One year ago today: May 8, 2015, bass player wisdom.
Five years ago today: May 8, 2011, it’s a punched out door lock.
Nine years ago today: May 8, 2007, the evil capitalist alphabet.
Random years ago today: May 8, 2012, Lear Jet charter prices.
MORNING
The biggest tradition around here is that we have no traditions, just long-term habits. So instead of Sunday breakfast, I worked on small inventions, repairs (see photo of broken sidecar windscreen), and changed the oil on the bikes. And listening to NPR. I even lifted some of the blues music I play from that source, but you know, you don’t have to go around telling people I listen to that station. Have you seen the latest anti-Trump campaign, where they claim he is "unfair to minorities"? That's lame and I'll tell you why.
Now that jerk in Germany arguing to raise taxes so that refugees can be handed free everything. Or that lady claiming to represent the Green Party saying that in 20-30 years Germans will be a minority and anybody who does not like it is a right-winger, the softest term allowed over there for “Nazi”.
There will be revolution in Germany soon.
Armed, fighting in the streets, the real deal. Liberals and Liberalism should be outlawed as an offense against the state and one's own kind. Traitors make the best Liberals. And take those damn anti-Uber driver factions with you. The news today is Uber is leaving Austin over a rule about fingerprinting [the drivers]. I’m anti-taxi but indifferent about Uber, however in this one I side with Uber. Why? Because fingerprinting demonstrates all that is wrong with invasion of privacy. There is no such thing as a good outcome of fingerprinting any honest person while he is alive.
It would be different if the proponents of fingerprinting had reasonable and probably cause to pick only those suspected of crimes. But they want to fingerprint everybody, as a deterrent to Uber, and that is so wrong. A law-abiding person should, in theory, be able to live his entire life without a background check, the more so because it should be, in general, illegal to keep files on a law-abiding person. Read the Constitution. The fact that establishment wants to fingerprint everybody tells you right there it smells.
Further, I think that fingerprinting is just a preliminary to other persecutions, including taxation, which is in itself an abomination. All Uber drivers with a criminal past would already have been fingerprinted and punished, so demanding new prints smacks of an ulterior motive. That motive as I view it is largely the corrupt existing taxi/city hall scam that’s been going on for too long already. As for any candy-asses out there who don’t know it, allow me to inform you: fingerprints are a form of criminal record.
One of the greatest reasons I have never agreed with political parties and armies is a spinoff of my anti-Liberalism. I simply cannot believe that there can ever be large groups of educated people who all think the same way. When it happens there is a lack of education or some other unsavory force at work. I can fathom people who support the same leader or the same cause, but that does not mean they think alike. All Liberals think alike. They cannot bear the thought of leaving good people alone.
And ignorant? These Liberals can’t see that these “refugees” are targeting only the enemy cities.
The last man on the moon.
NOON
The day’s getting on and I still have not left the house. I was more concerned about finding suitable music than grabbing a coffee. That’s dedication. Say, maybe I’ll go to the Panera. Maybe buy a magazine and hang out over there. It’s a strange atmosphere but as long as you get a table as far as possible from the old coots with their laptops and racing forms, you can work the crossword. You know, the other day, one clueless bastard said to me that his mother used to “play” those things. Yeah, like the NYT weekend version was a scratch-off ticket.
I drilled a tiny pinhole over the “dark sensor” to trick the camera into thinking it is brighter outside than it really is. This type of tinkering and investigation is also part of this blog, so those expecting sweeping or portrait photography should go buy Life Magazine. Noticing the sensor was next to a Zener diode, I drilled so that in daylight, my hand naturally covers the hole, so as not to compromise daylight photos.
If I am successful, I’ll be able to take night photos to a degree. Since it is already late afternoon, stick around. It was a perfect day, 78F, and I only had to change tables once at the Panera due to noisy, obnoxious old men with such important things to say. What’s even neater is I’m one of those people who everyone can naturally see the reason I get up and move without me ever letting on. Doubly so at the Panera, where I am the only man in the place with the brains to do the Sunday crossword. I know what some of you are thinking, but don’t do and can’t do the crossword are the same thing in this world.
Bob Faid: an Army Airborne Ranger turned bible thumper, awarded the 1992 prize in Mathematics for calculating the odds that Gorbachev was the anti-Christ. Also a designer of nuclear power plants, he insists his calculations are “serious, not a joke”. Do you get the feeling this guy worked on Three Mile Island?
