated. I wasn't, maybe I'll post the diagram I made. It is a device to totally drain a battery (Nickel Cadmium or Nickel Metal Hydride) before recharging. You must do this even if the NiMH people say you don’t. It [the discharger] works a little too well, because you learn that the batteries go dead long before they are fully discharged. That is the Panasonic batteries show in the photo were useless 24 hours ago, yet they still show a residual charge a day later. Kind of like old flashlight batteries that are dead, but you can get a flash out of them if you wait a few minutes.
While I can’t imagine how those worked, is there a way to get these things to rapidly drain the battery, then discharge to the left or something and do it again? A few million times per second? Computer speed. Oh, that reminds me of some trivia. Remember the early movies that showed computers with banks of blinking lights? All fake. They were made form half ping-pong balls to give the audience something to look at. And it became a Hollywood staple.
The original breakthrough was not the binary code or the tubes and transistors, or the early use of machines for artillery tables or code-breaking. In a sense, all of those components had been around a long time waiting someone to put them together. The alpha moment was in pre-war Germany, when a man name Zuse. Even the “stored progam” part he built was a known requirement. He built a working model, shown here, in 1943, using holes punched in old movie film. He was light years ahead of the so-called computer “heroes” of the west, the follow-ons like Turing and Gates.
The breakthrough was Zuse who seemed to have realized that computers could be made to “think” at least as well and reliably as 99% of humans, although he never actually said that. Instead, he politely predicted a computer would beat the world chess champion. Note, the computer in the photo does not work, it is a partially restored model of the original. It used keyboard data input and lights for output. But we never hear of him, as Zuse was, you see, on the “wrong” side in the war.
Last Laugh
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