Lookie here, I was in the coffee shop until after dark and here’s the first picture taken with the Argus using the night sensor enhancement. That’s the fancy term for pinhole. The exposure is guesstimated and it cannot take pictures of what is not there to the naked eye. I use the term sensor loosely since the way it really works is the camera charge coupled device simply rejects scenes that don’t trigger the circuit. But, as you see, we have a night photo for which this camera was never designed.
This (specialty photos) is not something you should expect a lot of here. Lack of expensive equipment is the result of my indignation at how the retailers have collectively stopped selling budget cameras. You get and deserve [in this blog] first class magazine-quality prose presentation, but not photography. It's more than I want to spend. Not everybody wants a brand name $100 toy with insane pixel counts and ridiculously short battery life.
While working the puzzles, I was thinking about my music sets, something expected to govern my thinking time until I pass or fail the solo guitar show I’m finally doing. You know this [guitar playing] is out of frustration, not my preference for the instrument.. The guitar player that trusted me would have never questioned his sudden good fortune, but since that individual was not to be found, I’m learning guitar on my own. One of the first lessons is that accompaniment by strumming is not that difficult.
That, in turn, means I’ve been fed a lot of lies by the guitar players I’ve met. I understand now why they were lying, they learned it along with their song list. Make excuses for anything you don’t want to play, and if it doesn’t make you the hero of the song, you don’t want to play it. Just say so, it was never necessary to lie to me. Moving on, if I decline to play “guitar ballads”, my usual reaction is to see what the opposite of a guitar ballad is and mine it if I can. Problem, does anyone know the opposing view? I don’t, so I sat down to figure it out, and the puzzles are just a distraction.
By nightfall, I had come up with nothing. But I think I have a better idea of what that nothing has to eventually look like. I’ll stick with my rule of no slow music and no songs about how tough it is to make it. It’s mainly guitar players to whine about playing till their fingers bled, so that batch of tunes is off my list. I jotted down numerous other aspects of guitar ballads I should seek to avoid.
They are items such as any music designed mainly to appeal to other guitar players, who have been conditioned toward certain predictable qualities of the instrument. Listen to any Neil Young and you see what I mean. I’ll stay away from the mention of sex and drugs except as obvious and light-hearted spoof. Several times, I returned to my first idea of doing medleys, but not the sort that I’ve seen strung together because they have the same beat or key.
I’m going to try to pick the most memorably parts of various tunes that otherwise have long dull passages, dang, it’s that Neil Young again. Give me extra time because I’ve never seen it done on this premise before. But I have the inestimable advantage of knowing it probably can be done.
ADDENDUM
And since I know the only thing that will keep me happy in my old age is a fully equipped laboratory and workshop, I priced out what I’ll need. Now if I could only find the $80,000. Ah, some say, but I have not yet built a robot. I’ll tell you what--I’ll tell you what. A robot worthy of the title would have on-board the equivalent of a “flight-controller”. We do not install any component on our models that we do not understand. We are not some model airplane club. Let’s take a quick peek at what’s involved with that so as to impart a better understanding of the basics. Do you know I spent six hours studying the design of caterpillar treads before deciding they were too expensive? I could get rich making dares on whether most people could grasp the operational principles of even one of the components I’m about to describe.
Next, if the bot moves, you need it to sense how it moves and that involves a piece of equipment I have only read about, a magnetometer. I would hesitate to do such calculations even with my new background in celestial navigation. The magnetic field moves and varies but it has to be measured if you want your bot to go anywhere specific in mostly a straight line. Good luck.
To get from A to B, the bot has to know where those locations are. (I opted to have my robot project a beacon on the target, then move toward the beacon.) Enter yet another sensor, this one is called GPS and I know how that works. It is also the most artificial of the inputs and the first one the North Koreans would knock out. Only those who have tried finding their own way can really appreciate GPS. If not for the GPS measuring altitude, you would also need something to measure that, like maybe a barometer.
Now quickly, go out and master all these devices and program the Arduino to co-ordinate them. Starting now, you get five years. This is one element of a genuine robot as differentiated from a remote control device. You have yet to learn gear ratios, motor controllers, steering mechanisms, parts fabrication, soldering, electronics, and programming. Make sure you do everything in the right order and have the financing and storage space in place before you start.
That, Sparky, is but one of the reasons I have not yet built a robot. And neither have you.
Last Laugh
(The World’s impression of Fox News.)
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